They are up front about not caring about how the institution runs but the conflict he is stirring up might make him a less viable presidential candidate should he choose to run. The Dish flags two stories to that make this argument.
One points out, ironically, that Cruz is violating advice made by one of his predecessors from Texas, Lyndon Johnson.
There was a time when a new senator could not have survived such a controversial start. "The making of a good senator is in some ways similar to the making of a good work of art," William White wrote in 1956 in Citadel: The Story of the U.S. Senate. "There are few shortcuts." Lyndon Johnson gave a copy of the book to freshman senators. It advised that a career rested "upon what is slowly developing and enduring ... rather than what is quick and spectacular. Eminence may be reached by a concentration on frenetic and untypical senatorial activity, but it will never be sustained in that way."
Ted Cruz didn’t read that book, and even if he did, he’s decided to write his own. Though his colleagues have suggested he tone down his hard charging approach, he continues to engage with verve on multiple fronts.
There are at least a couple reasons why. First, the Senate occasionally provides a quick step to the White House, and the quicker the better. Both JFK and Obama made the jump during their first terms, so if Cruz's goal is the White House and not a long Senate career, he better make the jump soon. Older candidates - John McCain, Robert Dole and John Kerry for example - have not been as competitive.
Second, his real constituency is the Tea Party, and he prefers to do their bidding. They provide his support, so he doesn't rick much in the short term. from taking the establishment on. This includes picking fights with the older members of the institution. But this strategy might be more successful - electorally - if all he is interested in is being a long serving member of the Senate. If he wishes to make the jump to the White House, he needs to broaden his appeal:
. . . there are still dangers lurking for Cruz and others in the purity caucus. Though Barack Obama moved through the Senate quickly, he used it as a platform for bipartisan platform building. That’s what you need to do to win a national election in a diverse country. Cruz is pursuing the opposite strategy. It may win him cheers at home, but that puts him on track toward becoming this generation's Phil Gramm, the Texas senator whose effort to build a conservative platform from within the Senate made him unappealing as a national candidate.
His refusal to create relationships might limit his future goals:
I spoke to Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma this week about a wide variety of topics. He is as principled a conservative as you can find in the Senate, and he is more eloquent than Cruz about the venality of career politicians. But Coburn can also talk about the power of human relationships in politics in a way that seems antithetical to the brand of politics pursued by Cruz. "Relationships are how deals get done," said Coburn, who in this case was talking about President Obama. He's been friendly with Obama since 2005, the year they both arrived in the Senate. This is a constant source of confusion for Coburn’s constituents. "The No. 1 question I get at home is: Why are you friends with Barack Obama?" Coburn's answer, as Obama wrote in his essay about him for Time, is, “How better to influence somebody than to love them?” It's hard to imagine Ted Cruz talking that way.
John Sides makes the same point, and adds a nuance:
Cruz’s problem is that he may want to be president of the United States, reports the National Review’s Robert Costa. And to be the Republican nominee, he’ll need the support of his Republican colleagues. The 2012 election once again showed—and despite some skepticism—that it is very hard to win the nomination unless you’re preferred by a substantial chunk, if not the vast majority of, your party’s leaders (as was Romney). Which is to say, it pays to be nice to your colleagues.
Here's the nuance. If he really wants to win his party's nomination, much less the presidency itself, he has to tone down his ideology:
. . . many in the party are wary of nominating a strongly ideological candidate—a “severe” conservative, if you will—because they’re afraid that this candidate will lose in the general. And rightly so! See Table 2 of this article (pdf) by John Zaller.
In 2012, as Lynn Vavreck and I show in The Gamble (pdf), only about half of Romney’s supporters were closest to him ideologically. The other half were closer to Gingrich or Santorum—that is, to one of the more conservative candidates. But this other half also tended to believe that Romney was the only candidate who could beat Obama in November. Their vote was about electability, not experience. Of course, Romney didn’t win, but Zaller’s finding suggests that a more conservative candidate would have done worse, other things equal.
Cruz’s path to the presidency—if he decides to run—must consist precisely of convincing “the middle” of the party that he’s electable despite the fact that he may be the most conservative member of the Senate (pdf). To do that, he’ll need the support of his fellow party leaders to send that signal.
