Akron, Iowa — If not for the blaze-orange baseball cap on his head, Ted Cruz would be impossible to see above the cornstalks. It’s Halloween, and he’s trudging through a field in western Iowa, a gun slung over his shoulder, hoping to scare up some pheasants. Ten feet to his left, invisible among the foliage, is Iowa representative Steve King; to his right, South Carolina representative Jeff Duncan. And trailing behind him, a dozen reporters and a handful of staffers — many wearing the same style hat as Cruz, emblazoned with the logo of the Hole N’ The Wall Inn, the home base for this hunt — are trying to avoid smacking into a cornstalk while filming, taking photographs, or writing down everything the candidate says and does.
“That’s how I like my reporters — unarmed,” Cruz jokes, when he first arrives mid-hunt and is immediately surrounded by reporters. Press gaggles, he adds slyly, could go a lot differently if he were always holding a shotgun.
Cruz is not known for being a warm and cuddly guy. He is carefully scripted as a candidate, often delivering speeches rather than having conversations. With the press, he displays a prickliness that often verges on disdain. Many Republicans describe Cruz as the best bet to win the Iowa caucuses — the rare contender who could unite the conservative flank of the party. But to woo Iowa caucus-goers, Cruz can’t rely on his fiery rhetoric and rigid ideological stances alone. He’ll also have to be able to connect on a personal level and charm individual voters.
“At the end of the day, you’re voting for a person,” says Craig Robinson, editor in chief of the Iowa Republican. “So I think people forget that personality and character and all that matters.”
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King’s annual pheasant hunt, a two-day event offering Cruz — as well as Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee — more face time with a man whose endorsement could provide a crucial boost in the caucuses, is the perfect venue for a candidate looking to seem relatable. There is no shortage of good photo ops and no formal campaigning, and the gregarious King serves as a perfect foil, giving Cruz a chance to talk about hunting hogs from a helicopter and crack jokes about the “adult beverages” they plan to consume after the hunt.
“I still tell the story of the last time I hunted with you guys. Only time I got credited with more birds than I fired shots,” Cruz jokes with King. This turns into something of a two-man comedy routine once the hunting starts.
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“Nice shot, Steve,” Cruz shouts at King after each bird goes down.
Cruz can turn on the charm. On Saturday, he is even friendly with the press, whom he has been bashing mercilessly since the middle of Wednesday’s CNBC presidential debate.
Cruz can turn on the charm. On Saturday, he is even friendly with the press, whom he has been bashing mercilessly since the middle of Wednesday’s CNBC presidential debate.
Cruz arrives almost three hours later than expected because his flight from Des Moines was delayed by weather. By the time he gets here, reporters have been wandering around the hunting grounds for nearly two hours with King, a group of around 20 people, and about a dozen dogs, who gleefully bound through the fields trying to scare up pheasants. At one point, two staffers murmur to one another; one of the dogs apparently relieved himself on the leg of a yellow-jacketed man in the pack of reporters whose name they didn’t catch. (He’s a Democratic tracker.) There is a pile of birds, some still twitching, in the back of an accompanying ATV.
In the interest of letting Cruz do some hunting before the sun goes down, the media is asked to refrain from asking any questions until after the hunt, when we’re promised a gaggle. We’ve already been warned not to interview people while they’re firing, lest one of us should unwittingly get shot.
But it’s hard not to talk to someone who pauses at every break to turn around and talk to you. At every opportunity, Cruz turns around to the cluster of reporters behind him to tell a story or chat, as his press staffers as well as King’s stand a few feet away fretting that we’re not obeying their rules. At one point, as a reporter from Breitbart is telling Cruz a story, a staffer steps in and cuts the conversation off, reiterating the request that questions be held until after the hunt. Cruz seems just as confused as the assembled press and says he’d like to hear the rest of the story later on.
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In fact, there is nothing Cruz does over the next hour and a half that is not for the benefit of the cameras. Cruz, King, and Duncan regularly stop and chat in camera-ready poses, conveniently positioning themselves before the line of reporters taking photos, shooting videos, and recording their casual conversations about football and why humans were meant to be carnivores (because, Cruz says, we have incisors, and “God knew what he was doing when he gave man fangs”).
Minutes after Cruz’s arrival, the group descends a very short, steep hill. Cruz does so in a rather ungainly fashion: His cowboy boots, he explains, don’t have the traction to keep him from slipping down. The press chuckles, until an NBC reporter toting a video camera winds up accidentally taking the last few feet like a slide, and we realize it was the hill, not the candidate. Cruz, who has been railing against NBC for days now, leans down and gives the man a hand up.
“I think there oughta be combat pay for the folks with cameras — big cameras. You guys are working hard,” says Cruz, after we emerge from another trek through a patch of cornstalks. “My recommendation: they double your salary.”
At the end of the day, Cruz poses for a photo with all of the dead pheasants, which have been hung up on a wooden board outside the hunting lodge. Cruz killed two of them, a solid haul, given that he took only three shots. After we all take his photo, the senator, who earlier this week declared “war on the liberal media,” suggests the press join him and King in a group picture.
Along for the hunt is a man named Jack Zimmerman, an Army veteran who lost both his legs in the service but uses a tricked-out wheelchair with tank-like treads to keep pace. As the group prepares to head in for the evening, Zimmerman is introduced to Cruz, and King joins them. The three pose for a picture, a politician on either side, as a Cruz staffer and the pack of reporters snap away.
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The three maintain their pose as they continue a conversation about Zimmerman’s service and how he lost his legs, speaking loudly enough so that all the reporters can hear them. Zimmerman has a sense of humor about his injuries, cracking a joke about “[getting] your foot in the door.” Cruz remembers a joke that Texas governor Greg Abbott, who was paralyzed from the waist down when a tree fell on him as he was jogging, used to tell when Cruz worked for him in the Texas attorney general’s office.
#related#“Okay, I know what you’re thinking: How slow was that guy running to get hit by a tree?” Cruz recalls Abbott saying. “You know, the first time [you hear that joke], you’re not sure if you can laugh.”
The sun is setting by this point, and it’s starting to get cold. Some reporters are beginning to shiver, but though the hunting lodge is in sight, no one will leave before the promised gaggle. At some point, Cruz excuses himself from the discussion, walks over to his press secretary, Catherine Frazier, and asks her to hold his gun for a moment. He grabs his heavy hunting jacket, which he’s long since shed, and drapes it over my shoulders.
“I saw you shivering,” he explains. Then he returns to his conversation.
— Alexis Levinson is senior political reporter for National Review.