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Ted Cruz did not make the cover of the October issue of GQ, an honor reserved for The Wire‘s Idris Elba. That’s probably for the best. The appearance of Texas’ junior senator on the cover of a national magazine, this one not a political rag but one that defines itself as an arbiter of men’s style, would be too much for liberals’ brains to take.
Cruz does, however, make a lengthy appearance inside the magazine, where he’s profiled by Jason Zengerle. It’s a solid enough piece, but by this point the senator has been thoroughly mined by the national media, and the man that emerges is the same whip-smart, precocious, smug, grating, occasionally self-deprecating political wunderkind that has been described in a growing mountain of Cruz profiles.
Nevertheless, Zengerle does managed to uncover a couple of nuggets. One is his father’s bankruptcy during the collapse of the Texas oil industry in the 1980s, a seldom-mentioned pothole on the family’s road to success. The more entertaining tidbit is about his time in law school.
As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz’s law-school roommates: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”
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Truly shocking. Now quick, everyone stop paying attention to him before he goes and runs for president.
