Ballot Boxing: The South Carolina primary and the GOP's uncivil war

Welcome to Ballot Boxing, WORLD’s political roundup of news and views from the presidential campaign trail.

GREENVILLE, S.C.—Here in one of the most conservative corners of Upstate South Carolina, a woman rose from her seat at a Republican women’s luncheon on Thursday afternoon to ask Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a question.

Instead, she bared her soul.

“I’m so stressed out about this election I can barely hold myself together,” she confessed into a live microphone. “With [Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia’s death, I can see what’s coming.”

After an anxious pause, she blurted out: “I don’t know. … I guess I don’t actually have a question.”

But the confession posed its own query: What will happen in an unwieldy presidential showdown already resembling a modern-day version of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly?

The results of South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary on Saturday may offer a glimpse of the trail ahead. But over the last week, the ugly and the bad were easy to spot in the GOP race.

A combustible debate last Saturday night featured billionaire businessman Donald Trump turning beet red and blaming former President George W. Bush for the 9/11 attacks. He also accused the former president of lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and said abortion giant Planned Parenthood does some “wonderful things,” just not on abortion.

Trump’s angry and overheated display during the debate may have blunted his swagger: An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll this week showed Cruz overtaking Trump for the first time in a national poll. Other polls show Trump with a still-commanding lead, particularly in South Carolina, but the new survey suggests Trump’s appeal may be hitting a ceiling, or at least a roadblock.

Even Pope Francis took aim at Trump this week, saying a person “who thinks only of building walls” is “not Christian.” But the pope’s criticism missed an opportunity to point out Trump’s central spiritual problem: It’s not his immigration policy, but his profession that he’s a Christian who has never asked God for forgiveness.

Meanwhile, other GOP candidates were hitting each other.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., accused Cruz of lying about a slate of issues, and Cruz called the accusations “knowingly false.” A slew of press releases from the Rubio campaign this week featured lists of Cruz’s purported “lies,” and offered a guide to lies Cruz might tell in a speech he hadn’t given yet.

Meanwhile, Cruz faced pushback for some of his own campaign tactics. After Cruz suggested Rubio didn’t fight Planned Parenthood hard enough, National Right to Life came to Rubio’s defense.

When the Rubio campaign called out the Cruz camp for releasing an ad with an obviously photoshopped picture of Rubio shaking hands with President Barack Obama, the Cruz campaign downplayed the photo and said Rubio’s campaign used photoshopped images too.

In a huddle with reporters, frustrated Rubio spokesman Todd Harris talked about the ad: “The fact is, I don’t even know what the fact is, that’s the point I want to make.”

That’s the point some voters may want to make as well.

As I watched the Wild West–style debate last Saturday night with friends, one asked, “How can anybody know what’s true?”

Hopefully, honest journalists can help, but political candidates can help too. In the case of Rubio and Cruz, it’s especially important for the two candidates most vocal about their Christian beliefs to take care in promoting the truth about themselves and others.

Sometimes that does mean pointing out false statements or responding to untrue accusations, and it doesn’t preclude pointing out substantial differences between candidates. But it also means acknowledging the complexity of some issues and not boiling down an opponent’s multi-layered position to a single campaign zinger.

That applies to all the candidates in both parties. (Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are in a tight battle for delegates in Saturday’s Democratic caucus in Nevada.)

A helpful guide for Christians on robust truth-telling comes from the Westminster Larger Catechism’s teaching on the ninth commandment (“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor”).

The catechism offers a sweeping list of what the commandment forbids, including “speaking the truth unseasonably, or maliciously to a wrong end, or perverting it to a wrong meaning … rash, harsh, and partial censuring, misconstruing intentions, words, and actions. …”

For all of us: Guilty as charged.

Indeed, every person falls short of this standard and needs God’s mercy and help to speak the truth. Political candidates publicly speaking to national audiences every day especially need this help.

Thankfully, both Rubio and Cruz seemed to tamp down some of the contention during separate speeches in Greenville on Thursday. Rubio said he wouldn’t ask one set of Americans to be angry with another group of Americans. Cruz said he liked the other Republican candidates, adding, “We are blessed to have some good and honorable people.”

Hopefully some of that charity will return to the debate stage, even in the midst of an intense primary battle that will eventually require the Republican Party to send a candidate to the general election in the fall.

For the rest of us—journalists, WORLD members, citizens—the daunting task of choosing the right words in a confusing season leads us back to the only perfect truth teller in Proverbs 30: “Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in Him.”