RUTHFULLY YOURS

If Hillary Clinton loses in November, two reasons will be Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson and Green-party nominee Jill Stein. Almost every national polls shows Hillary doing worse when the two third-party candidates are added to the mix. Even Johnson, perhaps because he is emphasizing his “social tolerance” more than his “fiscal conservatism,” is hurting Hillary more than he’s harming Donald Trump.

Stein’s impact on the race is clear. Polls show the Massachusetts physician winning between 3 percent and 5 percent of the vote, with strong appeal to former Bernie Sanders voters and leftists of all stripes. On the ballot in 44 states this fall, she is this year’s Ralph Nader, who polled 2.7 percent nationwide as the Green party’s standard-bearer in 2000. It’s generally assumed he cost Al Gore the electoral votes of Florida — and thus the election.

The impact of Gary Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, is more nuanced. Traditionally, people voting Libertarian are dismissed as “Republicans who like to have fun,” i.e., as right-wingers with liberal social views. But Johnson’s appeal is much broader than the million or so people who usually vote Libertarian in presidential contests. Nationally, Johnson polls between 5 percent (in a YouGov poll) and 13 percent (Quinnipiac) of the vote, scoring particularly well in Western states and among young people. He will appear on the ballot in all 50 states.

In the New York Times/CBS News poll released Thursday this week, Trump and Clinton are tied at 42 percent each among likely voters. Johnson captures 8 percent of the vote and Stein 4 percent. But among voters younger than 30, Clinton has 48 percent, Trump 29 percent, and 21 percent plan to vote for Johnson or Stein or not vote at all. That level of non-support for the Democratic candidate among young people is a warning signal for Clinton. By comparison, Barack Obama won 60 percent of their votes in 2012.

Some polls show Johnson doing far better with young voters than he does in the NYT/CBS poll. A Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday showed that among Millennials, Hillary is winning 31 percent, 29 percent favor Johnson, 26 percent pick Trump, and 15 percent choose Stein.

Clinton’s problem with young voters is that while few of them can remember the relative prosperity of Bill Clinton’s presidency, many of them associate her with a corrupt, dysfunctional political system. Stanley Greenberg, a pollster who worked for Bill Clinton, told the Los Angeles Times this summer, “They think she’s a typical politician . . . aligned with the elites . . . aligned with the big money and Wall Street.”

I don’t want to identify with anything Pat Buchanan does or says or thinks…he is a nasty anti-Semite and the worst of old guard conservatives…. Read Andy McCarthy, Victor Davis Hanson, and Bruce Thornton for the cream of the crop of those who choose Trump for the right reasons…..rsk
A few days ago David Limbaugh, a widely-syndicated Republican commentator (and Rush’s less fiery younger brother) posted a commentary intended to deescalate the tensions between Trump’s supporters and the “never-Trumpers.” Limbaugh defines himself as a “reluctant Trumper,” who decided to support the Donald as the lesser of two evils after his preferred candidate Ted Cruz stumbled in the primaries. Limbaugh does not hide his dislike for Trump’s free-wheeling rhetoric and believes that the GOP nominee’s critics on the right may be fully justified in doubting his “genuine commitment to conservative policies.”

Despite these doubts, Limbaugh endorses Trump for reasons that one also hears from Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Larry Elder, and yours truly. Trump has “many incentives to implement our [conservative] policies,” while Hillary Clinton has absolutely none. He is also, not incidentally, bestowing on the Republican Party a large working class constituency; and even among racial minorities, he is doing at least as well, and in the case of prospective black voters, better than his GOP centrist predecessors, Mitt Romney and John McCain. Moreover, it is hard not to see Trump’s focusing on the problems of illegals and sanctuary cities as anything other than a “conservative” issue. That remains the case even if most of his primary competitors and certainly the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal might wish those issues had never been brought into the primaries.

Although Limbaugh dutifully provides the reasons that someone claiming to be on the right should vote for Trump, he still can’t resist extolling the never-Trumpers. (Although they’re not my buddies, they may be his.) These supposedly principled conservatives deeply believe that “the best chance of saving the nation in the long run is to avoid elevating Trump to president and leader of the party because he could forever destroy conservatism and the Republican brand.” Although Limbaugh concedes that some establishment Republicans may be found among these noble idealists, most of the never-Trumpers “shared our frustration” about where the party was headed in the hands of unprincipled operators. Limbaugh closes his remarks with this statement: “I respect the never-Trumpers and will not presume to judge them as abandoning the nation’s best interests.”

It is of course possible to be so principled that one refuses to settle for politicians who don’t entirely live up to one’s ideals. About ten years ago I addressed a club named for the great conservative Republican of an earlier era Robert A. Taft. During my interaction with members I found that some of them would only vote for a leader who patterned himself on the organization’s namesake. Although I continue to refer to myself as a “Taft Republican,” I thought some of the young people I spoke with held unrealistically high expectations.

But in the case of the never-Trumpers, I would never make this criticism. Here we are dealing mostly with GOP shills who four years ago were drooling on cue over Mitt Romney and who four years earlier were gilding the lily for John McCain. What exactly were the high “conservative” principles that these candidates of the never-Trumpers articulated that Trump has failed to express? Indeed Trump has raised social issues that Romney and McCain, who were hailed as “conservatives” refused to even touch on the campaign trail. Unlike them, he has promised to appoint “conservatives” to federal judgeships and to protect the religious liberty of devout Christians, who have been beaten from pillar to post by Obama and who are not likely to be treated any better under a Clinton presidency.

If the 2016 election is remembered for anything beyond its flawed candidates, it will be recalled as the year of the Democratic email dump. Or rather, the year that the voting public got an unvarnished view of the disturbing—nay, deplorable—inner workings of the highest echelons of the Democratic Party.

What makes the continuing flood of emails instructive is that nobody was ever meant to see these documents. Hillary Clinton set up a private server to shield her communications as secretary of state from the public. She gave top aide Huma Abedin an account on that server. She never envisioned that an FBI investigation and lawsuits would drag her conversations into the light.

The Democratic National Committee and Colin Powell (an honorary Democrat) likewise believed their correspondence secure. But both were successfully targeted by hackers, who released the latest round of enlightening emails this week.

These emails provide what the public always complains it doesn’t have: unfiltered evidence of what top politicians do and think. And what a picture they collectively paint of the party of the left. For years, Democrats have steadfastly portrayed Republicans as elitist fat cats who buy elections, as backroom bosses who rig the laws in their favor, as brass-knuckle lobbyists and operators who get special access. It turns out that this is the precise description of the Democratic Party. They know of what they speak.

The latest hack of the DNC—courtesy of WikiLeaks via Guccifer 2.0—shows that Mrs. Clinton wasn’t alone in steering favors to big donors. Among the documents leaked is one that lists the party’s largest fundraisers/donors as of 2008. Of the top 57 cash cows 18 ended up with ambassadorships. The largest fundraiser listed, Matthew Barzun, who drummed up $3.5 million for Mr. Obama’s first campaign, was named ambassador to Sweden and then ambassador to the United Kingdom. The second-largest, Julius Genachowski, was named the head of the Federal Communications Commission. The third largest, Frank Sanchez, was named undersecretary of commerce. CONTINUE AT SITE

The question came up this week at a political panel: Why don’t people like Hillary Clinton?

Why do they always believe the worst? Why, when some supposed scandal breaks and someone says she’s hiding something, do people, including many of her supporters, assume it’s true?

The answer is that Mrs. Clinton has been in America’s national life for a quarter-century, and in that time people watched, observed and got an impression of her character.

If you give the prompt “Clinton scandal” to someone under 30, they might say “emails,” or Benghazi” or “Clinton Foundation,” or now “health questions.” But for those who are older, whose memories encompass the Clinton era, the scandals stretch back further, all the way to her beginnings as a national figure.

Seventeen years ago, when word first came that Mrs. Clinton might come to New York, a state where she’d never lived, and seek its open U.S. Senate seat, I wrote a book called “The Case Against Hillary Clinton.” It asserted that she would win and use the Senate to run for president, likely in 2008. That, I argued, was a bad thing. In the previous eight years she’d done little to elevate our politics and much to lower it. So I laid out the case as best I could, starting with the first significant scandal of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

It is worth revisiting to make a point about why her poll numbers on trustworthiness are so bad.

It was early 1993. The Clintons had just entered the White House after a solid win that broke the Republicans’ 12-year hold. He was a young and dashing New Democrat. She too was something new, a professional woman with modern attitudes and pronounced policy interests. They had captured the national imagination and were in a strong position.

Then she—not he—messed it up. It was the first big case in which she showed poor judgment, a cool willingness to mislead, and a level of political aggression that gave even those around her pause. It was after this mess that her critics said she’d revealed the soul of an East German border guard.

The Clinton White House was internally a dramatic one, as George Stephanopoulos later recounted in “All Too Human,” his sharply observed, and in retrospect somewhat harrowing, memoir of his time as Mr. Clinton’s communications director and senior adviser. He reported staffers and officials yelling, crying, shouting swear words and verbally threatening each other. It was a real hothouse. There was a sense the gargoyles had taken over the cathedral. But that wouldn’t become apparent until later. CONTINUE AT SITE

Donald Trump’s economic program has gone through several revisions and now deserves a citation at Trump University for “most improved.” The candidate’s New York Economic Club speech on Thursday, which included new tax reform details, was an encouraging if sometimes contradictory performance.

Mr. Trump’s rhetoric is often grim, but in New York maybe for the first time he talked more about solutions than problems. He even mentioned unrealized human potential. “We reject the pessimism that says our standard of living can no longer rise, and that all that’s left to do is divide up and redistribute our shrinking resources,” he said.

Mr. Trump identified economic growth as the most important domestic priority and set a “national goal” of reaching 4% from the 1%-2% trend of the Obama economy. That’s ambitious, but 2% isn’t some immutable ceiling and better policy could lift GDP. Jeb Bush also took a 4% pledge, and such commitments are important in setting a direction for governance.
Growth can seem abstract, but it’s a general proxy for the standard of living. At 1%, the real economy will take about 70 years to double in size. At 2%, it’s about 35 years and at 3% only about 25. The question is whether Americans will benefit from the gains of this doubling of national wealth in their prime working years, or never. No major problem—from flat incomes to budget deficits to poverty—can be solved without faster growth.

Mr. Trump’s plan to overhaul a tax code that hasn’t been updated in 30 years would help. He’d collapse the individual income tax brackets from seven to three, with rates of 12%, 25% and 33%. To help make the fiscal math work, he introduced a new cap on deductions of $100,000 for single filers and $200,000 for couples. A cap is shrewd politics because it means not going to war with every pressure group in Washington that lives off loopholes. CONTINUE AT SITE

On September 10, 2016 Fox News reported, “Clinton: Half Of Trump Supporters ‘Basket Of Deplorables’ — ‘Racist, Sexist…You Name It.’”

This is the same Hillary Clinton whose campaign slogan, “Stronger Together” clearly does not include Americans who support Donald Trump and the effective enforcement of our immigration laws.

My recent article, “Balkanized America: Politicians, pollsters, and pundits are all responsible for the nation’s division” addressed the way that Americans are being turned against each other by flawed polls and the disgusting notion that voters’ desires are determined by their race, religion or ethnicity.

This is the parallel universe of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and their immigration anarchist cohorts wherein “Latino voters” supposedly oppose border security and effective immigration law enforcement.

To suggest that the conduct, goals and aspirations of Americans can be predicted solely by their race is, by definition, a blatant example of racism. This constitutes a vile form of profiling that would never be and should never be tolerated if done by law enforcement officers.

Furthermore, Hillary labels anyone who wants our borders secured and immigration laws enforced as xenophobic and racist, blithely ignoring the irrefutable fact that our immigration laws are utterly and completely blind as to race, religion and ethnicity.

America’s immigration laws were enacted to protect public health, national security, public safety and the jobs of American workers.

While Clinton brands as “racists’ those understand the truth, that our nation’s borders and immigration laws are our first line and last line of defense against international terrorists and transnational criminals and who therefore want our borders secured and our immigration laws enforced, in reality, she is actually the racist.

Furthermore, Americans who want our immigration laws enforced are not “Anti-Immigrant” as Hillary would have Americans believe, but are simply “Pro-Enforcement.” To be pro-enforcement is to be “Pro-immigrant.” Under our immigration laws, annually, the United States admits roughly one million lawful immigrants. The number of new immigrants the United States admits each year is greater than the number of new immigrants admitted by all of the other countries of the world combined.

The Clinton Foundation is a national and international scandal. It’s under investigation by the FBI, but not by the Attorney General of New York, who is instead targeting the Trump Foundation.

The media has spent weeks suggesting the existence of an inappropriate political relationship between Trump and Florida AG Pam Bondi. And yet it’s cheering the wildly inappropriate relationship which has resulted in a member of Hillary’s leadership council investigating her political opponent.

Some months ago, the spokesman for Attorney General Eric Schneiderman had defended the trip he made to Miami Beach using donor money because he was fundraising for Hillary Clinton.

“This year, the Attorney General is doing everything possible to make sure Hillary Clinton is elected our next President.”

No one can argue with that as he abuses his office to launch his second legal attack on Trump.

Attorney General Schneiderman had previously made headlines for joining a group named “AGs United for Clean Power” to harass companies that questioned Global Warming. Some might have thought that blatantly identifying with one industry while harassing another would mean that Eric had hit peak conflict of interest. But then he opened an investigation into a rival political campaign.

“My interest in this issue really is in my capacity as regulator of nonprofits in New York State,” he insisted. “I didn’t make a big deal out of it or hold a press conference.”

The place he wasn’t making a big deal out of it was on CNN.

Schneiderman has no problem with the Clinton Foundation violating state regulations. But then again why would he? He endorsed the woman behind it and serves on her leadership council.

Bill Clinton had not only endorsed Schneiderman, but households across the state were irritated to hear a recording of him on their answering machines urging them to join him in voting for Eric. In June, Schneiderman was in Miami for an event benefiting the “Hillary Victory Fund.”

And he is still doing what he can for Hillary’s victory.