Bruni, a New York Times columnist, uses some of Senator Cruz’s debate remarks last week to portray him as a big fat phony. But Bruni doesn’t seem to understand the remarks very well. Cruz, he writes,

lashed out at any Republican who gave any ground on illegal immigration.
“The politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande,” he thundered, and there was no mistaking the contempt he meant to communicate for those elite, out-of-touch professionals.
But where does that contempt leave him?
He’s a lawyer, with a degree from Harvard, which was his steppingstone to a conventionally ambitious Supreme Court clerkship.

Bruni goes on like this for a while.

There is, at the very least, some mistaking this alleged contempt, because I didn’t hear it. He was arguing that Americans in the upper middle class, including many politicians and some influential journalists and politicians, don’t take the economic pressures created by illegal immigration seriously enough because they do not themselves feel that pressure. He is right about that, and you don’t need to have contempt for bankers and lawyers as a class to see it.

Later Bruni goes after Cruz for disparaging central bankers “as haughty, disconnected ‘philosopher-kings,’” a statement Bruni treats as more hypocritical Ivy League-bashing. It was nothing of the kind. Cruz was making an argument that central banks should follow a rule rather than try to fine-tune the economy. It is a particular example of a familiar conservative argument about hubris in government. You don’t have to have gone to Harvard to have that hubris, and you can reject it even if you did. Bruni is the one showing personalized contempt, and letting it substitute for comprehension.

(disclosure)