Is this the real Ted Cruz emerging?
For the second time in three days and the third time in the brief primary season, the Texas Republican senator’s presidential campaign has had to apologize or walk back false and misleading information it released.
The slash-and-apologize spree hit retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson before the Iowa primary, but the last two instances have involved Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
The most recent incident came Sunday, the morning after Rubio finished second to businessman Donald Trump by fewer than 1,100 votes in the South Carolina primary.
The problem began when the Cruz campaign released a video of Rubio walking by Rafael Cruz, the candidate’s father, who was reading the Bible, and a Cruz staffer in a hotel lobby, and included the subtitles, “Got a good book there. Not many answers in it.”
After the Cruz campaign linked to the video, Rubio communications director Alex Conant tweeted out the video with what he says are the correct subtitles: “Got a good book there. All the answers are in there.”
A Cruz campaign spokesman on Monday said the campaign had made a mistake and also posted an apology on Facebook.
“I posted in haste, I should not have done it,” Rick Tyler told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum. “It was a mistake, and I would not knowingly post something I knew to be false.”
However, the dirty tricks seem to be a habit.
Late last week, when South Carolina voters were making their final selection, the Cruz campaign included on its website a doctored image of Rubio shaking hands with President Obama. Titled “The Real Rubio Record,” it included an obviously faked shot of the Florida senator smiling as he shakes hands with the president with his left hand.
“This is how phony and deceitful the Cruz campaign has become,” Rubio adviser Todd Harris said.
The Cruz campaign eventually took down the photo and replaced it with a photo of Rubio shaking Obama’s hand at a State of the Union message (as senators of both parties do), and a later report out of the campaign said manipulating photos was a common practice in elections.
During the same week, the Cruz campaign also circulated a Facebook page that claimed South Carolina U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy was no longer supporting Rubio. That wasn’t true, either, and Gowdy made another Rubio ad to confirm it.
In Iowa, before the Feb. 1 caucus, the Cruz campaign told voters Carson had dropped out of the race, blaming the information on what it said was a misleading CNN report.
The candidates later met in a storage closet at the site of the Conservative Review convention in South Carolina to talk over the matter, with Carson saying afterward that “we disagree on accountability and culpability.”
With many voters still looking for an alternative to Trump, increasingly it appears Cruz cannot be that candidate.