Allahpundit made a note of this lovely little gem in his last post, and I realize we’ve already had a couple of Ted-Cruz centric posts today — I suppose it’s a testament to the degree to which Cruz is currently getting under the media’s skin — but this is too rich to let it pass without further comment.
According to the Daily Beast‘s — er, exposé? backgrounder? profile? — on Ted Cruz in the days of his young adulthood and higher education, Cruz actually exhibited some of the perhaps ill-conceived and arrogant but typically youthful and generally outgrown behaviors of a male college student, if you can believe it. He engaged in such activities as walking past the girls’ dorm rooms, gasp, and picking intellectual fights with what were presumably plenty of his liberal-minded cohorts. A bunch of people actually disliked him… at Princeton! Can you imagine? I just can’t come up with the words to describe the horror of such juvenile behavior from… well, a young person.
In addition to Mazin and Leitch, several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like “abrasive,” “intense,” “strident,” “crank,” and “arrogant.” Four independently offered the word “creepy,” with some pointing to Cruz’s habit of donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived. …
Cruz also angered a number of upperclassmen his freshman year when he joined in a regular poker game and quickly ran up $1,800 in debt to other students from his losses. Cruz’s spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, said Cruz acknowledges playing in the poker games, which he now considers “foolish.”
“He went to his aunt, who worked at a bank in Dallas, and borrowed $1,800 from her, which he paid in cash and promptly quit the game,” Frazier told The Daily Beast, explaining that Cruz worked two jobs and made monthly payments to his aunt for the next two years to repay the debt.
Good heavens, gambling! Which he… promptly stopped doing, obtained a loan, paid off his debt, and then steadily worked to pay off that loan? What a… bad role model?
The Beast’s piece does go on to highlight others’ positive experiences with Cruz and his collegiate accomplishments too, but if any of that was meant to suggest some kind of sullying of Cruz’s reputation or personality… I’m not getting it. Ramesh Ponneru has some thoughts over at NRO.
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