Today, Cruz’s family home and campaign headquarters are only a couple of miles away.įormer students and teachers contacted by the Guardian said that Cruz was a brilliant student whose political plans were already crystallizing. On other occasions, he wrote, he was beaten up by drunk older kids at 2am, and reprimanded by the principal for a prank that involved covering a rival school’s building in toilet paper and shaving cream, then fleeing in a 1978 Ford Fairmont with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries blaring out of the car stereo.Ĭruz had become popular and respected when, seeking more academic stimulation than he had found at his previous school, he transferred midway through his junior year of high school to Second Baptist, a small private establishment on the campus of a megachurch in one of Houston’s greenest and most desirable areas. According to this book, he was suspended from high school for several days for going to a party, drinking and smoking pot. His braces came off and he saw a dermatologist who improved his acne. He embraced sports and replaced his glasses with contact lenses. ‘Okay, well, what is it that the popular kids do? I will consciously emulate that.’” I ended up staying up most of that night thinking about it. “I remember sitting up one night asking a friend why I wasn’t one of the popular kids. “Midway through junior high school, I decided that I’d had enough of being the unpopular nerd,” he wrote in his book. As he was formulating a political outlook that has barely wavered since – enabling his current self-branding as a consistent, bold conservative – he was also hatching a plan to develop a likable personality. If this sounds like the sort of hobby unlikely to make him a sought-after guest at parties, the young Cruz would have agreed.
In his 2015 autobiography, A Time for Truth, Cruz recalled that they gave half-hour presentations on the constitution that ended with a patriotic poem, I Am an American. Their star turn was in setting up easels and writing summaries of the constitution from memory – along with a definition of socialism, so that everyone was clear on the enemy. The Corroborators toured Rotary clubs and chambers of commerce in Houston and across Texas.
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Photograph: Free Enterprise Education Center/Courtesy of Laura Calaway Everything produced is produced by the people, and everything that government gives to the people, it must first take from the people.” He tapped into widespread anti-big-government sentiment in his state on the way to winning a Senate seat as an underdog candidate in 2012, and he has stuck to this theme.Ĭruz’s plans laid out. Cruz has been especially fond of the second pillar: “Government is never a source of goods. Storey taught a set of principles dubbed the Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom. It was crucial in honing Cruz’s public speaking skills and economic views. Storey ran an after-school programme under the banner of a conservative thinktank called the Free Enterprise Education Center (now the Free Enterprise Institute). In his early teens, Cruz was a member of the Constitutional Corroborators, part of a five-strong “unit” of high-achieving, politically minded students managed by Rolland Storey, a retired gas executive from Houston. Rich, powerful, that sort of stuff.” Aspirations? World domination. “Well, my aspiration is to, I don’t know, be in a teen tit film like that guy who played Horatio – you know, he was in Malibu Bikini Beach Shop? Well, other than that, take over the world. “Aspirations? Is that like sweat on my butt?” he asks. Ted Cruz voices his goals in a video from 1988. It was apparently filmed in 1988, when he was a high school senior at Second Baptist School, a Bible-centric private school in Houston – long before he arrived in Washington pledging to upend the Republican establishment. That’s five goals checked off – one more to go.Ĭruz articulated his towering ambition less elegantly in a video that emerged on YouTube last month that combines schoolboy humour with Texas bravado. Ted would like to run for various political offices and eventually achieve a strong enough reputation and track record to run for – and win – President of the United States.”Īfter high school, Cruz went to Princeton (majoring in Public Policy), attended Harvard Law School, became a successful lawyer and was elected a US senator for Texas.
“He then wants to pursue his real goal – a career in politics.
From there he wants to attend law school (possibly Harvard) and achieve a successful law practice,” said a biographical note from around 1988 about the then 17-year-old. “Upon graduation Ted hopes to attend Princeton University and major in Political Science and Economics.