God bless Ted Cruz, and pass the popcorn. The sheer volume and variety of complaints against our freshman senator over the past month is a clue that he’s hit a nerve. The question is, is it a nerve worth hitting? 

At issue, of course, is the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare for short. The law is scheduled to take effect October 1, except for the parts of it that have already been delayed, by the clemency of President Barack Obama. Cruz, along with Utah’s Mike Lee and a handful of Republicans who have since rallied round, is hoping to persuade his colleagues in Congress to refuse to appropriate any money that would help fund the law. His weapons are an online petition and a willingness to barnstorm around the country talking about it, which is what he’s been doing during the Senate’s summer recess.

Everyone, including Cruz, knows that he’s not likely to succeed. Democrats control the Senate, plus a lot of Republicans don’t want to have this fight (plus Obama, the president who signed the law in the first place, is still president—even if some Republicans still aren't resigned to that fact ). And yet almost everyone, other than Cruz, is acting surprisingly irritated and defensive all of a sudden. Reading some news accounts, you would get the sense that this is just another one of those stunts that Americans have come to expect from Cruz, like that time (also this month) that it turned out he has dual citizenship in Canada and didn’t even know it. From left-leaning pundits, we see bravado with a side of aggrievement: Cruz’s campaign against Obamacare is doomed to fail . But he might trigger a government shutdown, which would be bad for all Americans . In the meantime, if anything, he’s helping to show how dangerously appealing Obamacare is; he’s said himself that it’s critical to stop Obamacare before implementation, because once Americans start having health insurance they’ll get used to it. Even on the right, many politicians and commentators seem annoyed: Obviously it’s too late to defund Obamacare now, so Cruz is just trying to strong-arm other Republicans into signing up for a losing fight. And if there is a government shutdown, the whole party, even those above-the-fray Republicans that Cruz has allegedly dubbed the “surrender caucus,”  will share the blame for it.

It’s a lot of backlash, given that most of the critics are united behind the premise that the defunding effort is bound to fail—a premise that’s probably correct. It’s a lot of sniping, considering that in opposing Obamacare, Cruz is hardly taking up a tinfoil-hat-type cause; lots of Americans are disgruntled about this law. And it’s a lot of scolding to throw at a guy who, Canadian though he may be, is also an American and therefore entitled to exercise his First Amendment rights just like the rest of us. Last week I hitched a ride with Cruz from a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Austin’s new VA clinic to Waco, where he was the keynote speaker at a benefit for West, Texas. The campaign to defund Obamacare was the first thing we discussed.

The effort had, he said, been getting a “tremendous” response, both in person and via the online petition. “The reason is, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that Obamacare’s not working, and that it is the number-one job killer in the country,” Cruz told me. “It’s causing more and more people to be laid off, and not to be hired in the first place, and it’s causing people to have their hours forcibly reduced.”

A few days ago he had, he said, met a woman at a Hill Country roundtable who owned several fast-food restaurants. She had said that she was cutting all of her employees’ hours so that she wouldn’t have to provide them with health insurance; it was breaking her heart to do that, she said, because she knew they couldn’t care for their families on 29 hours a week, but at the same time, Cruz added, the workers could hardly care for their families if the restaurants went out of business. Another business owner, at that same roundtable, had said he wanted to do more manufacturing in Central Texas, but the rule that employers with more than fifty employees should provide insurance made it too expensive, and so he had been forced to send those jobs, between 150 and 200 of them, overseas.

“I think so many people are being hurt by Obamacare,” Cruz said. “ And, in particular, the people who are being hurt are the most vulnerable. They’re young people, Hispanics, African-Americans, single moms.” Those groups, he meant, are particularly vulnerable to harm because the Affordable Care Act was indirectly reducing their access to jobs.

Other people, Cruz continued, are getting hurt because they’re actually losing their health insurance: “Just this week we have seen that a number of employers are dropping spousal coverage. UPS sent letters to 18,000 employees that said your husbands and wives will no longer be covered. 18,000—their spouses have just lost their coverage. Now, when Obamacare was being proposed, the president told the American people that if you like your health care, you can keep it, and that is proving every day less and less true.” (The figure was actually 15,000, but as Cruz noted, UPS isn't the only employer who has made such an announcement recently, pointing to the Affordable Care Act as at least one factor.) 

Earlier that day, Cruz had been at a roundtable for tech executives in Austin, so I asked if the executives at bigger companies, similarly, described the Affordable Care Act as a constraint on their growth. One CEO had, Cruz said, but for the high-tech employers, all of whom were already providing some form of insurance, the stakes were slightly different.

“I will share a conversation that one of the executives from one of the high-tech companies had,” said Cruz, “He said more and more large companies are just waiting for