In another strange development in the Republican presidential primary, Ted Cruz’s top campaign spokesman is out of his post after circulating a news article suggesting that Marco Rubio mocked the Bible.
Cruz, whose campaign has been dogged by allegations of perpetrating dirty tricks, said that his spokesman Rick Tyler committed “a grave error of judgment.”
Cruz asks senior spox who spread false Rubio story to resign. Says he committed a “grave error of judgement”
— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) February 22, 2016
It all started when Rubio bumped into Rafael Cruz, the Texas senator’s father and a frequent campaign surrogate, and a Cruz staffer in the lobby of a hotel in South Carolina. While walking by, Rubio briefly made remarks about the book the staffer was reading: the Bible.
An article in The Daily Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania’s student newspaper, originally reported that the Florida senator said that the Bible is a “good book” but casually added that there are “not many answers in it.”
While the audio in a video of the exchange is hard to make out, it seems highly unlikely that a presidential candidate would mock the Bible while chatting with a staffer of a rival campaign and the father of his chief opponent, not to mention in front of people with cameras. Rubio, in fact, seemed to say that the Bible had “all the answers in it.”
Nonetheless, Tyler shared on his Twitter and Facebook pages the Daily Pennsylvanian post claiming that Rubio challenged the Bible.
Tyler eventually deleted the posts and apologized, but Cruz nevertheless asked for his resignation over the matter.
However unlikely the Rubio story was, it seems almost inevitable that the Cruz campaign’s effort to portray its candidate as the one true Christian in the race would have eventually met a snag.
