Bruised Rubio licks his wounds, gets personal, aggressive
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — Sen. Marco Rubio, opening a more aggressive phase of his campaign as he tries to reinvigorate his bid for the Republican nomination, suggested Thursday that Donald Trump may be too crude to be president and that Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, may be too inexperienced.
Rubio expressed disgust with Trump’s use of obscene language earlier this week, describing how his two young sons had watched a news clip of Trump insulting Sen. Ted Cruz on the eve of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.
When the boys, age 8 and 10, asked their father what word had been bleeped out, Rubio said, he was at a loss.
“The commentator said it was another word for cat,” Rubio said in an interview on Thursday aboard his campaign plane, which touched down here for a rally.
“My boys wanted to know, ‘What was the word? What was the word?’ I said, ‘I can’t tell you.’ I had to make something up. And it bothered me.”
“I think you can be a straight talker,” he added, “but yet do it in a way that doesn’t offend.”
A battle for survival
Scolding of Trump, and his assertion that Bush — who is trumpeting the endorsements of dozens of retired generals and admirals — lacks foreign policy experience, reflected the high stakes here in South Carolina for Rubio, who is steeling for an intense battle heading into the Feb. 20 primary with rivals who have just as much on the line.
The contest here could settle what the New Hampshire pri- mary did not: Which Republican will survive as the choice of the party’s voters who are turned off by Trump and Cruz, the hardliners who have won the first two nominating contests.
Accusations and insults flew on Thursday, in new commercials and from the candidates themselves.
Conservative slugfest
Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, whose second-place finish in New Hampshire has buoyed his campaign — he picked up the support of Kenneth Langone, a founder of Home Depot, on Thursday after Gov. Chris Christie’s exit — also grew more confrontational.
He accused Bush of going at his opponents so aggressively that he was risking tarnishing his family name.
“I’m worried about Jeb,” Kasich said at a town-hall-style meeting at a pancake restaurant on South Carolina’s coast. “It’s all negative. How the heck can you sell negative?”
“I don’t know what he’s thinking,” Kasich told reporters later. “Does he realize the family legacy?”
Bush shot back that Kasich’s expansion of Medicaid in Ohio was a costly “expansion of government,” adding: “Here in South Carolina, people are looking for a conservative candidate.”
Bush was planning to send reinforcements to the state, starting on Monday with a North Charleston rally featuring his brother, George W. Bush, whose victory here in 2000 was pivotal in his presidential campaign.
Though Trump’s campaign pulled a negative ad attacking Cruz on Thursday, saying it wanted to stay positive, Cruz’s aides released two harshly negative ads attacking Trump for his use of eminent domain to try to demolish an elderly woman’s home in Atlantic City, New Jersey — one suggesting his behavior was childish, the other accusing him of a “pattern of sleaze.”
Cruz also introduced a television ad mocking Rubio as little more than a “pretty face” and hitting him for his prior support of a path to citizenship for people in the country illegally.