Cruz, Rubio, Face off in Nasty Battle for Second in S.C.

Columbia, S.C. — A photoshopped image. A phony Facebook page. One candidate daring another to follow through on his threat of a lawsuit.

Welcome to the race for second place in South Carolina.

As the gap between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz has tightened here — the latest poll, from a local Fox affiliate, shows Rubio pulling ahead of Cruz for the first time, and even within striking distance of front-runner Donald Trump — the two men have traded increasingly rancorous barbs. The nasty back-and-forth has revealed a previously unseen personal animus between the two candidates’ campaign staffs, as both sides recognize that they are fighting for the same voters, and ultimately for a position that only one candidate can occupy.

Cruz arrived in South Carolina securely in second place while Rubio staggered into the Palmetto State hoping to salvage his campaign after a disappointing fifth-place finish in New Hampshire. But just a week later, the race looks very different. Cruz has been hammered ceaselessly from above by Donald Trump and pecked at tirelessly by Rubio from below. Both have called the Texas senator a liar, and the accusation has taken a toll: With Trump eating into Cruz’s support among Evangelicals, he is looking to make up the difference by peeling enough voters away from Rubio’s hodgepodge coalition of conservatives and moderates.

Rubio, meanwhile, got a boost with the endorsement of South Carolina’s popular Indian-American governor, Nikki Haley, who has joined Rubio, the state’s African-American junior senator Tim Scott, and Congressman Trey Gowdy on a barnstorming tour. The group been riding high, joking to crowds that the new Republican party resembles a United Colors of Benetton commercial.

Under pressure, Cruz has been showing signs of strain. On Wednesday, he held an impromptu press conference to respond to the Trump campaign’s threatening legal action if he refused to pull a negative advertisement off the air. For 40 minutes, he schooled reporters on the intricacies of defamation law. “If Donald Trump files the lawsuit that he threatened in this letter, that lawsuit will be frivolous,” he said. “In any defamation case, truth is an absolute defense.”

Rubio adviser Todd Harris stepped forward to say that “Ted Cruz looked unhinged and un-presidential.”

Rubio’s surrogates also emerged to pound Cruz for a phony Facebook page, since disabled, which claimed that the popular Gowdy, a Rubio supporter, had decided to endorse Texas’s junior senator. There is no evidence that the Cruz campaign was behind it, but Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz said Thursday that it was consistent with “a pattern of personal destruction” that has come from Cruz’s team.

If Rubio’s allies were peeved, it was hard to blame them. The previous day, Cruz’s national spokesman Rick Tyler had, in an appearance on Fox News, accused Rubio of “wanting to talk about Facebook,” the condescension dripping from his voice. By putting Gowdy on the attack against Cruz, Tyler charged, the Rubio campaign had forced him to “make a fool out of himself, sort of like he did in the Benghazi hearings.”

On Thursday, an unusual controversy erupted over the Cruz team’s latest attack ad, which blasted Rubio for supporting a major free-trade deal pushed by President Obama. Never mind the substance of Cruz’s charge; Rubio’s backers immediately pounced on the photoshopped picture that accompanied it, an image of a smiling Rubio shaking hands with Obama. Before day’s end, Rubio fans across the country had created a Twitter hashtag, #CruzPhotoshop, and circulated images depicting Rubio as the Mona Lisa, Luke Skywalker, and Steve Jobs in an effort to mock the Cruz campaign.

“The picture is fake and that alone tells you everything I’ve been saying for the last few days,” Rubio told reporters on Thursday. “He’s making things up.”

“Over the last 10 days, the Cruz campaign has lied, smeared, fabricated, and even photoshopped,” Rubio communications director Alex Conant said Friday. “We fear the worst dirty tricks are yet to come. . . . The Cruz campaign will do anything to stop Marco Rubio’s momentum.”

Rubio has used this series of seemingly small openings to paint the Texas senator as a political opportunist whom voters simply cannot trust, with enormous help from his surrogates. Gowdy, for example, responded to the Cruz campaign’s barbs with a hastily composed YouTube video shot on Rubio’s campaign bus Thursday as it barreled between stops. “Come on, you’re better than that, you oughtta be better than that, you’re running for the highest office in the land,” Gowdy told the Cruz team — and the rest of the country.

Tyler, Cruz’s spokesman, says all of the Rubio team, in accusing others of perpetrating dirty tricks, is itself guilty of engaging in exactly the sort of trickery that it is accusing Cruz of. “Marco Rubio has no wins, no message and no conservative record to run on so has resorted to lies, smear and fear,” Tyler says. ” Worse, he claims to be the victim of made-up dirty tricks, which is nothing but a dirty trick.”

In Haley’s first major public appearance after her endorsement of Rubio on Wednesday, she invoked the concepts of grace, compassion, and acceptance, as well as the idea of “becoming better when tested.”

But in a state long defined by its culture of bare-knuckled politics, everyone’s better angels are, it appears, taking a vacation until the polls close on Saturday.

— Eliana Johnson is Washington editor of National Review.