The past lives of the 2016 presidential candidates will feature prominently in coverage of the upcoming election, as suggested this week by media’s reaction to an anecdote about Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz during his days as a competitive debater at Princeton University.
As a debater, Cruz showed “eloquence,” The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The Gray Lady also reported that the now-Texas senator wasn’t always as on point with his attempts at humor as he was with rhetorical finesse.
During one debate in the early 1990s, Cruz “proposed a method to detect infidelity in which God should ‘give women a hymen that grows back every time she has intercourse with a different guy,'” the Times reported, adding that the young student reasoned this would serve as a “visible sign of the breach of trust.”
Though the anecdote is mentioned only in passing in the Times’ much longer report, certain corners of online media appeared eager to question Cruz’s personal characters and his regard for women.
“Ted Cruz and the funny, magical hymen” a non-too-amused Daily Kos article stated.
An equally unimpressed Talking Points Memo took the Times’ minor anecdote and treated it as a standalone news story, characterizing the Grey Lady’s find as a “priceless anecdotes.”
Taking things a step further, the blog Wonkette published a satirical article that referred to the young debater as an “a**hole.”
There were those, however, who saw the supposed dustup over the Cruz debater anecdote as much ado about nothing.
“If one understands the nature and purpose of competitive debating, then one understands how silly this is,” wrote National Reviews’ Charles C. W. Cooke, an alumnus of Oxford University. “Really, it makes about as much sense to use debaters’ words against them later on in life as it does to deem an actor a ‘murderer’ because he once played Macbeth.”
For the crop of 2016 candidates who have officially launched their campaigns, including Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida., Rand Paul of Kentucky and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, as well as those who have yet to announce, the media focus on candidates’ ancient history shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Presidential elections have long featured coverage of the candidates’ respective histories, as the 2012 election showed in particular.
Even before former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney had won the Republican Party’s nomination, a handful of primary candidates found themselves the focus of front-page headlines reporting on decades-old stories.
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, for example, was involved in a 2011 media frenzy after reporters were tipped off that a rock at a ranch where he and his family used to hunt in the 1980s once bore a racial slur.
A person connected to the property turned the rock over around the time Perry started bringing lawmakers to the camp for hunting parties, but that didn’t stop the Washington Post, Gawker, the Huffington Post, Forbes and the New York Daily News from treating the offending rock as a game-changing primary scandal.
Meanwhile, irate House Speaker Newt Gingrich found himself during the primaries responding to allegations put forward by Marianne Gingrich, his ex-wife from a marriage that ended in 2000.
Echoing allegations made in a 2010 interview, Marianne Gingrich accused the Republican presidential hopeful of asking her for an “open marriage” in 1999 after he admitted that he was having an affair with his now-wife Callista Bisek.
Though Marianne Gingrich’s claim during the primary was a retread of something she had said in 2010, political journalists incapable of passing up on salacious bits of gossip rushed to report on the former House Speaker’s supposed request to his ex-wife.
And then there was Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
For Romney, the press couldn’t get enough of stories reaching back decades.
The New York Times’ seemingly obsessed Gail Collins reported at length on a story that involved the Romneys’ putting their sick dog, Seamus, in a carrier atop their station wagon for an extended road trip.
Collins’ seeming fascination with a story dating back to 1983 was echoed by the likes of Gawker, MSNBC and the Boston Globe.
The Washington Post, for its part, reported that Romney was involved in a prank in 1965 wherein he and his friends forcibly cut another student’s hair because they said it was too long.
The high school haircut story easily found traction in newsrooms as groups including the Times, the Atlantic, New York magazine, the Nation, Slate and the New York Daily News all reported the tale of Romney’s supposed cruelty.
As the number of 2016 presidential candidates is expected to grow later this year, so, too, is the number of stories involving their past lives as teens, students and young lawmakers.
