Written by Winston P. Nagan   

Rafael Edward Cruz has sprung onto the national stage like a roaring volcano. He is an articulate volcano. His facial expressions articulate the confluence of conviction, emotion, and determination. He has extraordinary debating skills. He can get into a mess and get himself out of one by simply accusing his adversaries of the mess he has created. He has made the avoidance of responsibility a slick political verity. Rafael (I decline to call him Ted because this diminishes his Cuban identity) is a distinctive and relatively rare personality type on the Washington scene. It has been a long time since Washington has generated a real overt form of homo-politicus: the quintessential political man. Rafael could almost be a textbook illustration.
Rafael like Barack is a mixed grill bloodline. His father was a Cuban exile immigrant and his mother an Irish-Italian. His parents were divorced meaning that Rafael grew up with a sense of deprivation. It would appear that the loss of some parental affect required that he compensate with some vigor in the competitive world of education, law practice, and continues in the world of politics. In short, the hard drive for power and success is also the search for the adulation and empathetic love that he appears to have been deprived of. It is adulation that he craves or needs.
In politics his opportunity came when Senator Hutchinson left the Senate. It positioned him as a Tea Party candidate which organization was fed by Koch millions. The Koch agenda was focused on the destruction of the Affordable Healthcare Act. It is the charge of this role that Rafael emerged on the national scene.
Rafael’s father was a political activist in Cuba supporting Fidel Castro. When he came to the U.S., he promptly joined the anti-Castro Cuban crowd. It is not clear whether his father’s style of leadership and outlook incorporated something of a caudillo style father figure. What is clear is that his parent’s divorce left him with an emotional gap of deprivation.
Having placed Rafael in the category of homo-politicus, it would be appropriate to tease out the sub-categories that flow from this categorization. Most importantly, homo-politicus is a power-centered personality. Rafael will therefore have an orientation to acquire and mobilize power because among other things, it is power that fulfills his private needs. The classic formulation of an intensely power centered personality is that the personality displaces its private motives onto public objects and then rationalizes it all in the public interest. This at least gives us a general sense of what makes Rafael tick. A more intense version of the power personality is that it will sometimes encompass an authoritarian element. This element is often reflected in the authoritarian personality’s embrace of prejudice. As a prejudice prone personality, Rafael’s antipathy to gays and other minorities may be a pointer to his extreme prejudice against all those he defines as the political other. This includes Democrats in general; moderate Republicans, and political rivals such as Harry Reid and Barack Obama. This type of personality is more than willing to damage out groups and targets. Additionally, the attention he has gathered reflects a personality structure that requires a relatively constant level of hostility in all political circles. This type of personality when exposed to the facts will generally be immune to the rational implications of the facts presented.
From the authoritarian elements reflected in Rafael’s hyper-aggressive style and bullying, or provocative conduct there is another variant of homo-politicus that could provide some further insight into Rafael’s political character. That is the power-oriented personality acting as the agitator. Rafael’s theatrical and debating skills, his use of gestures, his eye movements, and other facial expressions, his oratorical skills, make him a master agitator. He functions like a trained actor. He appears to have mastered his passion so that he may be detached and observe his own role in generating anger, agony, rage, and more. Rafael comes to the agitator role with an infectious emotionality. It is almost as if he needs to generate excited attention to avoid feeling empty, unloved, puny, and insignificant. This emotional dependence on audience response by the agitator may suggest that the agitator’s inner life is something of a vacuum. What is important in Rafael’s repertoire of agitation is that he can generate a certain level of hysteria by projecting obsessions and compulsions. Some types of agitators feel a sense of importance from the generation of forms of destructiveness in political activity. Rafael must feel extremely important about his role in shutting down the federal government. We have not scratched the surface of all his other latent fantasies and vehement symbolisms. I am certain the American people will be in for a treat if he becomes President.
The final insight here is whether Rafael believes in any of the ideological postures and symbols that he hysterically promotes, or is these matters only incidental to the private motives, which he displaces on these symbols as a pathway to power for the sake of power.