At this point, watching Donald Trump calling Ted Cruz the worst liar he’s ever seen and implying that he’s got a mental disorder doesn’t even phase the press. That’s just Trump being Trump. But it is noteworthy that Marco Rubio’s supposedly “high road” campaign is tarring Cruz with the same message. Even poor old Ben Carson gets in on the act, fulminating over Cruz’s alleged “dirty trick” in Iowa in which some of his campaign workers phoned into the caucuses with a bogus report that Carson was dropping out of the race and told them to vote for Cruz instead. (Carson did not lose the race because of this. He garnered only 9 percent of he vote to Cruz’s 27.6, Trump’s 24.3 and Rubio’s 23.1.)
Cruz was first fingered for alleged trickery for sending misleading flyers in Iowa which earned a scolding from the Iowa Secretary of State. (It turned out that Marco Rubio deployed something similar without controversy.) And in South Carolina there were flurries of accusations mostly aimed at Cruz for doing push polls and running dishonest ads. A pro-Cruz PAC ran robo-calls against Trump saying he was gay friendly and “tearing down our America.” (Those were probably balanced out by the pro-Trump white supremacist robo calls.)
Here’s one example of the kind of dirty campaigning that had the Rubio campaign crying foul:
How they do it in SC. Here's @tedcruz mailer on @marcorubio pic.twitter.com/7VGjQ392Jo— Michael Isikoff (@Isikoff) February 20, 2016
One of the criticisms of that mailer is that it’s “racially tinged” which seems to have meant that it implied Rubio is black which is the worst thing you can say about someone, apparently.
It wasn’t the only mailer that got the Rubio camp in a dither. This one was very upsetting:
It’s a photoshopped picture so obvious it might as well be a cartoon rendering. It’s odd that people were so upset about it. Marco Rubio is a U.S. Senator and there are actual photographs all over the internet of him shaking hands with the president.
The reason the Rubio camp was upset about these mailers was because Cruz called attention to some areas in which Rubio agrees with President Obama. If nothing else, it’s telling that Donald Trump can call Cruz a “pussy” in front of thousands of people, but telling people your rival agrees with the man in the White House on even one issue is beyond the pale.
The Rubio campaign said Cruz ran the dirtiest race in South Carolina history. Let’s just say that’s a bit of an exaggeration. It’s hard to top the George W.Bush campaign’s vicious attacks on John McCain there in 2000, which included a weird whisper campaign about fathering a “black baby.” (His daughter was adopted from Bangladesh.) They accused his wife of being a drug addict and claimed that he’s slept with prostitutes and gave his wife venereal disease. They called him a traitor when he was a POW and claimed that he had been brainwashed by the North Vietnamese to destroy the Republican Party. The rumors were spread through anonymous flyer and push polls that could never be traced. The calls peaked about a week before the vote and McCain never recovered. Compared to that, Ted Cruz’s little flyers were child’s play.
This week, Cruz was hit once again with complaints that his spokesman Rick Tyler had passed around a video purporting to show Marco Rubio remarking to Ted Cruz’s father Rafael about the Bible: “Got a good book there, not many answers in it” In fact, Rubio had said it did have “a lot of answers in it.” Cruz, under increasing pressure, fired Tyler. And both Trump and Rubio promptly responded by saying Tyler was a fall guy.