David Weigel has a good (both civil and probing) interview with Nebraska Republican Senate candidate Ben Sasse. I’m not sure I agree with Weigel’s framing of Sasse as a Ted-Cruz-type. Reading the Weigel interview and other stories about Sasse, my sense is that Sasse has a chance to be a constructive and reformist politician along the lines of a Paul Ryan who focuses on specific ways to reform health care and entitlement policy. Sasse could be a reformist Yuval Levin Republican. Cruz got a lot of attention for his defunding Obamacare initiative but when you strip out all the references to the Framers and Ayn Rand, it was all about getting us back to 2009. Ryan actually got the congressional Republican party to commit to supporting competitive bidding for Medicare. If we are very lucky, we might spend 2015 wondering if Ted Cruz could develop into another Ben Sasse.
