RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

The 2016 race to replace four-term U.S. senator Barbara Boxer of California, one of Congress’s most liberal politicians, appears likely to result in the election of an even more liberal successor: state attorney general Kamala Harris. In an increasingly polyglot state that exalts appearance and symbolism over substance, the ever-stylish and multiracial Harris—she is the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican-American father—finds herself in the right place at the right time. She’s enjoyed a meteoric rise in California politics—the first woman, African-American, or Asian-American elected as the state’s top law-enforcement officer. Whether the Senate will be a political stepping-stone for Harris or a final destination depends on how credibly she portrays herself as a politician with national stature. Her fans compare her with President Barack Obama; her detractors do the same.

Now 51, Harris cruised to reelection as attorney general in 2014, after eking out a close victory over Los Angeles County district attorney Steve Cooley in 2010. (Before becoming attorney general, she served two terms as district attorney of San Francisco, where she unseated popular incumbent Terence Hallinan.) The outcome of the 2010 contest, which took nearly a month to resolve, was decided by just 74,000 out of 8.8 million votes, or a margin of 0.8 percent—one of the closest statewide elections in California history. Cooley, a moderate Republican, had been the front-runner in most preelection polls, and he even declared victory on election night. But the results proved too close to call, and Harris eventually prevailed when all provisional and mail-in ballots were counted. And so a position formerly held by Republican law-and-order stalwarts such as George Deukmejian and Dan Lungren, as well as a relatively tough-on-crime liberal like Jerry Brown, fell into the hands of an outspoken opponent of capital punishment whose campaign drew almost no law-enforcement support.

Competing Democrats debate each other one night. Republican rivals take their shots at each other a couple of nights later. An air of frenetic normalcy sets over primary season: The country is $20 trillion in the red and under heightened terrorist threat, yet pols bicker over the legacy of Henry Kissinger and the chameleon nature of Donald Trump – another liability the mogul is marketing as an asset. It is business as usual.

Except nothing about the 2016 campaign is business as usual.

For all the surreal projection of normalcy, the race is enveloped by an extremely serious criminal investigation. If press reporting is to be believed — in particular, the yeoman’s work of Fox News’s Catherine Herridge and Pamela K. Browne — Hillary Clinton, the likely nominee of one of the two major parties, appears to have committed serious felony violations of federal law.

That she has the audacity to run despite the circumstances is no surprise — Clinton scandals, the background music of our politics for a quarter-century, are interrupted only by new Clinton scandals. What is shocking is that the Democrats are allowing her to run.

For some Democrats, alas, any criminality by the home team is immaterial. A couple of weeks back, The Donald bragged, as is his wont, that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Trump was kidding (at least, I think he was). Unfortunately, the statement might have been true had it sprung from Mrs. Clinton’s lips.

In a Democratic party dominated by the hard Left, the power Left, what matters is keeping Republicans out of the White House, period. Democrats whored themselves for Bill through the Nineties, seemingly unembarrassed over the lie it put to their soaring tropes about women’s rights, good government, getting money out of politics, etc. They will close ranks around Hillary, too. After all, if she was abusing power while advancing the cause of amassing power – er, I mean, the cause of social justice — what’s the harm?

More-centrist Democrats realize there could be great harm, but they seem paralyzed. The American people, they know, are not the hard Left: If Mrs. Clinton is permitted to keep plodding on toward the nomination only to be indicted after she has gotten it, the party’s chances of holding on to the White House probably disappear. By then, there may not be time to organize a national campaign with a suitable candidate (as opposed to a goofy 74-year-old avowed socialist).

Your name is Hillary Clinton. You run for president. Six different dead-locked precincts tossing tie-breaking coins all fall your way. Per Las Vegas odds makers, six consecutive appearances of heads-or-tails is a statistical probability of 1.5%. That’s 64-to-1 against, an exceedingly lucky outcome.

For Democrats, there is no hand-wringing, no equivalent “hanging chads” controversy. Unlike Bush/Gore in 2000 in Florida, there are no recounts demanded, no cadre of lawyers dispatched to Iowa, no lawsuits filed. Mrs. Clinton claimed victory before all the results were tallied, ultimately managing a microscopic victory of four delegates. That’s people, not percentage points. (Does she know something the rest of us don’t?)

In New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders – an avowed Socialist who took his blushing bride to Russia for their honeymoon – gave Madame a real shellacking by 22 percent. A Donald Trump-like primary performance. That translates into 15 delegates for him to her 9. However, despite the Iowa virtual tie and the clear New Hampshire win, it turns out today that Bernie’s been burnt. That’s because in the all-important delegate count – the convention electors who ultimately select the Democrats’ presidential nominee – she leads him going into Clinton-friendly South Carolina 394 to 44.

Nonexistent in the Republican Party for the very good reason that they can easily thwart the voters’ intentions, the discrepancy lies in little-understood Democrat super-delegates. These are the “important” people, party insiders like Bill Clinton (no nepotism there). Instituted in 1982 – no doubt due in large part to Ronald Reagan’s landslide 1980 victory over unpopular incumbent Jimmy Carter – super-delegates are designed to prevent brokered conventions and their result: weak or insurgent candidates. They make up 712, a whopping 30% of the 2,382 delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination.

Via FiveThirtyEight:

If you look at a Democratic delegate tracker like this one from The New York Times, you’ll find that Hillary Clinton has a massive 394-44 delegate lead over Bernie Sanders so far, despite having been walloped by Sanders in New Hampshire and only essentially having tied him in Iowa. While Sanders does have a modest 36-32 lead among elected delegates — those that are bound to the candidates based on the results of voting in primaries and caucuses — Clinton leads 362-8 among superdelegates, who are Democratic elected officials and other party insiders allowed to support whichever candidate they like.

If you’re a Sanders supporter, you might think this seems profoundly unfair. And you’d be right: It’s profoundly unfair. Superdelegates were created in part to give Democratic party elites the opportunity to put their finger on the scale and prevent nominations like those of George McGovern in 1972 or Jimmy Carter in 1976, which displeased party insiders.

Here’s the consolation, however. Unlike elected delegates, superdelegates are unbound to any candidate even on the first ballot. They can switch whenever they like, and some of them probably will switch to Sanders if he extends his winning streak into more diverse states and eventually appears to have more of a mandate than Clinton among Democratic voters.

Clinton knows this all too well; it’s exactly what happened to her in 2008 during her loss to Barack Obama.

On Friday the West Virginia Senate voted to override Governor Tomblin’s veto of a right-to-work bill, making the state one of a majority that protects workers from mandatory union membership. West Virginia joins three other Midwest states—Indiana (2012), Michigan (2013), and Wisconsin (2015)—that have passed workplace freedom laws in the last four years. Conspicuously absent from that list is the state led by presidential candidate and self-proclaimed “conservative reformer” John Kasich, who was stung by a failed union reform attempt in his first term. Ohio’s governor gave up and walked away from that fight after he lost the first round to union activists and Ohio is now surrounded by right-to-work states that threaten its tenuous economy.

Back in March of 2011, Kasich signed a sweeping 350-page public sector union reform bill, Senate Bill 5, that would have prohibited forced union membership for the state’s public employees. But the bill went much further, mandating merit pay, banning strikes, and curtailing the collective bargaining rights for public employees. It also required that they pay a percentage of their health insurance and pension benefits. The reforms were—and still are—needed, in large part because they would have given local governments control over their budgets, freeing them from crippling unfunded union mandates, for the first time since 1983. Kasich, whose vaunted balanced budget scheme was dependent on shifting costs to local governments, explained at the time, “We want to give local communities the ability to manage their costs.” Kasich said, “We’re a high-tax state. We brought the income tax down. But local communities still have high taxes.”