It's my party and I'll cry if I want to.

Cry if I want to.

You would cry to if it happened to you.

Welcome to Politico's off message podcast.

I can't even say this week's because we're doing a lot of them, kind of on the fly.

This one is being recorded from my dining room in lovely downtown Kensington, Maryland, with my dog sitting at my feet.

Just drove back from Cleveland yesterday because I don't like to fly with a couple of Politico's in tow.

It took me a mere eight and a half hours, but I did get my first

good night's sleep in a week. I got about 10 hours of sleep, which I think is about one hour

more than I got in the aggregate of the five days that I was in Cleveland. So this week was really,

really interesting for a lot of reasons, just finished up with Trump's big speech. But to me,

the big memory is going to be Ted Cruz. And we were lucky enough, obviously, to get Ted Cruz last Friday. And anyone who listened

to what Ted Cruz told me that he was watching and waiting on Donald Trump, that he had a particular

vision for the country, that he cared more about that than the Republican Party and cared more about that than Donald Trump, I think would have had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen.

That said, I want to tell you a little story.

So Cruz drops his bombshell on the convention.

He has booed out the door.

His wife, Heidi, is escorted out of the quick and loan center under guard because

people are afraid that you might get attacked. And I decided, oh, this fiasco ends and I leave

and it's like, I don't know, midnight. I'm looking for a place to pick up an Uber. The closest

hotel to the center is the Marriott. And I happen to know that the Texas delegation was

hanging out at the Marriott, so I figured let's kill two birds with one stone. I'll go over there,

...