Ted Cruz is sounding more like a preacher than a politician these last few days before the Iowa caucus.
Cruz is ending many of his stump speeches with a request for prayer.
Cruz wraps up to standing O, asks all to pray, have movement like Reagan did #iacaucus pic.twitter.com/UGkqOO3gGE
— Deirdre Baker (@deirdrebaker) January 30, 2016
Sunday in Hamlin, Iowa Cruz called on supporters to “Awaken the Body of Christ.”
The Star reported:
Ted Cruz, Republican presidential candidate, once mused about a career as an actor. Now he performs his conservative zeal.
His stump speech is a full-body production, a monologue that combines the flourishes of the born-again church and the high school musical. There are sweeping arm gestures, pregnant pauses, a pursed-lip chortle at precisely the same moment each time. To close, he invokes Jesus — “Awaken the Body of Christ that we might pull back from this abyss” — and asks his supporters to pray.
His political colleagues see him as a grandstanding phoney. On the trail, dressed unassumingly in a zip-neck sweater and blue jeans, he can seem like the most sincere man around. When he finished quoting Scripture on Friday in the Iowa farm town of Fenton (population: 279), John Brickner had tears in his eyes, his support for Rick Santorum wavering.
“I really think his evangelical attitude kind of got a grip on me,” said Brickner, a 50-something who sells home alarm systems. “I’m really not that kind of guy.”
The Iowa caucus is on Monday. Cruz, a man on the fringe of the Republican caucus in the U.S. Senate, is now the party’s best hope to thwart a Donald Trump waltz to the nomination. It is his professed fervour, both religious and ideological, that has won him converts around the country.