The GOP’s Security Divide Rubio vs. Cruz revealed gulfs on policy and political character.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-gops-security-divide-1450275444
The Republican presidential candidates auditioned to be Commander in Chief on Tuesday in the first debate since the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. The differences with President Obama were less instructive than the GOP fault lines that emerged on antiterror surveillance, the war on Islamic State and the Middle East.
Perhaps the most revealing exchange came on the powers of the National Security Agency, where Senator Marco Rubio and Ohio Governor John Kasich in particular squared off against Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Messrs. Paul and Cruz were among the few Senate Republicans to vote for the USA Freedom Act this summer that barred the bulk collection of telephone records.
Mr. Rubio has been hitting Mr. Cruz’s vote on the campaign trail, and he rightly pointed out that “now the intelligence agency is not able to quickly gather records and look at them to see who these terrorists are calling. And the terrorist that attacked us in San Bernardino was an American citizen, born and raised in this country. And I bet you we wish we would have had access to five years of his records so we could see who he was working with.”
As federal Judge William Pauley put it two years ago in his opinion upholding the legality of metadata collection, the point is to “detect relationships so attenuated and ephemeral they would otherwise escape notice” to prevent attacks. “This blunt tool only works because it collects everything,” he added. “Without all the data points, the Government cannot be certain it has connected the pertinent ones.”
Our guess is that Mr. Cruz realizes that the vote he cast to appeal to Mr. Paul’s supporters has now become politically treacherous. So he is trying to limit the damage by making his previous calculation sound like hawkish principle. This slipperiness has become part of his political method, and it is a character issue for a potential Commander in Chief as much as it is a substantive one.
Chris Christie was also given a chance to elbow into the metadata scrum, and he has said he agrees with Mr. Rubio on the merits. But the New Jersey Governor ignored the substance and instead played to his biography by dismissing Messrs. Rubio and Cruz as squabbling legislators who never have to make a decision. Mr. Christie is trying to display his alpha leadership qualities, but listeners could have benefitted from his judgment on so basic an antiterror issue.
A second policy dispute Tuesday was on U.S. intervention abroad, especially in the Middle East. Donald Trump, and Messrs. Cruz and Paul, tried to make a virtue of restraint and criticized President George W. Bush. They focused on immigration control and, in the case of Messrs. Trump and Cruz, on defeating Islamic State by bombing. The latter is President Obama’s policy with tougher rhetoric.
The other candidates, including most forcefully Jeb Bush and Mr. Rubio, stressed the additional need to form coalitions with Sunni Arabs and drive Islamic State out of Iraq and Syria. Mr. Christie put the point well when he defended a no-fly-zone in Syria that would protect the refugees who are fleeing for Europe—and America.
The bomb-them-and-come-home line is the easier political case, since it offers to punish the enemy at little cost—also like Mr. Obama. But the problem is that even “carpet-bombing,” in Mr. Cruz’s Curtis LeMay-ish phrase, won’t be enough to remove Islamic State from its territory, much less defeat it. We need Sunni Arab allies on the ground, and those won’t arrive in enough numbers without a greater U.S. commitment to the fight. The interventionists are more honest, as a President Trump or Cruz would discover on his first day in office.
Speaking of alpha candidates, front-runner Donald Trump seemed almost to have taken a chill pill. He spoke more calmly and slowly than usual, only blowing up once under persistent needling from Mr. Bush.
Mr. Trump stuck to his trademark buzzwords of “strength” and winning and how people “respect” his candor. He still shows little knowledge about policy, and he seemed clueless about the nuclear “triad.” But by now it’s clear that for his core supporters the candidate’s persona trumps what he doesn’t know.
Mr. Bush also deserves credit for taking on Mr. Trump in the debate as he had on the stump; Messrs. Rubio and Cruz ducked that fight. Mr. Bush hit Mr. Trump as “the chaos candidate” for his broadside against all Muslim immigrants and other insults. Mr. Trump responded by dismissing Mr. Bush as a desperate candidate trailing in the polls and said “we’re not talking about religion. We’re talking about security.” But U.S. security against jihad requires Muslim allies.
With some six weeks left before the first voting in Iowa, the debate was useful in revealing GOP differences on policy, knowledge and above all political character.
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