What Ted Cruz's Goldman Sachs loan tells us about running for Congress
Article/Op-Ed in Vox
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Jan. 14, 2016
Lee Drutman wrote for Vox about Ted Cruz's entanglement with Big Banks:
Today's big GOP primary news is that, per the New York Times, Ted Cruz obtained $1.2 million in low-interest loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank to fund his 2012 Senate bid. These loans were improperly concealed from election officials. Also Cruz's wife, Heidi, was a managing director at Goldman Sachs at the time, which may have helped. (She is now on leave.)
Naturally, the optics of this are terrible for Cruz. For one, it fuels the criticism of Cruz as a sleazy hypocrite, privately benefiting from the big banks that he publicly bashes and then lying about it by calling the money "personal funds." It also highlights that his wife worked at Goldman Sachs, which undercuts some of his cultivated outsider credibility. The allegations that he is permanently in debt to Goldman write themselves.
Cruz, of course, claims that the failure to report was "inadvertent" and that this is a non-story. My guess: There will be a few days of back and forth as other candidates try to make this into the Rosetta Stone of his true character. And then we will move on to the next moment of outrage.
But while we have this story in front of us for the moment, let's zoom out to the bigger picture: With rare exception, you have to be superrich to run for federal office these days. Which is itself a tremendous problem — far bigger than Cruz's accounting shenanigans.