They hate me because I'm awesome.
The lesson from Republican presidential aspirant and actual (sigh) Senator Ted Cruz's new book is that Ted Cruz hates everybody and is pretty darn sure he's better than all of them put together. There was once a person he liked, mind you, Supreme Court Chief
Justice John Roberts:
[Cruz] confides that when he was a young lawyer learning how to argue a case in the Supreme Court, he had a role model: John G. Roberts, whom he described as “a brilliant Supreme Court lawyer,” the “best advocate” of his generation.
... but that all turned
very, very sour of late because Roberts let the Affordable Care Act slip through his fingers without properly crushing it like a good conservative would, so now Roberts is a traitor to the cause and Ted Cruz will never love again. As for everyone else Ted Cruz has ever had to work with, they're all horrible people who do not understand his genius.
[T]he book’s opening chapter – titled “Mendacity” – is mostly a take down of his fellow Republicans in the Senate, as he tells the story of his 2014 fight over a debt ceiling increase. Senate Republicans were publicly opposing the increase, while maneuvering to allow the bill to pass without a fight. Mr. Cruz insisted on a direct effort to block it even if it was destined to fail, foiling a strategy he called “chicanery.”
Which, you will recall, got Ted Cruz absolutely nothing. Ted Cruz seems to be unaware that in fact all off his various demands to shut down the government have gotten him essentially nothing, save for wrecking his party's poll numbers and solidifying the narrative that Republicans are hard-pressed to manage day-to-day government affairs at all, much less "reform" them. But no matter: It is all evidence that Ted Cruz is so awesome that not even the most conservative court or most conservative Republican Congress in a generation can grasp his brilliance.
Writing books about how you are smarter than everyone else in politics and explaining that those times you spectacularly failed were due to everybody else not being as great as you—that's pretty typical Washington fare, though it is more often reserved for after the "author" retires from his day job and will never have to see those other people again. In Ted Cruz's case, he seems to consider the bit about everybody in Congress hating his guts as a badge of honor and evidence of a presidential temperament. And why not? This year's Republican race could be themed "people that nobody likes and who have screwed up everything they touch want to lead you." Most of these people make Mitt Romney look positively warm and fuzzy in comparison.