THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The New York Times has look at the undergraduate debating career of Ted Cruz and it shows how he has honed his strengths and weaknesses during those heady days.

To many former teammates and opponents who recounted his Princeton debating career, Mr. Cruz, the Texas senator who has emerged as a formidable Republican presidential candidate, stood out as a remarkable orator in a college circuit brimming with Type A strivers.

But in the upper echelon of a rollicking debating world that exalted extemporaneous thinking, where topics ranged from the concrete to the absurd, and where facts and moral assessments took a back seat to quick thinking and wit, Mr. Cruz had a different reputation.

Regarded as a powerful speaker who depended on overly prepared, or “canned,” cases, Mr. Cruz could be foiled with humor. His emotional zeal, no matter which side he was arguing, rubbed more experienced judges the wrong way. So did his stilted speaking style and standoffishness on the debate world’s vibrant social scene, where kegs flowed at Friday night parties. His raw ambition sometimes soured the student judges, as well as the audiences who voted in championship rounds, on him.

A lawyer who came to prominence arguing before the Supreme Court, Mr. Cruz has leveraged his intellectual bandwidth and ability to articulate a defiant brand of conservatism into a political career that has taken him to where he always expected to be. As a presidential candidate, he is now calibrating his arguments to win over evangelical Christians, Tea Party voters and moneyed donors.

Mr. Cruz honed those skills as a college debater, an experience that served as a beta version for his national campaign. It was a time when his strengths, weaknesses and occasional self-defeating ploys were all on display.

An interesting glimpse of the man who sees himself as El Guapo. So lets close with one of the first efforts to stop this golden child from thinking too much of himself.

Mr. Cruz did not get along with his first roommate, a liberal who put Super Glue on Mr. Cruz’s alarm clock snooze button.