For Senator Ted Cruz to call his party’s leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, a liar as he did Friday and again Sunday in the Senate was an extraordinary personal attack, but given how much the conservative base of the Republican Party has come to loathe its leaders, it was also good politics for the struggling presidential candidate.
While tensions between the ideological purists of the base and the pragmatists of the party establishment have simmered for decades, the breach has widened in recent years to nearly unbridgeable. CONT.
Jackie Calmes, New York Times