RUTHFULLY YOURS

— Mike Pompeo represents Kansas’s Fourth Congressional District and serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Select Committee on Benghazi. He is a graduate of West Point and an Army veteran.

There is only one Republican presidential candidate that has a proven, courageous, and conservative record on national security: Marco Rubio. Contrast him with Senator Ted Cruz who says he is prepared to defend America, but repeatedly finds a way to vote against that very goal. When we need leadership, Cruz plays politics with America’s national security. Put another way: Cruz is pro-military when he passes a soldier in uniform, but he abandons that same soldier when he does not vote to raise active-duty pay or provide our warriors with the tools they need to accomplish their critical missions.

I am a West Point graduate and an Army veteran. In Congress, I represent South Central Kansas, home to McConnell Air Force Base. I am proud to serve on the House Intelligence Committee and every day I see the lifesaving work of our men and women in uniform. I serve with Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina on the Benghazi Committee and came to Congress alongside Trey and South Carolina senator Tim Scott. All three of us believe in Marco’s ability to keep our families safe and have endorsed him.

Bernie Sanders is a nice, avuncular character who seems to be harmless enough — a nostalgic throwback to another era — but his espousal of socialism, “democratic” though it may be, misleads an entire generation of American youth who have absolutely no idea of the economic or social ramifications of the senator’s ideology.

Lovable Bernie is essentially propagandizing a generation of gullible American young people who don’t have anything near the education or experience to understand what is happening to them. His task is made simpler because his Democratic Party opponent is demonstrably and obviously corrupt and in danger of prosecution. She has also been pushed so far to the left by Bernie’s success (and her own fears) that no serious questions about socialism are even asked.

Our educational system, which, even at the college level, rarely looks at socialism from a results-oriented perspective, exacerbates this situation. Yet those results sit just below our southern border in catastrophic form for all to see, though few, especially among the young, have the background or, frankly, even the interest, to look.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/more-essential-than-ever-gop-electability-1455572580

The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has raised the stakes of the presidential election. If there is a silver lining, it’s that maybe conservatives will finally sober up and stop indulging their self-destructive impulse to choose the “most conservative” candidate or the one with no internal censor (or compass). They may finally realize how important electability is—and take a fresh look at Marco Rubio.

After an uninspiring performance in New Hampshire, the Florida senator used the South Carolina debate on Saturday as a mulligan to dispel criticisms that he is too callow and glib. While discussing immigration and foreign threats, Mr. Rubio came across as confident and capable without sounding robotic.

At the end of the night, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump were the ones looking juvenile after they engaged in a playground game of “liar, liar.” Mr. Trump sounded as uninformed as usual, though his supporters may not care. He had no solution for out-of-control entitlement spending other than promising, as so many politicians have before him, to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. His harangue against trade deals and endorsement of an exit tax for companies that move abroad showed a shaky grasp of economics.

Unlike the front-runners, Mr. Rubio projected hope. Recalling the election of 1980, he noted that Americans “were scared about what kind of country their children were going to live in and inherit. And yet somehow Ronald Reagan was able to instill in our nation and in our people a sense of optimism. And he turned America around because of that vision and ultimately because of that leadership.”

Ronald Reagan aside, Mr. Rubio’s chiaroscuro contrasting the dark present with a bright future seems more to echo John F. Kennedy, who notably was also a youthful senator when he sought the Democratic nomination in 1960. In his acceptance speech at the convention, Kennedy said: “We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.” There are other similarities. As with JFK, some voters don’t take Mr. Rubio seriously because of his boyish good looks. A new Cruz ad mocks him as “just a pretty face.”

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If the GOP wants to win, it should learn how not to lose.

On the similarities between Canada’s Conservative party and the GOP, I have previously argued that the latter must not repeat the mistakes of the former if it wishes to succeed in November 2016. As I explained, the Conservatives lost the recent Canadian election at least in part because they failed to stick by their central principles, attempting to cater to the voting bloc of the opposition parties by soft-pedaling or even abandoning basic policy decisions or by camouflaging their fundamental ethos so as not, they calculated, to alienate the electorate. The result was predictably twofold: in manifesting as Liberal lite the party made no inroads among a skeptical population and simultaneously lost many of its long-standing supporters, in total dropping 67 of its previous 166 seats.

When a party begins to shed its own constituents by aping the agenda of its competitors or by failing to reframe its image, it has effectively sealed its fate. Greg Richards points out in a cogent article for American Thinker that “The ascendancy of liberalism in America is the cause of the silence of Republicans in Congress since they won the House in 2010. One would think that a solid majority in the electoral body closest to the people would provide a platform for advancing the Republican case. But no.” The Republican establishment is “unwilling to challenge the liberal world view, [which] controls the debate in the public space… Republicans have had neither the skill nor the intestinal fortitude — the courage — to operate outside the culturally dominant liberal paradigm.”

Hillary Clinton may yet win the Democratic nomination—if she is not indicted. After all, it is hard for a New England spread-the-wealth socialist like rival Bernie Sanders to appeal to working-class southern whites, minorities, or the wealthy Democratic establishment. It is still likely that the Democratic Party will find a way to aid an ailing and scandal-plagued Mrs. Clinton, rather than turn over its future to a 74-year-old scold, who for most of his voting life was not a Democrat and whose redistributionist agendas and Woodstock fables about the 1960s make Obama seem centrist in comparison.

All that said, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign rhetoric is coming up empty—largely because it is at odds with the way she has lived her life and conducted her various careers over the last two decades. Voters, even younger ones, are now sorely aware of those flagrant contradictions.

The so-called Republican war on women was successful Democratic demagoguery in 2008 and 2012. That paranoid mythmaking worked with urban, unmarried young women. They were terrified of old white-guy Republican bogeymen, who would make them pay for their birth control and take away abortion on demand, were indifferent to new expansive definitions of sexual harassment, and seemed hung up on what were seen as roadblocks—religion, marriage, and family—to a young, college-educated woman’s self-expression. Yet Hillary has now lost that long-enshrined wedge issue after only 24 hours of Donald Trump’s withering counter-fire—in stark contrast to past years of failed Republican counter-strategies.

Trump assumed that her problem was not just that Bill Clinton had been a recognized serial womanizer and cheat for over forty years, but involved far greater hypocrisies. First, it was hard to find any sexual liaison of Bill’s that ever had a good word to say about him. The consensual Monica Lewinsky variety all felt used and manipulated. The Juanita Broaddrick-Paula Jones-Kathleen Willey category alleged that they were victims of crude coercion or violent assault.

I feel like we’re back in the pre-Iowa period when no one could figure out whether Donald Trump skipping the Iowa debate would hurt him–by the normal rules, of course it would hurt him; by the Trump rules, it wouldn’t make a difference and maybe even help (by demonstrating strength).

By the normal rules, Trump embracing a blood libel about George W. Bush (he knew there were no WMD in Iraq), saying Planned Parenthood does great things, and often swinging wildly and angrily would hurt him a week out from a primary in Bush-friendly, hawkish, socially conservative South Carolina.

But we’ll see. Certainly Trump’s behavior reinforces the idea that he’s disruptor and not just another politician, and Republican voters might not mind so much that one of the candidates is outspokenly anti-Iraq war (even if he takes it too far). Trump continues to be able to interrupt everyone else with impunity and act the Big Man on stage, with no one really able or willing to assert themselves against him.

Jeb is trying the hardest. He continues to improve–he seems a bit more relaxed and authoritative every debate– and did better against Trump than ever before. But some of his strongest moments were defending his family and although that is honorable, I’m not sure how much that gets him. He has still not figured out how to clearly best Trump, even when he has the better of the argument.

Rubio was very good. A little sharper, a little more conversational. He probably got in more telling jabs against Trump in the Iraq debate than Bush did (although I doubt anyone cares much that Bush was enforcing U.N. resolutions). More importantly for Rubio’s purposes, he clashed with Cruz and showed he could throw punches in real time after the New Hampshire debate. If Rubio had hit back at Chris Christie this way, the trajectory of the race might look different.

Cruz had strong moments, of course, especially on Scalia and the Supreme Court. But it looked like he basically wanted to duck Trump again, which is kind of amazing given that he can’t win South Carolina without Trump getting taken down several notches. In the one exchange with Trump, Cruz seemed to shrink a bit, and it was awkward for him that both Trump and Rubio waved the bloody flag of Ben Carson in Iowa, more or less a non-scandal that is very useful to his opponents.

Kasich continues to get to narrow-cast for his audience.

“If strength of language without all the anger that Trump showed is the criterion, then Rubio won, with a close second to either Cruz or Bush.Bottom line: Rubio did what he had to do, so the laurels go to him.”

The main story for the night was anger and passion. Does this help or hurt the GOP’s prospects in November?

Everyone seemed nervous, including the main moderator. His voice quavered. But the moderators were not the story, so we can move past them.

Everyone talked about Scalia’s passing and how important this election is. Two branches of government are at stake.

With that appropriate opening, let’s take them in alphabetical order.

Bush

He criticized Trump as having a wrongheaded foreign policy. Russia should not be an ally, and Assad should not remain in power. Bush does not get his foreign policy from TV, which Trump does.

Bush told Trump to stop attacking Bush’s elderly mother. Trump leveled the charge that George W. did not keep America safe; look at 9/11, after all. Bush shot back that while Trump was building a reality TV show, his brother was building a security apparatus that kept us safe.

He brought up Trump’s “McCain is a loser” comment. Trump denied it, but unconvincingly, because everyone knows he said it.

He went after Trump on eminent domain. Trump pointed out that George W. used it to build a stadium. Jeb said he disagreed with his brother; eminent domain is okay for public reasons, but not for private business.

His line of the night: Reagan said to tear down this wall, while Trump tears down other people.

The list of 2016 also-rans makes for a grim chronicle. There were the vanity candidates — Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum (add, soon: Ben Carson) — for whom self-interest outweighed the public interest. There were the heavyweights — Rick Perry, Scott Walker, and Bobby Jindal — whose prospects were cut short by foolish voters. There were the head-scratching candidates: Jim Gilmore and George Pataki.

And there was Carly Fiorina.

About Carly, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race on Wednesday after single-digit finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, one can say a rare thing: The Republican party is better for her having run — and, if the party is smart, she’ll be a part of it going forward.

To be sure, that Carly’s presidential bid never caught on is not a surprise. Her path was always narrow. She had no political experience besides a failed Senate race in deep-blue California. Her “CEO-as-president” pitch was undermined by a rocky tenure at Hewlett-Packard. The field was crowded. And it turns out that the Republican electorate is feeling thumotic — fair or not, an advantage to men.

But in a year of also-rans, Carly stood out — as one of the clearest, most incisive, and most forceful conservative speakers to come along in years.

That was on full display on the debate stage, where she turned in one solid performance after another. It was on display on the campaign trail, as my colleague Jay Nordlinger observed last year. And it was on display when you sat down and chatted with her, one-on-one.