In discussing the presidential ambitions of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas with my mother recently I realized that the method to his madness was not actually foreign to me. My mother reminded me that he was employing a tactic that I perfected in my teenage years when I frequently frustrated the efforts of my parents to hold me accountable for various transgressions or my siblings' efforts to retrieve stolen goods from me. Senator Cruz, my mother assures me, simply [mis]appropriates the case against him, reversing the accuser and the accused in his telling.

So simple, yet so confounding. I got away with way too much using this approach as a kid because it literally exhausted my accusers. When Ted Cruz claims that science deniers are the brave defenders of science against the corrupt scientific community, reasonable people might be expected to laugh, but because Cruz is a U.S. Senator and he’s not joking, reasonable people become exasperated by his mendacity. In his speeches and public comments Cruz artfully combines reality reversals, wild exaggerations, and outright falsehoods, with simple truisms and weak but debatable claims leaving reasonable hearers/critics with a lot of work to do unpacking the Texas Tea Partier’s rhetoric. As I learned in my youth, angry critics and accusers are often sloppy, making it easier to mock and dismiss them. If you want to bond with uncritical friends and discourage enemies by disorienting and exhausting them, this approach can be effective (in the short run at least).

In some ways, Cruz’s approach is perfectly tailored to our 24/7/365 media environment in which depth and explication are VERY hard to come by, as well as our polarized political environment. Journalists trying to operate in this highly competitive, fast-paced environment rarely have the time or incentive to do the necessary unpacking required to fully expose Cruz’s folly. Most probably assume that his act is so over-the-top that the public doesn’t really need to be drawn a map. As far as his campaign for president goes, this assumption is almost certainly true, but Cruz has achieved considerable political success by abandoning reasonable discourse.

He understands that his very conservative followers and supporters already know what they know and believe what they believe. They simply reject out of hand arguments against their positions, reasonable or unreasonable, and assume that a majority of Americans share their views or would share their views if only folks were paying attention and not being fooled by the lies of liberal elites. Cruz’s job, therefore, is simply to advance their cause and causes in a competitive and polarized political arena by frustrating opponents and energizing supporters.

This approach is designed for an electorate with very few, if any, “swing” voters. He assumes that persuading folks who disagree is a waste of time and that it actually detracts from the mobilization of the base. His is a strategy geared toward elections that turn on turnout, rather than persuading uncommitted voters. From this perspective, you almost have to admire Cruz’s discipline and willingness to play the fool. He has no incentive to try to impress moderate or liberal Americans, and the folks he is courting are impressed by doggedness and confidence, and they are energized by the anger and frustration of liberals.

For Cruz, it’s all about the base. Maybe he should adopt Meghan Trainor’s pop hit as his campaign theme song?