Ted Cruz, the Tea Party Texas Senator and self-styled populist Superman, is just a common man. Except for how he apparently omitted from required financial disclosure reports his connection to a Jamaican private equity firm he founded with his college roommate in 1998, since which his initial $6,000 investment turned into a tidy $100,000. Other than that, though: Just a regular Joe!

Time’s Massimo Calabresi reports:

Cruz says he failed to include the promissory note among his assets on his first financial disclosure in July 2012 when he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate because he had forgotten about it. “In 2011, there was an inadvertent omission of this promissory note, and after a conversation with my college roommate I remembered it,” Cruz says. Cruz’s initial filing was made in the heat of his campaign. He was fined $200 for filing the document late.

Cruz’s college roommate, an Atlanta businessman named David Panton, refused to speak to Time about his connection to Cruz. Which is anomalous both for Panton, who spoke with the magazine for a profile on Cruz published in August, and among the rest of Cruz’s old classmates, who tend to remember the senator quite well. One of them recently discussed Cruz’s college years with GQ:

The elite academic circles that Cruz was now traveling in began to rub off. 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.”

Vote Ted Cruz, Man of the People.

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