RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/marc-molinaro-underdog-candidate-for-new-york-governor/Is Marc Molinaro an underdog? Or a sacrificial lamb?

Governor Andrew Cuomo has called him a “Trump mini-me” — “anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ.”

Marc Molinaro, the Dutchess County executive and Republican candidate for governor of New York, takes this in stride. When I ask him about it, he shrugs and quotes Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.”

Focusing on moral character and personal integrity seems important to Molinaro’s campaign, which is striving against considerable odds to win the governorship in a state that has not sent a Republican to the executive mansion since 2002. But if any Republican can achieve that goal, Molinaro says, he’s the man for the job. He was brought up on food stamps, he says, and had to grow up fast. When I suggest that such government support could have sent him in a Democratic direction, he replies that, on the contrary, it taught him the value of hard work and achievement, the refrains of the Republican playbook: that he needed to take the support he had been given and make something of it, and therefore of himself. Limited government, he says, can be helpful in overcoming poverty and societal hardship — but help is synergistic, and the individual then has to use what he was given to surmount the worst obstacles himself.

He considers himself a pragmatist, a middle-of-the-road Republican who can work with political rivals to, say, make sure the garbage gets picked up. He’s a social moderate — pro-gay-marriage (“I’ve evolved” since voting against it in 2011, he says — “like Barack Obama, like Hillary Clinton, like Andrew Cuomo”) and pro-choice, albeit with restrictions and not for late-term abortions (“there are certain lines I just can’t cross”). He adds that he can build the relationships necessary to work across the aisle, with Democrats including New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, and that he will listen to everyone who disagrees with him — from the left and from the right. He points to Cuomo’s June 2014 remarks that “extreme conservatives . . . have no place in New York” as proof that working across the aisle is something that the current governor simply cannot do.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/top-dem-contender-for-president-cant-name-a-single-accomplishment/

Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calf.) was asked by a radio host to name her top accomplishment since coming to the Senate and all she could come up with is that she sat on committees.

Harris has been prominently mentioned as a potential nominee for president from the Democratic Party.

Podcast host Aminatou Sow asked Harris, “We’re wondering, maybe, if you could talk about what at this point you consider your biggest win, or the thing that when you’re like ‘Wow, when I look back at those 18 months, this is the thing that I want top of the resume,'” Sow said.

Harris answered:

I’ll tell you. Umm. One of the things that I think, for me, is most important is the role that I serve on that various committees that I’m on — umm — which are oversight committees. Let’s be clear. Those committees exist to watch and question what is going on with our government, the United States government. So, I’m on Senate Intelligence, I’m on Homeland Security, I’m on Judiciary and the accomplishment then is for me is a function of what I think my role should be. Often, especially in the last 18 months, has been to try and get at the truth.

Wow. That’s some “top of the resume.”

From that same interview: “And so, the accomplishment is, and the goal is to always make sure that we are being, and the system is being, as transparent as possible, and that, frankly, that the American public has the answers and that we’re being told the truth,” she said. “And when that happens, I feel a sense of accomplishment and when it doesn’t happen, I feel a sense of frustration.”