Dissatisfaction with Republican establishment behind Trump and Cruz move to top

David Schribman:

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Significant: Because Mr. Cruz has deliberately and carefully courted Mr. Trump’s support base even as he was building his own. Though the two are temperamentally and rhetorically different, they draw on many of the same themes, and if you add their support together you get a remarkable congruence: 53 percent of Republican support in the Iowa caucuses and 53 percent of Republican support nationally. It may be the first time ever that the Iowa and national numbers have converged exactly.

More significance: This tells us that the well of alienation within the Republican Party is even deeper than earlier surveys suggested. The Duo of Discontent has tapped into — perhaps even, by virtue of their fiery rhetoric and distilled contempt for the GOP establishment, expanded — a growing rebellion in American politics.

And so while it is tempting to argue that Mr. Trump is an American original, tycoons, outsiders, agitators and media phenoms have been a big part of our political tradition. The real American original may be Mr. Cruz, particularly since his American story begins in the peaceable kingdom north of the 49th parallel with a mother holding a degree from Rice University and a father who got his education in the rebellion in Batista Cuba.

And while Mr. Trump may seem to have built a candidacy out of unlikely elements, including an Ivy League education, a real-estate empire and vast exposure on “The Apprentice,” Mr. Cruz’s profile is even more unlikely.

He is grumpy. There is none of the “lift of a driving dream” that Ray Price added to Richard Nixon’s rhetoric for his speech at the Highway Hotel in Concord, N.H., in his 1968 campaign — a speech that has become a symbol of the rhetoric of hope that even dyspeptic candidates employ in presidential elections. Nor are there the touches of Tennyson that Theodore Sorensen gave John F. Kennedy in 1960 and that Jeffrey Hart gave Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980. And no one describes Mr. Cruz as a Happy Warrior, the phrase from Wordsworth that Franklin Delano Roosevelt appropriated for Al Smith in 1928, that Hubert Humphrey ascribed to himself in 1968 and that Barack Obama applied to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2008.

But there is more. Mr. Cruz is no mellifluous speaker. His voice has the capacity to curdle milk in a refrigerator two blocks away and to scratch blackboards in a middle school at the far edge of town. He’s reviled by his colleagues, who consider him selfish, self-absorbed, self-indulgent and, when he began his presidential campaign, self-deluded. They were wrong about the latter. And while Mr. Cruz, a Supreme Court clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, is almost always the smartest man in the room, he seldom is the nicest.
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Earlier this autumn, Mr. Cruz launched an attack against the CNBC debate moderators that could not have been rehearsed and could not have been more pitch-perfect. In Tuesday’s debate in Las Vegas he parried Mr. Rubio’s thrusts with ease if not exactly with elan. And his remark that President Barack Obama has practiced “photo-op foreign policy” displayed a mastery of alliteration for the alienated.
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There is much more.

Schribman also notes the pointed use of the "political correctness" which seems to be running rampant through liberal institutions.   While Trump has used the term defensively, Cruz uses it like an offensive weapon against the liberal establishment.   If Trump fasdes Cruz is well positioned, but at this point his supporters are not buying into the media narrative that their attachment is weak.