YOU CAN'T SERIOUSLY BELIEVE THIS LOAN STORY IS GOING TO HURT TED CRUZ, CAN YOU?

The political class thinks this is a huge story:

Ted Cruz Didn’t Disclose Loan From Goldman Sachs for His First Senate Campaign

As Ted Cruz tells it, the story of how he financed his upstart campaign for the United States Senate four years ago is an endearing example of loyalty and shared sacrifice between a married couple.

“Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign,” he says he told his wife, Heidi, who readily agreed.

But the couple’s decision to pump more than $1 million into Mr. Cruz’s successful Tea Party-darling Senate bid in Texas was made easier by a large loan from Goldman Sachs, where Mrs. Cruz works. That loan was not disclosed in campaign finance reports.

The report, which appears in The New York Times but was probably handed over to the Times by a rival campaign's opposition-research team, goes on to quote dishonest accounts of the campaign financing by Cruz and his wife:

In recounting the decision to put all of their savings into the campaign, Mr. Cruz said in [a] 2013 Times interview that Mrs. Cruz immediately agreed to his proposal....

“What astonished me, then and now, was Heidi within 60 seconds said, ‘Absolutely,’ with no hesitation,” Mr. Cruz said.

Mrs. Cruz, who is on leave as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, later suggested that the reality was more complicated. She told Politico in 2014 that she thought they should apply “common investment sense” and not use their own money for the campaign “unless it made the difference” in winning. The article did not mention anything about loans from banks.

The loans, we're told, were perfectly legal. Failure to disclose them violates campaign finance laws, but the enforcement of those laws isn't exactly draconian:

Other campaigns have been investigated and fined for failing to make such disclosures, which are intended to inform voters and prevent candidates from receiving special treatment from lenders. There is no evidence that the Cruzes got a break on their loans.

So why is this supposed to be a big story?

I suppose it's because Cruz has been known to criticize "crony capitalism." However, he's been a hypocrite on that subject all along and his fans don't seem to mind. (March 2015 headline from Politico: "Cruz Rails Against 'Crony Capitalism,' Praises Wife's Goldman Sachs Career.")

And this is to be expected. As Ed Kilgore wrote earlier this week, Republicans nowadays may shake their fists at "the establishment" and "elites," but the "elites" somehow never seem to include members of the business community:

There are no corporate or Wall Street bad guys, unless they are deemed too cozy with government, the perpetual Satan figure.

... You are left with the impression that absent government intervention corporations like Koch Industries would be able to make life in this country, well, if not Edenic, then infinitely more prosperous and efficient.

... as candidates in both parties conduct a wide-ranging debate over the various interests that have at least partially spoiled the American Dream, there's a gap in the GOP discussion that's as obvious as a lost front tooth: Somehow corporate "job creators" never share responsibility with lazy welfare bums and freeloading immigrants and police-hating minorities and feminist baby-killers and Muslim-loving anti-Semites and every single organ of domestic government that is not being systematically degraded by conservative ideologues. In the Year of Anti-Elite Anger, the elites who collectively own much of the country are being given a pass by one of the two major parties so long as they do not consort with any other enemies, particularly government.

I've been saying that for years -- once again, I'll link my roundup of Tea Party reactions to the Citizens United ruling in 2010. The teabaggers were delighted.



A private corporation lent money to Cruz, who was a private citizen at the time. Failure to report the loan violates a campaign finance law (boo! hiss!). This is an infraction in the eyes of the hated government, and the hated New York Times. Nope, it's not going to hurt Cruz with Republican voters.