Ted Cruz Revels in His Book Feud With NY Times

So Ted Cruz's book won't be listed among the New York Times' best sellers, even though it racked up about 12,000 sales in its first week. But if you think Cruz is angry, you've got it exactly backward, reports Politico. The feud is a sign that the "campaign gods are smiling down" on him, writes Dylan Byers. It's helping him among conservatives who loathe the paper as too liberal, and it's generating more attention for his book. If you missed the original controversy, the Times essentially accused the Cruz campaign of rigging the system by buying up books in bulk. But publisher HarperCollins disputes that, as does the campaign.

“The Times is presumably embarrassed by having their obvious partisan bias called out," says spokesman Rick Tyler. "But their response—alleging ‘strategic bulk purchases’—is a blatant falsehood." Tyler challenged the newspaper to present its evidence for the accusation. In a piece at the Washington Post headlined "Ted Cruz hits the jackpot: A book war with the New York Times," Philip Bump predicts an ironic conclusion to the tale: The book will eventually show up on the Times' list because all this attention will do wonders for authentic, no-doubt-about-it sales. "In which case Cruz gets the conservative cred of being blackballed by the Times and the PR bonus of being a Times bestseller. Win-win." (More Ted Cruz 2016 stories.)