RUTHFULLY YOURS

The campaign of class-warrior Hillary Clinton is pushing the panic button over the prospective release of secret transcripts of high-dollar speeches she made to Goldman Sachs that threaten to portray her as a two-faced un-progressive Wall Street elitist who is out of touch with the common people.

The Democrats’ leading avatar of avarice depicts herself as the candidate of Occupy Wall Street, a fearless champion of the downtrodden, but the transcripts of three speeches for which Goldman paid her an astonishing $675,000 threaten to torpedo the false, focus group-friendly image she has cultivated.

In the speeches to her fellow one-percenters, she reportedly comes across as unduly cozy with the financial titans that her angry left-wing base blames for most of America’s (and the world’s) problems today. In the current political environment publication of the transcripts could be as damaging to her run as Republican Mitt Romney’s ruinous “47 percent” speech was to his 2012 campaign.

One speech attendee reportedly said Clinton “sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director” than a politician. This phrase could easily end up in her Democratic opponent’s TV ads as the race shifts to the March 1 vote in critical South Carolina.

~Long, long ago – August 12th last year, in fact – I wrote:

The integrity of a nation’s borders and the privilege of its citizenship is certainly a “truly conservative” principle. More practically for this election, it may be the one on which all the others depend… And, as Ann Coulter says to the other candidates, if you don’t like Trump, steal his issue.

According to exit polls, in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, two out of three GOP voters favor Trump’s proposed temporary ban on all Muslim immigration – despite the universal reaction from the massed ranks of the politico-media class that this time he’d really gone too far. In other words, as I said all those months ago, it’s the old Broadway saw: Nobody likes it but the public.

The only reason any pollster is even asking this question is because Donald Trump proposed it. As those numbers suggest, any of Trump’s rivals could have helped themselves by “stealing his issue”. And yet no other candidate has gone anywhere near it – or anything like it. Perhaps one reason why American elections have the lowest voter participation rate of almost any developed nation is because the political class mostly seems to be talking about its own peculiar preoccupations. Consider this astute observation by Steve Sailer:

American citizens have turned in large numbers to old-white-guy candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. For all their differences, both give the impression that they are running for president of the United States, not president of Davos.

I live in northern New Hampshire, where every town that isn’t a ski resort is dead. They were pleasant, sleepy places in genteel decline 20 years ago. Now they’re hollowed out by heroin and meth, and offering no economic opportunity beyond casual shifts at the KwikkiKrap. And when you listen to the Dems they’re worried about micro-aggressions and transphobia and when you listen to Congressional Republicans they’re talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The two-party one-party state has nothing to say to tens of millions of Americans.

Trump won because he put real-world issues on the table. Nobody needs to be told that he “isn’t a real Republican”. That’s the point of Trump. The Republican base loathes the Republican leadership far more than they love the vessel they’ve chosen to express their loathing.

Assessing the influence that Jewish associates, advisors, and relatives have on Presidential candidates is complicated. Just being Jewish does not mean automatically understanding the issues confronting Israel and world Jewry. It surely does not mean the politicians’ advisors will be supportive of Israel or effective advocates for the Jewish state.

All too often, Jewish voters believe that if Jews are involved in a candidate’s campaign, this will benefit our people. History has painfully shown this is to be a false assumption.

Hillary Clinton’s anti-Israel advisors, including Sidney Blumenthal, Sandy Berger, Anne Marie Slaughter, and former US Ambassador to Israel Thomas Pickering, have been the subject of discussion within the Jewish community. Michael Oren’s description of Mrs. Clinton’s condescending behavior toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and her view that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are the impediment to peace, speak volumes about her feelings towards Israel and her failure to understand why this conflict remains unresolved.

Mrs. Clinton’s views are also influenced by her husband. In an impromptu discussion with a pro-Arab Palestinian activist in Iowa in September 2014, former President Bill Clinton was overheard asserting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “not the man” to sign a peace agreement. Mr. Clinton agreed with the activist that “if we don’t force him to have peace, we won’t have peace.”

I sometimes have the fantasy of approaching Huma Abedin as a scout for Playboy Magazine and offering her a cover and foldout deal with the publication. I’m more curious about her possible response to such a proposition. Perhaps she would cast a voodoo hex on me, or a curse, or turn to a handy Muslim djab or imam to issue a fatwa. Or perhaps she’d just slap my face and sic the Secret Service goons on me. I’ve never seen her in a bathing suit, so I’m not sure about her figure. Perhaps she isn’t Dallas Cheerleader material.

But she certainly is a fashion plate – unlike her boss, that aging Goodyear blimp in pantsuits – and apparently a well-paid one, at that. Huma is always expertly groomed, she looks like she lives comfortably in the nicest, safest neighborhoods, and possesses some poise, almost as much poise as Queen Noor of Jordan (Lisa Halaby) and that regal fox, Queen Rania, wife of King Abdullah.

But one would not be in error to claim that Huma Abedin is a card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Or, shall we say, of the Muslim Sisterhood? Not so far-fetched a charge. There is an actual division of the Muslim Brotherhood called the Muslim Sisterhood. Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power are only honorary members of that organization, because they’re not Muslims. But they, too, work against U.S. interests, and against Israel’s. They, too, wish to see Israel wiped from the map and the U.S. beholden to Islam.

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There is so much dope on Huma Abedin that it could serve as raw material for a Mata Hari movie, and certainly enough to send her to prison at least on charges of treason, for helping Hillary breach national security, together with half a dozen other Federal felonies. She is, after all, an American citizen, born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. There are several blog sites that contain all the necessary information that could be used to indict Abedin for at least acting as an agent against the U.S. for a foreign power, particularly Saudi Arabia, and generally, for the Muslim Brotherhood.

New Hampshire primaries are occasionally unpredictable, but this time around Iowa proved to be unpredictable, while the outcome in New Hampshire was known to everyone and their second cousin.

But New Hampshire was less about winning votes and more about constructing a winning narrative. As Iowa showed us, early primaries are not so much about delegates as about stories. Win or lose, every candidate uses the process as background for a narrative about their own trajectory. Winning candidates boast inevitability. Losing candidates claim that they exceeded expectations or were robbed.

For Sanders and Trump, their wins allowed them to reclaim the victories they thought had been denied to them in Iowa. New Hampshire was a do-over, rebooting the narrative of their inevitable candidacies.

For Hillary Clinton, New Hampshire is a setback, but not a major one. She had won New Hampshire in ’08 against Obama, but the racial calculus has since flipped. In ’08, Hillary Clinton’s base was white Democrats and New Hampshire is as white as the driven snow. Now Bernie Sanders is breathing down Hillary’s neck with white voters, but her political firewall is her base of black and Latino voters.

In ’08, Hillary Clinton had desperately scrambled to hold on to New Hampshire after her loss in Iowa. This time she desperately held on to Iowa, using tactics that look suspiciously like fraud, complete with magic coin tosses, but could afford to accept defeat in New Hampshire. Her victimhood antics from ’08 made a comeback in New Hampshire as Bill Clinton whined about “sexist” attacks, but if the candidate has any crocodile tears to cry on camera, she held them in liquid suspension in her steel ducts even in chilly New Hampshire, saving them for sunny Nevada or for an emergency Super Tuesday Weepathon.

Hillary’s Use of the Gender Card Isn’t Working By Jonah Goldberg —

Hillary Clinton is not a woman, and that’s a triumph for feminism and a problem for Hillary.

Let me clarify.

Yes, technically she is female. But when millions of Americans think of Hillary Clinton, they don’t think of her gender; they think of, well, Hillary Clinton. Some may think of her as a heroic liberal technocrat. Others might think of her as a deeply partisan politician. The list goes on: She’s a supportive (or enabling) wife, a great (or terrible) former secretary of state, a left-wing bully, or a victim of political witch hunts.

What she is not is an icon for a category of humanity called “womanhood.”

This strikes me as a significant victory for feminism, though not for professional feminists and certainly not for Hillary Clinton.

Clinton, who on her best days is a workmanlike (workwomanlike?) politician, desperately wants to borrow some unearned excitement about her gender. And to her great frustration, it’s not happening. In Iowa, Bernie Sanders crushed Clinton among women under 30 years old by 70 percentage points (84-14). He beat her significantly among 30- to 44-year-old women (53-42). Meanwhile, Clinton trounced Sanders among mature and, uh, very mature women. Women over the age of 65 backed Clinton 76 percent to 22 percent.

But in the lead-up to the New Hampshire primary, Sanders had opened an eight-point lead over Clinton among New Hampshire women, according to polls.

While a gaggle of female Democratic politicians and aging feminist writers and actresses have tried to gin up female solidarity, it’s largely backfired.

Gloria Steinem, a fading icon of a bygone era, said that Bernie Sanders is attracting young female supporters because they’re boy-crazy, and “the boys are with Bernie.” She later apologized.

Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright was trotted out to issue her favorite quip: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”

New Hampshire Deals Death Blow to Christie Campaign By Alexis Levinson —

Nashua, N.H. — “Four years ago, people wanted me to run for president. I said no,” Chris Christie told a crowd of employees at DYN, a tech company based in Manchester, 30 hours before polls closed in the state’s primary. “The reason I said no is ‘cause I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to be president. I knew I wasn’t ready. I’d been governor for a year and a half; I wasn’t ready to be President of the United States.”

“But I’m ready now.”

Timing can be everything in politics. And for Christie, the timing was never quite right.

The New Jersey governor’s presidential hopes were vanquished Tuesday night here in New Hampshire, the state on which he’d staked his campaign: He came in sixth place, failing to earn a single delegate, and while he did not officially suspend his campaign, he made clear it was unlikely to continue unless the results changed after all the votes had been counted.

“Mary Pat and I spoke tonight and we decided we’re going to go home to New Jersey tomorrow. And we’re going to take a deep breath, and see what the final results are,” a subdued and evidently saddened Christie told a crowd assembled in the ballroom of the Radisson Hotel. He had been scheduled to fly to South Carolina in the morning.

“We leave New Hampshire tonight without an ounce of regret,” he added.

But Christie’s tale is very much a story of what could have been. When he won overwhelming re-election as the Republican governor of a blue state in 2013, he was heralded as perhaps the top contender for the nomination. The win, wrote the New York Times, “vaulted him to the front ranks of Republican presidential contenders and made him his party’s foremost proponent of pragmatism over ideology.”

Most days, there is little reason to feel any sympathy for my son, whose birth date on each of his twin passports, American and Australian, testify that he has the bloom of youth about his twentysomething cheeks, stands to enjoy a long, interesting life and, as our latest Prime Minister would put it, is blessed to have come of age in this, the most exciting time to be alive. Being also agile — a gifted short-stop who can pitch a baseball at 90mph — and innovative to boot, especially in winkling money out of his father’s wallet, the fruit of my loins might very well represent the sort of ideal citizen of whom Mr Turnbull dreams after gliding past the Nolans and Drysdales to place his supremely gifted head upon the Lodge’s lovely new pillows.

Just now, after this morning’s telephone conversation, Junior has the benefit of both my sympathy and advice that he stop at the nearest bar and a order something strong and bracing, preferably in double measure. He lives in New York, you see, where unlike Australia the nanny-staters have not yet banned the stiffer-than-average libation. Given the New Hampshire primaries results, Junior might as well enjoy one of the US’s civilised decencies.

“Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump!” he exclaimed, “a fruitcake socialist and a land shark! That’s the best this country can put up for the White House.” Speaking as an Australian, he continued, “Americans are mad as cut snakes.” I reminded him that his mother, a Brooklyn gal, is reasonably sane most of the time, and that he had to take at least some small measure of blame on his own shoulders. Weren’t you telling me only the other week, I reminded him, that Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop campaign was knocking the Republicans’ moribund leadership for six and that this was a good thing?

Switching to his American persona, he responded that, yes, he had said that, but never expected the property developer “to hit a home run”. Trump would cause a bit of damage — a bit of good, too, if you subscribe to the view that complacency needs to be ruffled from time to time — but then fade away, as tends to be the case with the flash-in-the-pan mavericks of American politics. Ross Perot and John Anderson would be waiting to greet him from atop that pile of ambitious and delusional discards. That was Junior’s theory anyway.

This is something that happened a couple of days ago, but I didn’t want to write about it for reasons of privacy you will understand.

Once in a while — well, at least this once for me — when you are traveling around the country covering presidential campaigns, you have an experience that makes the big-time grandeur of presidential politics oddly and touchingly personal.

When, relatively at the last moment, the folks at PJ Media asked me to continue on from Iowa to New Hampshire, having been in the Granite State for previous primaries, I knew Manchester would be the center of the action. I want online and, not surprisingly, the entire city was booked. Looking for someplace relatively close, I stumbled on a Holiday Inn Express in a place called Merrimack, not far from Manchester and known for its outlet mall. The hotel had a 4.7 rating on Trip Advisor, so I quickly reserved a room.

The day I arrived, I sensed something was up when I bumped into Senator Tim Scott in the elevator. I knew he was backing Marco Rubio. Was Marco actually staying in this hotel? I knew the Florida senator slightly. We had been introduced in the Senate last summer and I had interviewed him for PJ Media at Joni Ernst’s Roast & Ride in Iowa some months ago. I also sent him and Senator Cruz a series of foreign policy questions for PJM that they both answered.

I was further partial to Rubio, as some readers have noted, because I admired those foreign policy views and thought he was well positioned to beat Hillary, Bernie or whomever (Jerry Brown?) the Democrats would put up. I wasn’t as disturbed as some by his role in the amnesty question, though I don’t think those who enter the country illegally should ever be allowed to vote.

Sure enough, I saw Rubio’s campaign bus parked behind some snowy trees at the back of the hotel parking lot, but didn’t think that much of it as I went about my business, checking out the candidates at their campaign stops and then joining the media mash-up at the debate.

There, of course, I watched Chris Christie butcher a befuddled Rubio with his accusations of scripted answers that have been repeated, we could say ad nauseum, in the media. In an instant, I realized that Marco’s momentum from his surprise finish in Iowa, that many were saying would propel him to being the competitor to Trump, had been derailed by the New Jersey governor.

To be honest, I was depressed by it, but still went the next day to Rubio’s Super Bowl party, which was very well attended. (They had to change to a larger venue.) Marco gave an upbeat speech — maybe he wasn’t so wounded — and told the crowd to enjoy themselves, he wasn’t staying to watch the game.