But that we have to list all of these things proves the point: Cruz has a perception problem, for two reasons.

First, his opponents are more than willing to make a big deal out of these not-very-big issues because it serves their own political goals to do so. Trump plays them up because he wants people to think that maybe he won Iowa, which he didn't. Carson plays them up because he wants people to think that he's actually a good candidate, which he isn't.

It is, in my estimation, as dirty to berate Cruz for playing dirty as was anything that Cruz actually did.

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Why? That brings us to the second point: The repetition of the accusation that he's playing dirty by his opponents and their supporters and some in the media puts his campaign under much greater scrutiny than his opponents. Cruz is now seen as a dirty campaigner, so he has to meet a higher bar than Trump or Carson. Marco Rubio sent an email to voters in South Carolina telling them to look out for dirty tricks from Cruz -- a way of getting them to consider anything from Cruz skeptically. This is how politics works; campaigns try to frame one another as low-energy or a "chaos candidate" or whatever, and sometimes it sticks (as in the first example there). But this is what Cruz has been saddled with.

Over the weekend, that Cruz spokesman, Rick Tyler, posted a link on Facebook to a blog post showing a video of Rubio. In it, according to the captions in the original video (below), Rubio walks up to a Cruz staffer who is reading the Bible and says there are "not many answers" in the book.

Which wouldn't really make any sense for Rubio to say, for a number of reasons, including that he's a devout Catholic. His communications director, Alex Conant, posted the actual exchange on Twitter.

"All the answers in there" makes a lot more sense, obviously. Tyler, recognizing this, offered an apology to Rubio in a new Facebook post Sunday.

Too late for Tyler. Speaking to the press this afternoon, Cruz said that he'd asked for his staffer's resignation -- which may have been requested all of this other stuff notwithstanding. Tyler, who at that moment was supposed to appear on MSNBC, didn't.

Tyler was also integral to the campaign's defense of the "Carson is dropping out" push. Two strikes, and he was out. This is about all Cruz can do in the moment to rebut the "dirty politics" argument.

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But it won't be enough. Trump's already issued one of his signature Twitterstorms on the subject.

And so on. Rubio’s camp kept the heat on Cruz, too.

Trump's line about evangelicals, which Trump also used on Sunday, shows how it works. Paint a portrait of Cruz as unethical and use it to tell voters explicitly why they shouldn't back him. Why did Cruz underperform with evangelicals in South Carolina? We don't know, but Trump is happy to offer his own analysis.