Ted Cruz is finally being taken seriously. That should make him very nervous.

Welcome to the big leagues, Senator Cruz.

Now that Ted Cruz has moved into second place in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, the coverage he gets in the news media is going to change, not just in its volume but also in its content. Up until now the media have treated Cruz as an interesting character — a player in Washington shutdown battles, a representative of Tea Party anger at the Republican leadership in Congress, an ambitious young politician who has risen quickly despite the fact that everyone thinks he's an obnoxious jerk. But now Cruz is going to get a new kind of attention: Reporters are taking a close look at what he actually wants to do if he becomes president.

So when Cruz gets into an argument with Marco Rubio about who hates amnesty more, as happened at Tuesday night's debate, journalists investigate Cruz's history on the issue, publish explorations of it, and give Cruz tough questions. That's how Cruz found himself being interrogated by Bret Baier of Fox News, and asked him to square some statements he made in 2013 about an amendment offered to an immigration bill co-sponsored by Rubio with the position he takes today. "Looking back and what you said then and what you're saying now," Baier said, "which one should people believe?" Detailed explorations of Cruz's history on this topic are showing up in both conservative and mainstream media. If Cruz were in fifth or sixth place, no one would care. It isn't like anyone's writing any long examinations of George Pataki's policy positions.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

It isn't just about immigration. For instance, he has said multiple times that we ought to "carpet-bomb ISIS." Now that he is a contender, however, commentators feel free to enquire about what exactly he means, and if he knows what he's talking about. As it happens, the United States hasn't carpet-bombed anyone since Vietnam, and to do so — bomb an area indiscriminately without concern for civilian casualties — would probably be a war crime. And as Michael Cohen notes, it just isn't something our military does anymore. "Today, virtually all U.S. weaponry is precision guided," he writes.

If Cruz were a trailing candidate, no one would bother explaining the meaning of a term he had used and seeking out experts to comment on its feasibility. But unless he falls in the polls quickly — and given the care with which he has constructed his campaign, raising lots of money and assiduously courting the evangelicals who form his base, that isn't too likely — there's more to come. His ideas about everything from health care to taxes to energy will get more and more scrutiny, so voters will have at least some idea of what sort of president he could be.

This could prove troublesome for Cruz. He's as smooth a talker as there is in the GOP field (all that college debating no doubt helped), and he has yet to encounter a question he couldn't give a coherent answer to. Unlike some of his opponents, like Ben Carson or Donald Trump, he has enough familiarity with policy issues to talk about most of them in a way that sounds at least reasonably informed. But Cruz's policy ideas are mostly just slogans — Abolish the IRS! Secure the border! Repeal Obamacare! — with the barest measure of detail attached to them almost as an afterthought. It's one thing to give a 60-second explanation of where he stands on something in a debate, but under repeated, probing questioning, Cruz could fare far worse.

That's not to mention the intense exploration of his personal history that will inevitably come if Cruz remains near the top of the polls. While he hasn't had any scandals in his history, enough looking will produce uncomfortable questions for just about any candidate. Right now you can bet there are opposition researchers combing through every corner of his life to find anything that can be used against him.

Political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck have described the cycle most presidential candidates go through as "discovery, scrutiny, and decline." Voters become interested in the candidate, then the press explores him in depth, which reveals things both positive and negative. Then the candidate fades. That has already happened to multiple candidates in this race, including Scott Walker and Ben Carson. But someone has to avoid the decline and become the nominee. If Ted Cruz is going to be that person, he's going to have to suffer through a period of intense and uncomfortable examination. Who knows how he'll look when he emerges on the other side.