·The GOP establishment will probably learn to love Ted Cruz, a man every Republican in Washington currently hates, when and if they determine that they have no other options. (Marco Rubio isn’t just stagnant, but actually falling in recent national polls.) But they’ll fight him until they are absolutely sure they’re stuck with him. The opposition research has been coming at a furious pace. And so far, it’s a huge whiff.

Here’s the big “secret Ted Cruz tape” story from Politico’s Mike Allen this week. Cruz, speaking “behind closed doors” at an expensive Manhattan fundraiser this month, said that he would not prioritize opposition to gay marriage in his campaign:

During the question period, one of the donors told Cruz that gay marriage was one of the few issues on which the two disagreed. Then the donor asked: “So would you say it’s like a top-three priority for you — fighting gay marriage?”

“No,” Cruz replied. “I would say defending the Constitution is a top priority. And that cuts across the whole spectrum — whether it’s defending [the] First Amendment, defending religious liberty.”

Soothing the attendee without contradicting what he has said elsewhere, Cruz added: “People of New York may well resolve the marriage question differently than the people of Florida or Texas or Ohio. ... That’s why we have 50 states — to allow a diversity of views. And so that is a core commitment.”

This is slightly inconsistent with what Cruz has said publicly, to his own supporters and to national audiences. As Allen notes, Cruz has promised that opposition to same-sex marriage would be “front and center” in his campaign. But nothing in his answer in New York actually contradicts Cruz’s official positions, and “defending the Constitution” and “defending religious liberty” both pretty clearly signal his intention to allow states to ignore the Supreme Court ruling that made same-sex marriage the law of the land.

This is the best Allen, channeling his sources, can do at finding the “gotcha”: “The claim about Cruz by rival campaigns isn’t so much that he changes his message to different audiences, but that the prioritization of his agenda changes.”

That’s not a very damning claim! Maybe make the other claim, the one that actually sounds more like a bad thing, if you want to hurt the Cruz campaign.

(Also, sidenote: Don’t send your damning Republican oppo to Mike Allen of all people. Do you think likely GOP primary voters read Playbook? Send it to the Free Beacon or the Daily Caller!)

This attempted attack, much like the one Rubio launched on Cruz’s immigration record, demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of what activist conservatives see in Cruz. The fact that he’s a bamboozler is part of his appeal. His supporters just think he’s bamboozling the right people—that is, he’s using his slick-talking Ivy League debater skills to placate the elite, not the grassroots.

Rubio, as you may recall, attempted to paint Cruz as soft-on-immigration because Cruz, in the middle of the 2013 immigration reform fight, introduced an amendment that would kill a “path to citizenship” but allow a path to legal residency. Cruz did this for a reason that was pretty obvious at the time: to divide supporters of the reform bill and make it less likely that anything would pass. Rubio, hoping that rationale was too convoluted for a national audience, just said that it proved that Cruz once supported legalization of undocumented immigrants.

To a low-information voter, maybe that sounded convincing. More likely, it all sounded like an obscure fight over a dead bill that neither candidate (now) supports. But, as Dave Weigel noted in a very helpful piece on how this fight played among activist conservatives, for a high-information voter—whose information only comes from the conservative media—this was a fight that was covered in great detail at the time, and it’s a history that Rubio can’t rewrite: Rubio supported amnesty, and Ted Cruz pretended to support it in order to kill the bill. Maybe that’s slippery Washington politician behavior, but no grassroots conservative has a principled opposition to playing the game to further the conservative cause. Rush Limbaugh was raving about the brilliance of Cruz’s strategy at the time. And Cruz won: The bill died and Rubio himself abandoned it.

Is this really the best the mainstream GOP can do? You’re never going to beat Ted Cruz by convincing conservatives that he’s not one of them. He’s always going to be clearly much more “one of them” than the non-Huckabee alternatives. Your best hope is an electability argument, and that’s simply one that conservatives are very sick of hearing.

Photo via AP