With the contest for the party’s nomination moving into South Carolina and the stakes rising, it is possible the most disparaging discourse of the Nov. 8 election campaign is yet to come.
The epithets may be characteristic of schoolyard bullies, but there is some evidence that candidates are reveling in the attention they draw. The harshest attacks elicit the biggest responses at rallies, on the Internet and on cable TV.
Trump, the billionaire former reality TV star, sent a New Hampshire rally into a frenzy on Monday when he repeated the term “pussy” shouted by a person in the crowd, effectively questioning Cruz’s manliness. Trump went on to win the state’s primary the next day, ahead of the third-place Cruz by a 3-to-1 margin.
“It’s one of the reasons I won. You have to be yourself,” Trump said in a television interview on NBC’s On Saturday show. Trump later promised to clean up his foul language and to be more presidential.
History suggests the language could turn even more coarse in the run-up to next Saturday’s Republican nominating contest in South Carolina. It was there that U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona was accused in 2000 of fathering an illegitimate African-American child, and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in 2008 of supporting polygamy.
“These adults are acting like elementary children,” Leslie McRobbie, a former fifth-grade schoolteacher from New Hampshire, said of this year’s Republican contenders.
President Barack Obama, a Democrat, this week spoke of the snark that characterized a Republican race of the past when he recalled that Ronald Reagan was described by rivals as an “unshapely man” and a “yahoo” before his election as president in 1980.
Coming off the first nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, the seven remaining candidates for the Republican nomination are under pressure either to break away from the crowd or prevent others from doing so.