Tea Party Cruz?

According to much of the press coverage of the Republican Senate primary in Texas, Ted Cruz is just a creature of the Tea Party.  Really?  With his degrees from Princeton and Harvard Law, his background as a Supreme Court clerk and state solicitor general, he hardly fits the media stereotype of a peasant with a pitchfork. And it's not as if he's the first statewide figure in Texas with roots in the conservative or libertarian intellectual worlds:  Phil Gramm leaps to mind.  At his blog, Zachary Courser shrewdly observes:

Given the Republican bona fides of both candidates, their nearly equal hard money totals, and the fact that it was independent expenditures by traditional conservative interests that made the difference for Cruz, describing his victory as a Tea Party success seems overstated. It seems more a recipe for a very traditional, very conservative Republican Senator.