RUSH: Mark Steyn sat in for Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel last night, had Ted Cruz on, and they had this little back and forth going on.

STEYN: Since you mentioned Rush, Rush a couple of days ago on his radio show said basically, after the budget deal, what is the Republican Party for? Every other senator running for president — Bernie Sanders, Rand Paul, Lindsey Graham, you — managed to vote on this budget deal. Marco Rubio didn’t. What’s with the absence?

CRUZ: Well, listen, I’ll let Marco defend his own voting record. What I’ve tried to do is every day honor the promise that I made to the men and women who elected me. So that has been — you look at this omnibus deal, this was a betrayal. It was disgraceful.

RUSH: Oh, cool. Well, hey, let’s open those up. I mean, you’re just making more work for me if you just leave those there in the boxes. Well, the five FedEx things just showed up and they brought ’em in here and they left ’em in the boxes. Here, hang on a minute. Take this. Here, it’s a box cutter, bammo, there it is. Oops. Good catch.

Okay. I have been thinking about the campaign Rubio is running. (interruption) What are you laughing at? I was not being disrespectful. I don’t have time here to play nice. I’m in the middle of a radio program and somebody says, “Here are the boxes.” Well, big whoop, a lot of good that does me, they’re not opened. I have to have the box cutter for somebody else to use, exactly.

Anyway, the Rubio campaign — you know, people are talking about the fact he missed the vote, that he’s not on the ground in a lot of these places, that he’s not showing up, he’s not doing the usual retail political campaign, and yet he’s doing okay. And the theory is that it’s a new day, it’s a new era, what with online expanding, that the need to press the flesh is not nearly what it used to be with all the YouTube videos and everything else that you can do. But, essentially, what they have concluded, some of these analysts have concluded, what Rubio is actually doing is running a national campaign already rather than a series of primary campaigns.

And I stopped, you know what, I can see that. That makes some sense, and that it’s an active strategy. They’re trying to say Rubio is not serious, he’s lazy, and others, no, no, no, it’s not that, this is a new kind of campaign he’s running. And missing the vote, so forth, ’cause of the way it was gonna go, it was gonna go.