RUTHFULLY YOURS

Many Americans are justifiably worried about how our country can be brought together after this most divisive of elections in years.

Those who think that Hillary Clinton can do it are living in dreamland. The continued WikiLeaks revelations—and they are probably just getting started—coupled with the ongoing investigations on many fronts, lies multiplying on decades of lies, Obama himself implicated, will wound Mrs. Clinton, her husband, and their putative foundation through her entire administration and weaken her both at home and abroad to such a degree that her ability to govern will barely exist. It will be tragic for our country and the world.

Everyone honest knows Trump is right in one regard—she is a crook, a crook who got away with it.

But Trump, if he wins, will create aftershocks reverberating way beyond his enemies on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and Beverly Hills. We may see riots, strikes and urban discontent unlike anything we have seen in many years.

In order to govern in this parlous situation, Trump has to break one of his campaign pledges immediately. He must pardon Hillary Clinton, not “lock her up”—or at the very least, don’t initiate new punitive actions against her—satisfying as that chant has been to his loyalists and much as she may deserve it.

Did President Obama mislead the public about what he knew about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server? That sounds possible based on the latest batch of WikiLeaks released Tuesday.

In March 2015 Mr. Obama said in an interview that he found out about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server “the same time everybody else learned it, through the news reports.” But we now know that answer alarmed Mrs. Clinton’s aide Cheryl Mills, who emailed adviser John Podesta the same day: “We need to clean this up—he has emails from her—they do not say state.gov.”

So the President emailed with his Secretary of State over an address that wasn’t on the official government network. Hmmm.

“The President did not suggest he hadn’t traded emails with her,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday in an attempt to explain the seeming contradiction. “Of course the President had possession of Secretary Clinton’s email address but he did not have any knowledge of where her server was located or what sort of arrangements had been made to store her email.”

We suppose a President wouldn’t pay close attention to the email addresses of his cabinet officers, though that lack of state.gov sure was a red flag. The fact that he said he didn’t know about the server may also have protected him from an FBI interview. In any case, the Cheryl Mills email is more evidence of the ethical messes that attend the Clinton entourage, as well as the perpetual need to “clean this up” without coming clean to the American people.

ObamaCare has suddenly been injected back into the 2016 election debate, on the news of the law’s 25%-plus average premium increase for 2017. Even Donald Trump is talking about it. With only two weeks to go, this is a moment for voters to hold accountable the Democrats who imposed this debacle on the country over voter objections.

Next year’s enormous price increases are merely the latest expression of ObamaCare’s underlying problems, and the dysfunction is undermining the health security of Americans who lack employer coverage. A wave of major insurers have quit the exchanges, and those that are left have raised deductibles and copays and restricted choices of doctors and hospitals. The public is witnessing—and the unlucky are experiencing—the collapse of one progressive promise after another.

At every stage of the ObamaCare saga, liberals said not to worry. Sure, the law was unpopular when Democrats rammed it through Congress on a partisan vote in 2009-10, but voters would learn to love it once the subsidies started rolling. That didn’t happen, and in 2014 President Obama tried to buck up Democrats by saying that “five years from now” people will look back on the law as “a monumental achievement.” Two years later it’s worse.

Nothing could shake the liberal faith in their supposed landmark: Not the Healthcare.gov website fiasco of 2013, or the millions of individual health plans that were cancelled despite President Obama’s promise about keeping them. The left kept the faith as the entitlement subtracted from economic growth, hurt incomes and killed jobs. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber called the critics stupid, and Mr. Obama denigrates anyone who disagrees with him as illegitimate or politically motivated.

Now reality is confirming what the critics predicted. ObamaCare’s regulatory mix—benefit mandates, requiring insurers to sell coverage to all comers, and narrow ratings bands that limit how much premiums can vary by health status—was tried by several states in the 1980s and ’90s. Every one saw the same results that are now unspooling nationally: high and rising costs, low and declining enrollment, and less insurer and provider competition.

The Affordable Care Act was supposed to solve these predictable disruptions with subsidies and a mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty. But most people don’t think ObamaCare plans provide value for the money, especially if they are non-subsidized. CONTINUE AT SITE

There was panic in Camp Clinton when President Obama falsely told the public he had not known about then-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s use of private e-mail until he heard about it “through news reports.”

In reality, Obama and Clinton exchanged at least 18 e-mails through Clinton’s private account and homebrew server system. And we now know, based on investigative reports released by the FBI, that Obama used a pseudonym in at least some of his e-mails with Clinton. Moreover, as I noted in a column ten days ago, top advisers to Obama and Clinton flagged the Obama–Clinton e-mails problem before Obama issued his false denial of knowledge.

Asked by Bill Plante of CBS News in a March 7, 2015, interview when he learned about Clinton’s private e-mail system, the president responded, “The same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

This assertion spun the Clinton campaign up, according to the latest WikiLeaks disclosure of e-mails hacked from the account of John Podesta. A longtime Clinton aide, Podesta was Obama’s top White House adviser until transitioning to the Clinton presidential campaign, which he chairs, in February 2016.

At 6:15 p.m. on March 7, Clinton campaign secretary Josh Scherwin e-mailed Jennifer Palmieri and several other Clinton campaign staffers, alerting them: “Jen, you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news.”

“It also remains a curious artifact of this election that many conservatives are outraged far more by Trump’s obnoxiousness, crudity, and rhetorical excesses than they are by Hillary’s concrete record of premeditated criminality and habitual prevarication — especially given the likelihood that on illegal immigration, defense spending, Obamacare, abortion, the debt, taxes, and regulation, Trump’s published agenda is the far more conservative. Apparently a vicious, insider liberal establishmentarian poses less threat to the republic that does a more conservative outsider fop.”

Donald Trump, in characteristically muddled and haphazard fashion, said he thought the election might end up “rigged” (if he lost). Therefore, he would not endorse the November 8 result if he found that fear confirmed — unless, of course, in Jacksonian fashion, he managed to win.

All hell broke loose, from both the Left and principled conservatives, that Trump’s allegations had somehow undermined the American electoral process itself.

Not likely.

Questioning the integrity of election votes was a national pastime in 1824 (“corrupt bargain”), 1876 (“compromise of 1877”), and again in 1960. Bitching over losing, of course, is not the same thing as armed insurrection in the fashion of 1860, when furor erupted over Lincoln’s election.

Any candidate, whether feeding conspiracies or out of genuine concern for electoral misconduct, can say whatever he or she wishes, without the deleterious national consequences that pundits decry. Bad sportsmanship and manners are not synonymous with constitutional subversion.

“Selected, not elected” was a Democratic talking point after the 2000 Bush victory. In a speech two years after that election, a now sanctimonious Hillary Clinton echoed those “selected” charges against the Bush presidency. But so what?

Every corner of the media is pouring cold water on what they view as the wreckage of the Trump campaign. It is so pervasive that one friend, an ardent Trump supporter, said he listens to nothing but his own thoughts.

The message is to move beyond Trump to building a mandate and a Democrat Congress for Hillary.

Oh, and you people who were crazy enough to listen to Trump and your own values and beliefs might as well forget about it and stay home. And those silly “Trump: Make America Great Again” signs? If they have not already been vandalized, you can put them with your Goldwater buttons and your Bibles.

There will be time after November for denial and disbelief, and then the final grief and eventual hardening to the reality of another unbearable president, should Trump not emerge victorious. But this is not that time.

One can quickly get lost in the weeds of poll samples, weightings, and methodologies, but that is best left to the professionals. The way things are is made obvious even to irredeemable clingers by a statistic contained in one recent poll that found Hillary up by twelve points but also contained the finding on page 24 that Obama voters outnumbered Romney voters in the sample by 46 to 32.

Fortunately, there is competition even among pollsters, and there remain three reputable national polls that consistently indicate a tight race nationally.

While the wizards of talk in their cloistered network studios harp endlessly about the coarse and vulgar Mr. Trump, who just can’t seem to act like a normal politician, there is much more still in play in this election.

The Las Vegas Review Journal, owned by major Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, came out this weekend in support of Trump for president, noting that voters “clamor for an alternative” to the corruption “dominating the capital” and that voter “discontent isn’t confined by ideology or political philosophy.”