What is it with the wives of politicians making us wish they were running instead of their husbands? Heidi Nelson Cruz, wife of political dingbat Ted Cruz, certainly fits that bill, if a new New York Times profile of her is to be believed. Or does she? [Cue ominous music]
Heidi has an impressive job; she's a managing director at Goldman Sachs – very nice Heidi! – and still makes time for her kids (though the couple does employ a live-in nanny). The Times' Ashley Parker describes her as "a complex study in contrasts to her husband":
She describes herself as instinctively collaborative, and her husband as a man of big, fearless ideas — a seemingly polite way of saying that, yes, Mr. Cruz breaks a few pieces of china every now and then.
“Ted is very much a visionary,” she said. “He is very strategic, and he’s very practical, and he does what needs to be done, not what everybody wants him to do.”
Of herself, she said: “I want to make sure that everybody is comfortable. I want to make sure that everybody is talking to each other.”
Cool, Heidi! Communication is 9/10ths of the law or whatever they say. What else should we know about you?
While Mrs. Cruz comes across as confident but gracious — she disarms by asking personal questions, and answers those put to her directly and candidly — her husband tends to filibuster. Still, when Mr. Cruz stopped by last week for the final 15 minutes of the interview, he often listened attentively, resting his cheek on his clasped hands as he gazed at his wife. She, meanwhile, occasionally cut him off with a joke or a quip.
She's like a conservative Michelle Obama, always there with the laughs about her clearly dumber husband, a fair and balanced voice in the life of a man who wouldn't know fair and balanced unless it was on Fox News.
But wait...
In Mr. Cruz, friends and colleagues say, she met not just her match, but also her intellectual equal.
Uh oh. You're "intellectual equals" with a man who believes some insane shit? Okay...we'll let that unintentional dig slide, if you tell us how you feel about the issues, Heidi:
Although Mrs. Cruz said that she was less “issue driven” than her husband, she added that she was committed to him and his ideals.
“It’s allowed me to really support what he does, even politically,” she said, “because I know he’s doing it because he truly believes in it.”
Hmmm. But clearly you always do what's best for you and your family, right?:
In a glimpse into their marriage that Mr. Cruz called “illustrative,” he recalled saying to his wife in the weeks before his Senate primary, when he was still behind in the polls, “Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign.”
“What astonished me, then and now, was Heidi within 60 seconds said, ‘Absolutely,’ with no hesitation,” said Mr. Cruz, who invested about $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” he added — into his campaign.
TO BE FAIR, in extra audio clips the Times has made available, Heidi clarifies that she wouldn't have put that money into her husband's campaign if there hadn't been proof that the constituents were fans of Ted. So +1 Heidi, for making financial choices not based entirely off of your husbands madcap schemes to take over the world.
Unfortunately for Heidi, as we tally up the cool points and pointedly ignore her conservative values that only seem liberal in comparison with her husband's, the bigger issue is that she's decided to be with him, to stand beside him while he does things like this and this and this.
Parker spends a good portion of her profile discussing Cruz's choice to use his wife's health insurance, provided through Heidi's aforementioned job at Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs no doubt has a robust and thorough health insurance plan that would, like most plans provided by non-religious institutions, cover abortion. In most cases, plans that provide abortion coverage don't allow you to "opt out" of that particular coverage – it's part of the package, whether you choose to D&C or not. So. Ted Cruz, by way of his delightful wife Heidi, is helping pay for abortions around America, whether he likes it or not. And that's the real reason we can't be excited about Heidi: she's enabling a hypocrite, and that makes her one too.
A Wife Committed to Cruz’s Ideals, but a Study in Contrasts to Him [NYT]
Image via Evan Vucci/AP