So who is John Kraft?

The man who won more than 600,000 votes in the the Democratic primary for insurance commissioner has been pretty much a mystery, but I caught up with him for a story this week. Find the full piece here A Mormon, former wrestler and self-described "walking genius," who had a hand in the development of individually wrapped sliced cheese and "pourable" salad dressings, won 631,000 votes in last week's primary elections. Not only that, this unfunded and unknown candidate has now pledged to raise as much as $1 million for the fall general-election campaign--for his one-time opponent. Really. The candidate is John Kraft, an heir to the Kraft Foods empire, who shunned both political contributions and endorsements and still managed to swipe the support of 30 percent of Democratic voters from Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante. All told, Kraft's bid for insurance commissioner garnered 200,000 more votes than Sen. Liz Figueroa, who lost a three-way primary for lieutenant governor, and more votes than either former Assemblyman Tony Strickland or Sen. Abel Maldonado, the two leading Republican candidates for state controller. As for that million dollars: Regarding his hundreds of thousands of supporters, Kraft added, "I would say that probably 99 percent of those people will vote for Cruz and they did not vote against him." Kraft, who called Bustamante after the election to congratulate him on his victory, is now so enamored with his one-time opponent he says Bustamante has a "chance to be the best insurance commissioner California has ever had." And he is willing to open up his wallet to prove it. The grandson of a founder of Kraft Foods, Kraft is independently wealthy and well-connected as the sitting chairman of the Kraft Family Foundation, a multimillion-dollar charity organization. "I would love to raise $1 million or more. We have six months. That is only a thousand people giving a thousand dollars," said Kraft, optimistically. "I have enough friends in corporations I sit on boards with." In an interview this week, he even floated the idea of an independent-expenditure campaign with himself as the biggest donor. "We have got to have a Democratic insurance commissioner," he said.