This struck me this morning listening to Weekend Edition:
Behind the scenes, Heidi Cruz has been busily fundraising for her husband for months. She took a leave of absence from the investment firm Goldman Sachs to work on the campaign.
That connection has been a source of criticism for Ted Cruz, who was elected to the Senate in 2012 as a Tea Party conservative and a critic of the federal bailout of Wall Street.
The scrutiny intensified after it came to light that Cruz had used loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank to fund that campaign. In an interview, Heidi Cruz said she doesn’t see a contradiction.
“Ted and I were both against the bailouts, but not against Wall Street, not against any industry,” she said. “We are against government intervention into the industries in this economy.”
Given a) the culpability of firms like Goldman Sachs in creating the Great Recession, and b) the aid that such firms received from the federal government, such statement are hard to take. And yes, I understand both the ideological and political impulses behind the statements. Still, there is some special mixture here of Tea Party anti-bailout rhetoric mixed with financial support from those bailed out that is impressive (in a certain sense of the term).
In particular I find the notion of being against the bailouts and being for Wall Street to be a remarkable bit of mental gymnastics (although, again, ideology is clearly at play here).
(And before anyone mentions it: neither of our major parties is untainted by hypocrisy on this topic).
