Ted Cruz seeks to soften image

Sen. Ted Cruz is seeking to warm up his image as he enjoys a steady rise that has propelled him into the top tier of GOP presidential candidates. 

The senator, normally a buttoned-down, intense presence, acted out a scene from the movie “The Princess Bride” during an event in New Hampshire last month, much to the amusement of voters gathered around a table.

{mosads}His campaign created a social media stir when its online store began selling a garish Christmas sweater, which featured an image of the senator wearing a jaunty Santa hat, for $65.

His dogmatic defense of conservatism is winning fans and helping his poll numbers rise in Iowa, where he has emerged as a favorite to win the Feb. 1 caucuses. 

Yet the Texas Republican’s favorability ratings are consistently low, at least when measured among the general population. 

His net favorability rating is close to minus 7, according to an average of polls compiled by HuffPo Pollster, while rival Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) is in modestly positive territory by the same measure.  

Cruz has made it clear he’s conscious of the vulnerability. 

“If you want someone to grab a beer with, I may not be that guy,” he said at a late-October Republican debate. “But if you want someone to drive you home, I will get the job done and I will get you home.”

Moments before, Cruz had been asked about his biggest weakness and had replied, with a smile, “I’m too agreeable, easy going” — an ironic nod to the hard-charging nature that led his colleague Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to describe Cruz and fellow 2016 presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) as “wacko birds.”

Cruz has run arguably the most proficient campaign of anyone in the GOP field, and he is now regarded as a clear top-tier candidate along with Rubio, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and business mogul Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner for months. 

Still, unaligned strategists within the GOP worry that low likability could sink him in a general election, where the battle to win over a relatively small number of persuadable voters will be fierce. Those worries explain the efforts Cruz and his team have made to address the issue head on. 

It’s similar in some ways to the tack Hillary Clinton has taken. The front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination has her own well-documented issues with likability, and she undertook a coordinated effort in the fall to soften her image.

Whether Cruz’s attempts to show off different sides of his personality have been successful remains hotly debated, even among observers who credit Cruz’s campaign for its strategic awareness and professionalism.

“He is wired to make rational arguments to win debates,” said GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak, who writes for The Hill’s Contributor’s blog, alluding to Cruz’s status as a champion debater while a student at Princeton. “You don’t win on likability. You win on reason and facts and argument. He is much more wired that way, and one of the few areas where I think his campaign has not succeeded is in softening his image and warming him up.”

There are also those in the GOP who look skeptically at Cruz’s many attempts to present himself as an idealistic outsider.

“The frustration of many Republicans who do not support him is that they believe there is a certain level of phoniness behind his rhetoric where he says, ‘If only Republicans fought harder,’ ” said GOP consultant Brian Walsh. “He is smart enough to know full well that without having 60 votes in the Senate” there is a limit to what the party can do.

Catherine Frazier, the Cruz campaign’s national press secretary, told The Hill via email, “The more Americans get to know Ted Cruz the more they like him, as evidenced in recent Iowa polling that shows Cruz’s favorability at the top of the pack. Our campaign will be won by a movement from the people, not approval from the New York and Washington elites.” 

The efforts to boost Cruz’s likability have sometimes misfired, however. Video footage that had been shot some months ago and was first reported by Buzzfeed gained new prominence this week via a CNN report. The raw clips, intended for use in later political ads, show Cruz trying to persuade his mother to tell some unspecified story despite her protesting “that’s too personal.” Another moment shows 15 different takes of him approving the ad’s message while his two young daughters sit on either side of him.

Months back, Cruz also took to late night TV, as a guest on NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” The appearance was neither a triumph nor a disaster, but it had its fair share of awkward moments.

Those downsides have made Cruz an inviting target for some critics. In a New York Times column on Tuesday headlined “Anyone but Ted Cruz,” Frank Bruni called the Texas senator and Trump “nasty pieces of work.”

He added: “Cruz will work overtime in the months ahead to persuade you otherwise. The religious right already adores him, but to go the distance, he needs more support from other, less conservative Republicans, and he knows it. Expect orchestrated glimpses of a high-minded Cruz, less skunk than statesman, his sneer ceding territory to a smile.”

Such personal attacks, especially from a liberal commentator, are only likely to make Cruz supporters even more committed.

“The Washington Cartel has stopped at nothing to baselessly villify Ted Cruz from the beginning because his efforts to expose their corrupt tactics threaten the power they hold in Washington — power they have garnered at the expense of the very people who voted them into office,” according to Frazier. “Frank Bruni and the New York Times may speak for these establishment politicians who fear a Ted Cruz candidacy, but he does not speak for the millions of Americans who are energized by Cruz’s positive vision for the future of our country.”

Meanwhile, strategists such as Mackowiak, who acknowledge Cruz has a vulnerability in terms of his image, argue that this may not matter much if he were to be nominated against Clinton.

“I think he recognizes he is a not a back-slapping guy with a huge number of people who love him,” Mackowiak said of Cruz. But, he added, “You often hear the question ‘who would you rather have a beer with?’ If the question is Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton next fall, that would be an interesting question.”