Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Daily Beast: Ted Cruz' College Classmates At Princeton Thought He Was Creepy

A lot of conservatives have really taken to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). I don't count myself as one of them, although I respect him more than most people in Congress today. The first time I heard him speak, the word "creepy" was the first thought to pop into my mind, although I wasn't entirely comfortable saying that out loud. Apparently his classmates at Princeton where he did his undergraduate work had the same reaction to him. Unlike Obama, the Daily Beast was actually able to locate classmates who remembered him attending school with them. From his creepy strolls through the women's dormitory in his paisley robe to his gambling debts, former classmates of Cruz unload on him. Their most interesting observation: his political views haven't changed at all.
“It was my distinct impression that Ted had nothing to learn from anyone else,” said Erik Leitch, who lived in Butler College with Cruz. Leitch said he remembers Cruz as someone who wanted to argue over anything or nothing, just for the exercise of arguing. “The only point of Ted talking to you was to convince you of the rightness of his views."

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.

“I would end up fielding the [girls’] complaints: 'Could you please keep your roommate out of our hallway?'" Mazin says.
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 . . . " 
More than anyone I knew, Ted seemed to have arrived in college with a fully formed worldview,” Butler College colleague Erik Leitch said.  “And what strikes me now, looking at him as an adult and hearing the things he's saying, it seems like nothing has changed. Four years of an Ivy League education, Harvard Law, and years of life experience have altered nothing."
I'm really not bothered by the people who speak negatively because of his political views. He has been a more consistent conservative in his short political career than let's say Marco Rubio, who I'm convinced could just as easily have been a Democrat if opportunity had knocked. I like the fact that he has been an outspoken critic of the overreaching by the NSA surveillance state, but I'm really turned off by his delusional belief that he is a natural born citizen eligible to run for president. He can't on the one hand argue a strict constructionist viewpoint in interpreting the U.S. Constitution and say that it doesn't matter that he was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father. I understand his ambition and desire to be president, but if he were true to his conservative principles, he would agree that an amendment to the Constitution is required in order to make him eligible to run for president. I do sympathize with him on one big point. Why is it that others like Cruz are placed under a microscope by the media when they stick their heads out to run for president, while anyone daring to question anything about the completely manufactured biographical narrative of Barack Obama as told in his work of fiction, "Dreams From My Father," is immediately dismissed as a bigot and crackpot conspiracy theorist?


Anonymous said...

Knowing more than a little about Princeton, some of that actually makes him an ideal student there. Princeton, far more than the other Ivy's, seems to look for the unique student, not just one with academic credentials. That never means you have to like them, or even agree with them, but it's always helpful to developing a view of the world if you confront wildly differing viewpoints. If you were going to be a liberal in the 60's, and an effective one, you had to be able to make an argument with Bill Buckley.

Anonymous said...

OTOH Evan Bayh in college would have had a poll commissioned as to whether it would be OK for his future political career to wear a light blue T-Shirt to class instead of a button down white cotton dress shirt with a collar with a particular thread count.

LamLawIndy said...

Well, there's no doubt that his mom was American. Wouldn't DNA evidence demonstrating that he's her child settle the question? After all, to hold otherwise would chill travel by women in their 8th to 9th month of pregnancy. Moreover, the Naturalization Act of 1790 - enacted by members of Congress who actually were Founders - stated that children of US citizens are natural born citizens regardless of the locus of their birth (though I admit the Naturalization Act of 1795 omits the language).

Gary R. Welsh said...

You omitted the critical exception in the 1790 Naturalization Act, which provided that citizenship did NOT descend to the child at birth if the father had not been a resident of the U.S. At that point, Cruz' father was a Cuban citizen residing in Canada. When the law was redrafted in 1795, it clarified that the statute only conferred status on the child as a citizen and not "natural born citizen" status, still with the provision that said it was not conferred on a child whose father had not been at least a resident of the U.S.