RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

Almost a month ago, Fox News reported that the FBI’s investigation of possible national security violations stemming from Hillary Clinton’s private email system had expanded to include a corruption angle, centered on the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and the possibility that Foundation donors received favorable government treatment during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

The Fox report prompted indignant denials from Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign that there had been any broadening of the probe. Yet, the government is not required to disclose the course of its investigation publicly, much less to its subjects. And now, there are additional indications that the government is indeed scrutinizing the cozy relations the State Department enjoyed during Secretary Hillary Clinton’s tenure with both the Clinton Foundation and a Clinton-connected consulting firm called Teneo.

Last autumn, according to the Washington Post, the State Department’s inspector general (IG) issued subpoenas to the Clinton Foundation. The IG’s office has authority to investigate wrongdoing at the Department, including criminal wrongdoing. Its conclusions may be referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution, and may also result in other forms of disciplinary action against government officials found to have committed misconduct. The subpoenas served on the Clinton Foundation reportedly focused on two areas of inquiry: (a) Clinton Foundation projects that may have required federal government approval during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state; and (b) Clinton Foundation records pertaining to the employment of Huma Abedin.

The conservative consensus around Trump has solidified into, “He’s the devil” or “He’s our savior.” Either Trump is going to destroy the establishment and save us all. Or he’s secretly in league with Hillary Clinton to rig the election. There’s very little room for the middle ground here.

But Trump isn’t either of these things. He’s just Trump. And it’s important to understand who he is. Instead of the narratives that the different sides are building around him.

Trump seems exotic in a Republican system dominated by D.C. insiders from northeastern suburbs and filled with southern and western candidates. But local politics in New York is filled with guys who have the same blend of liberal-conservative politics and talk and sound just like him.

Giuliani’s political career really began with him yelling, “He blames it on me! He blames it on you! Bulls__t” at a police rally. The cops then took over City Hall chanting, “No justice, no police.”

Christie’s national rise began with the release of videos in which he berated union members and humiliated questioners. Republicans fell in love, at least until the infamous Obama hug happened. And yet the establishment forgets that some of its key members were begging a guy who has the same personality, attitude and style as Trump to run for president before the last election.

Call it New York values, but some of what Trump’s critics object to is a New York-Jersey-Philly abrasive political style that puts a premium on “telling it like it is” at the expense of civility and sometimes substance. You can catch Bill O’Reilly doing the same thing on FOX News.

It’s disingenuous for the establishment to pretend that Trump is some sort of complete break from civility. It’s not. It’s just New York Values taken to their most obnoxious extreme. If the establishment thought that President Chris “Numbn__s” Christie had enough class, why not Trump?

But the trouble with the common sense tough guy style in urban politics is that it compensates for weakness elsewhere. Giuliani and Christie were very tough in one specific area. In Giuliani’s case that was crime and it was such a major issue for the city that some of his more liberal positions didn’t matter. In national politics, those positions did matter when Giuliani ran for president.

Hillary Clinton is struggling to connect with young women voters, so she has brought in… Madeleine Albright? Enlisting the 78-year-old to chase millennials may seem far-fetched, but it’s a gift to voters and to the GOP. Just as Hillary’s claims of advocacy for women encouraged criticism of her husband’s sexual misadventures, trotting out Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State allows us to revisit how her husband’s presidency all but ignored the brewing Islamic jihad against the U.S.

Hillary Clinton offers her husband’s time in office as a halcyon time of peace and prosperity. The truth is that Bill Clinton, like President Obama, made a cataclysmic choice early on that has cost this country untold amounts of blood and treasure. That choice was to ignore the numerous attacks on Americans by Islamic radicals, a decision which served to embolden the jihadists behind 9/11. Like President Obama, Bill Clinton, distracted by endless scandals, led from behind.

Americans may have forgotten that during the Clinton presidency al-Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center in New York, leaving 6 dead and 1,040 injured. The administration, focused on pushing Hillary’s unpopular healthcare proposal, characterized the attacker as someone who “did something really stupid,” and handed the investigation over to the cops. Intelligence groups, who suspected that Osama bin Laden orchestrated the bombing, were muted.

Did one robotic moment in a single debate really bring down Marco Rubio in New Hampshire, probably finishing him off nationally? Unlikely.

It’s difficult to believe that voters would turn on a candidate over one gaffe — yet, somehow, it can also make perfect sense in this cycle. Either way, let’s stop pretending that 2016 voters are concerned about authenticity. What they’re really asking of politicians is for better acting while delivering canned lines. Because they’re all canned lines.

Nearly every candidate is a talking-point-spewing automaton. What Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz say — and even much of what Donald Trump says — is prefabricated, tested, and constructed to appeal to whatever subsection of the electorate they hope to entice. The most talented candidates can repeat those lines, jokes, and touching anecdotes with the same bogus earnestness every single time. This is their real talent. I mean, even Trump — probably the only top-tier candidate regularly going off script — strings together many of the same absurdities in mind-numbing platitudinous loops, and his fans eat it up.

Still, there’s no question that Rubio failed to deliver on this front last week. And while he’s no more prone to offer calculated responses than is Clinton or Sanders, Rubio let the political world create a caricature. All the usual suspects joined in, because, whether you like him or not, Democrats fear Rubio more than they do any other Republican.

The robot talking point was regurgitated in dozens of articles and a million tweets, and by political cartoonists. Activists, lacking basic self-respect, began following Rubio around in robot outfits. The Washington Post explained what it all meant — “what Marco Rubio’s robotic debate performance reveals.” Well, it probably reveals that we — pundits, bloggers, media, and probably most voters — like to turn candidates into one-dimensional cartoon characters who can be easily mocked, categorized, memed, and dispensed with.

Caricatures are easier to hate, and also easier to support. Trump the brash fighter. Mitt Romney the out-of-touch job killer. Cruz the Machiavellian meanie. Jeb the awkward establishmentarian. Bernie the pure-hearted ideologue. Rubio the robot. You know how it works.

While this line of attack, brought on by his own performance, almost certainly had something to do with his showing in New Hampshire, I’m not fully sold on the debate theory. Whatever you make of Rubio’s positions — and I’m not crazy about plenty of them – he’s an impressive politician. According to CNN, voters broke away from Rubio at the end, but exit polls (and you can take them for what they are) show that while the debate mattered to many voters, Rubio fared only slightly worse than most other Republicans.