A key supporter of Sen. Marco Rubio say CNN delivered “a punch in the gut” to Rubio’s campaign by reporting that his advisers are debating an early exit from the presidential primary, a rumor the campaign dismissed as “fiction” almost immediately.
“It just pisses me off,” Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Fla., one of Rubio’s in-state surrogates, told the Washington Examiner. “We’re working our asses off. Marco could not be working any harder, we could not be spending any more time away from our families and working to help get him the state of Florida. And for something to just be dropped like that on TV … it’s a punch in the gut.”
Rubio’s team is accusing Sen. Ted Cruz’s campaign of planting the story. It’s the second act of a drama that played out first the night of the Iowa caucuses, which involved the same media outlet. When CNN reported that Ben Carson was returning home to Florida and “not going to go to New Hampshire,” Cruz’s team told caucus-goers that Carson was dropping out. Rubio and Donald Trump cited the incident repeatedly to hurt Cruz in the run-up to the South Carolina primary, which the reality TV star eventually won.
Rubio has guaranteed a win in Florida, where Trump currently leads, but Cruz is stepping up his efforts there as well. The new CNN report could motivate Rubio and Cruz to revert to fighting each other over the next week, after two weeks of focusing on taking down the real estate mogul who leads the GOP primary field.
“My immediate reaction is this is the Cruz campaign putting that out because of what he did in Iowa,” Rooney said. He also allowed that it could be “Trump putting it out” because he wants to regain his momentum.
CNN’s report cited “a source familiar with” internal Rubio campaign discussions, however, and so Rooney conceded that the rumor could have come from someone on the periphery of the campaign.
“Is an ‘advisor’ just some donor who gave him some money at some point and has his cell phone number and texts back, and gets texts from Marco?” he wondered. “It’s a punch in the gut just from the standpoint of those of us that are working our asses off to help this candidate, and him working his ass off to help himself close the gap. We are really closing the gap in Florida. Any little leak of information like this that CNN is going to carry but not name the source or use as some kind of an advisor of any kind of gravitas, it’s just an effort to stop that momentum from carrying forward.”
