http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/ted-cruz-marco-rubio-2016-219645?lo=ap_c1 Ted Cruz in turmoil as Rubio gathers steam
Texan scrambles to fix his image as ‘dirty tricks’ allegations stick.
By Eli Stokols and Shane Goldmacher
02/22/16 06:08 PM EST
Marco Rubio won the day before Nevada’s caucuses — and Ted Cruz lost.
While Rubio was racking up big endorsements, he also managed to exact a pound of political flesh from his closest rival on Monday as Cruz’s campaign was thrown into turmoil over new allegations of “dirty tricks.”
“When you stand in front of a sign at every rally that says ‘TrustTED,’ with ‘Ted’ being the key part of the brand, you have to protect that brand at all costs — and they’ve lost that brand,” said Bruce Haynes, a GOP strategist. “Cruz cannot afford three days of the news cycle with everyone scrutinizing everything they’ve done that might be unseemly, so they had one choice to try and stop the bleeding, especially with Rubio on a bit of a rocket ride right now.”
Cruz abruptly fired communications director Rick Tyler on Monday afternoon, a day after Tyler posted, then deleted, a link to a student newspaper’s blog that had misstated Rubio’s comments about the Bible. The blog quoted Rubio as telling a Cruz staffer reading a Bible on Saturday that the book didn’t “have many answers in it.” Rubio said he actually said “the answer to every question you’ll ever have is in that book.” The blog later added an editor’s note saying that “after reviewing the audio, we feel it is too unclear to say for sure” what Rubio said.
Tyler apologized, but it was not enough, especially after Cruz’s team took criticism for falsely implying, just as Iowans prepared to vote, that rival Ben Carson was getting ready to drop out.
“This campaign now has repeatedly done things that they have to apologize for, and no one is ever held accountable,” Rubio said to reporters in Nevada on Monday. “Who’s going to be held accountable for making up this video? Who is going to be held accountable for lying about Ben Carson? Who was held accountable for the robo-calls, and who was held accountable for the commercials on television that they had to pull down?”
It didn’t take long for Cruz to answer.
“I had made clear in this campaign that we will conduct this campaign with the very highest standards of integrity,” Cruz said Monday afternoon as he told reporters that he had asked for Tyler’s resignation.
“That has been how we’ve conducted it from Day One,” Cruz said. “It is why when other campaigns attack us personally, impugn my integrity or my character, I don’t respond in kind. None of you have heard me throw the kind of insults at Marco Rubio that he throws at me every single day. If other candidates choose to go into the gutter, we will not do the same.
“Rick Tyler’s a good man,” Cruz continued. “This was a grave error of judgment. It turned out the news story he sent around was false, but I’ll tell you, even if it was true, we are not a campaign that is going to question the faith of another candidate.”
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