And just fir giggles...name me one time before that the RNC has demanded it's entire staff kiss the ring of one candidate or hit the streets.
I can't recall this happening before.
I doubt they ever would have mentioned it publicly if they had, it pretty much goes with the territory of political campaigns. They certainly had plenty of snakes on the plane in both the McCain and Romney campaigns, I think you could look at this as an application of a 'Lesson learned.'
Also just for giggles, I'll share my analysis of where the Cruz campaign went off the rails:
His first big mistake was that 'New York values' thing, he is a very smart guy who NORMALLY thinks very well on his feet, but he let his mouth run away with him that one time when he should have said something more like 'Ivy League Liberal values.' It caught up with him and turned the momentum against him when NY came up in the batting order, though of course Trump was Huuuuuge there anyway because, well, NEW YORK. And I do regard it as a travesty that tiny electoral states and states that never go Red anyway decide the outcome of the GOP primary, but I don't see any way to fix that given the stakeholders and the level to which every one of them is invested in it.
Big mistake number two was the quasi-deal with Kasich. It wouldn't have smelled bad at all if the deal had been for Kasich to get out and pledge his delegates to Cruz, but the way they actually went about it made it look like they were trying to be too cool for school and have it both ways, in a year when that doesn't play well with the electorate, who clearly aren't valuing clever political maneuvers.
The third big mistake (Though it was running before and after the second) was the behind-the-scenes maneuvering to line up delegates already pledged to Trump, in states where Trump had beaten him, with an eye to the second ballot in a contested convention. This got to the point that it no longer looked like he was just picking off some marginal ones here and there, but created the appearance (In the eyes of the outraged and highly-vocal Trump voters in states Trump had carried) of subverting the will of the electorate. While in reality Cruz and his agents did nothing illegal under the rules, again, in a year when Populist disaffection with political insiders has been decisive, it made him look like a rule-weasel-sneaky-lawyer rather than the outsider they were looking for, and poisoned the well in important primaries that were still to run. If he'd kept a lid on his organization until the primaries had closed out, it may not have lined up as many, but it wouldn't have fired the anger of anyone yet to vote. His much-touted superb ground organization got 'way too far ahead of the power curve.
Those are my thoughts on it, I'm sure everyone has their own ideas on the whole thing, of course.
