The fur of Carson... Or is that Fury?

The fury of Ben Carson

The candidate and his flailing campaign look consumed with one thing: Making Ted Cruz pay for 'dirty tricks' in Iowa.

By Kyle Cheney

Five days from the New Hampshire primary, Ben Carson has yet to set foot in this state since his fourth-place finish in Iowa. His detour to Florida for a fresh set of clothes has become a running joke online. The candidate is, by all indications, consumed by what he calls the “dirty tricks” of Ted Cruz’s campaign.

“Dr. Carson feels absolutely robbed, violated," said Armstrong Williams, a Carson confidant, in a phone interview. "He realizes, the Democrats are not his enemies trying to malign him. It’s people who smile in his face, shake his hand, go out to dinner with him — and yet, they’re trying to destroy him behind his back.”

Carson was fading before Iowa, and an exit from the race after Monday’s caucuses was not a farfetched scenario. On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported he’s cutting staff and salaries to rein in exorbitant campaign spending. But the Cruz episode has given Carson renewed purpose, and he now looks determined to spend whatever time he has left in the campaign making the Texan pay.

Combined with Donald Trump’s loud and repeated claims that Cruz stole Iowa, Carson’s efforts could keep his flailing campaign relevant — if only by keeping the heat on Cruz.

Williams, who said he's spoken to Carson since the voting in Iowa, described him as more motivated than ever to call out the Texas senator. Carson has pointed to several messages disseminated by the Cruz campaign. They included a tweet by top surrogate Steve King and an email from Cruz Iowa staffer Spence Rogers that strongly suggested Carson would imminently drop out of the race, just as the caucuses were getting underway in Iowa, thus prompting potential Carson voters to back Cruz instead.

Cruz has apologized to Carson. But until Cruz fires the perpetrators — he has indicated that that would happen — he's as complicit as any of them, Carson said. The issue could emerge as a focal point of Saturday's presidential debate here.

Williams signaled that Carson is poised to bring it up, and Trump, the Republican poll leader in New Hampshire, has said the Iowa results should be invalidated. Marco Rubio, who's hoping New Hampshire helps him leapfrog Cruz in the primary standings, argued the episode proved Cruz would stop at nothing to become president.

“We are not going to sit by and allow Cruz to lie, manipulate and be unwilling to fire everybody and just issue an apology and in Kumbaya," Williams said. “This has been their tactic and we’ve said nothing. Here, there’s no turning back. Dr. Carson has never said anything unkind about Ted Cruz … for Cruz to do this to him is unacceptable.”

The intensifying squabble has overshadowed what already has been an unusual week for Carson, marked by questions about his absence from public campaign events since Monday's Iowa caucuses.

Though most of his rivals for the Republican nomination pivoted immediately from Iowa to New Hampshire, which holds its primary on Tuesday, Carson detoured to Florida for a day to regroup — a stop his team says was long planned.

He jetted to Washington on Wednesday, where he held an unusual news conference to stoke the coals of his fight with Cruz. Carson planned to attend Thursday morning's National Prayer Breakfast, the annual event that rocketed him to prominence in 2012, when he delivered a keynote address that skewered President Barack Obama's policies — with the president seated just a few feet away.

Though he'll arrive in New Hampshire Thursday night, his campaign lists no public events until Saturday morning, when he greets campaign volunteers ahead of that evening's debate.

"Bad idea to divert to FL even for a few hours if you're trying to convince people you're still in it to win it" said former Carson communications director Doug Watts, in an email.

Jason Osborne, a Carson campaign spokesman, said it's wrong to assume that Carson's light public schedule is a sign of a slowdown in activity. Instead, Osborne said Carson will be holding a handful of unannounced "off-the-record" events with voters and spending most of Friday preparing for the debate. These off-the-record events — or OTRs, as Osborn calls them — have been a staple of Carson's campaign activity since he began receiving Secret Service protection. By stopping in at shops and businesses to meet voters with little warning, he said, it precludes a massive sweep by Secret Service agents that can disrupt business.

“In the tradition of New Hampshire, people like to see their candidates, and with the Secret Service detail, a lot of complications come about" he said, noting that the campaign did "one or two OTRs every day" in Iowa as the caucus day neared. They held another one recently at a pool hall so Carson could get in a few games, a favored pastime that Osborne said he has rarely enjoyed on the trail.

"There’s literally no idle time," Osborne said.

Meanwhile, the dispute with Cruz continues to be an issue..

He's argued that his campaign simply reacted to a CNN report insinuating Carson was dropping out. The report did note that Carson was heading to Florida but didn't suggest Carson was leaving the race. But Cruz said he will not be "scapegoating staff members" for their role in the incident.

"I don't make it a practice to discipline people for passing on public news reports," Cruz said on the Mike Gallagher show Wednesday. "From the beginning, we resolved to run a high-road campaign with integrity, and Ben is someone who has enormous principle and character. He and his wife, Candy, have become friends, and I really admire and respect them both."

Cruz had other defenders, too. Erick Erickson, the prominent conservative writer, said the Carson campaign's stumbling attempts to explain why the candidate was going to Florida gave Cruz's team room to try to persuade voters to jump to their side.

"The Carson campaign was really slow to respond to the news, created the news themselves, and should be upset with their own team, not Ted Cruz’s team," Erickson wrote in a column titled "Suck it Up, Ben Carson."

Steve Deace, an Iowa radio host and Cruz supporter, posted a lengthy narrative of the controversy in an attempt to absolve Cruz and pin the controversy on misleading media stories.

But one prominent former member of Carson's orbit, ex-campaign manager Barry Bennett, said Cruz has handed Carson a bludgeon that could have repercussions in his attempt to win over Carson's voters, should the retired neurosurgeon eventually leave the campaign.

"I think Cruz gave Ben the victim card he needed," said Bennett, who has begun informally advising the Trump campaign. "I think Cruz deserves what he is getting. Any hope Cruz had of getting Ben’s voters is long gone. I think they would have come his way had he behaved."