Why 'jerks' get ahead- Day media

Story highlights

• Ted Cruz is widely disliked by those who have worked with him, yet he is one of the leading candidates for the GOP nomination, writes Peggy Drexler
• Studies show that people perceived as disagreeable can be viewed as more powerful and are good at getting their ideas heard, she says

Peggy Drexler is the author of "Our 






Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, and the Changing American Family" and "Raising Boys Without Men." She is an assistant professor of psychology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University and a former gender scholar at Stanford University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) Is Ted Cruz the most popular jerk in America? He very well could be: The brash Texas senator's star is on the rise, with on-again, off-again predictions for domination in the upcoming Iowa caucuses, and yet it's becoming clearer by the day that this is a guy about whom few have nice things to say—if they can even tolerate him at all.

Mother Jones lists all of the many derogatoryexpressions used to describe Cruz throughout his career—"pompous a**hole," "carnival barker," "hyper arrogant," and "widely despised" among them—to answer the question of whether Cruz is "Really an Awful, Terrible Jerk?" (Conclusion: yes.) In April,Wonkette went even further back, chronicling Cruz's Princeton and Harvard years in a post entitled "Portrait of a Young A**hole," a tale of a younger Cruz's classroom misogyny, belligerence at pizza shops, and refusal to associate with anyone at "lesser Ivies." (That would be anything besides Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.)

Peggy Drexler

So how to explain Cruz's success in a business as people-oriented as politics? Even members of his own party, from George W. Bush to Bob Dole to John McCain, describe him as someone that people "cannot stand" -- a "counterfeit" with "no qualifications."