Thank you, money.
Meet
Ted Cruz's sugar daddy.
[Robert Mercer], a reclusive Long Islander who started at I.B.M. and made his fortune using computer patterns to outsmart the stock market, emerged this week as a key early bankroller of Mr. Cruz’s surprisingly fast campaign start. He is believed to be the main donor behind a network of four “super PACs” supporting Mr. Cruz that reported raising $31 million just a few weeks into his campaign. [...]
Mr. Mercer does not have the name recognition of fellow Republican financiers like the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, but he has spent more than $15 million since 2012 in support of conservative political campaigns and causes, donating to a number of candidates who had never even met him.
You cannot run for president without a sugar daddy. Unless, like Mitt Romney, you are your own sugar daddy. Newt had his Adelson, and the Koch brothers have raised many a candidate from larva to legislator, and Ted Cruz can run for president only because a hedge fund manager somewhere in America has given him his blessing. There has been no groundswell of support for an inexplicable Ted Cruz presidential run—the only swelling has been in Sen. Ted Cruz's head—but a few million dollars spent wisely can create the illusion of one, thus obliging the press to pay attention, thus gaining name recognition, thus building a case for other hedge fund managers to kick in larger amounts of dough.
There has got to be a better way to elect a president. I am not proposing a merit-based system, heaven knows, or that we give it out as reward, Nobel style, to great achievers in actual government. But it seems like you ought to have at least proven yourself competent at the individual duties running the free world (as they say) might require—a checklist, a resume, a demonstrated ability to keep the government running in spite of your own presence in it—and there has got to be a a better way than this.