RUTHFULLY YOURS

Politico, the Washington Post and Fox News all report that the results in the Democratic race in Iowa between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is too close to call.

Both Democratic candidates received approximately 50 percent of the vote, with only 0.1% to 0.4% separating them. In most of the data, Sanders is trailing Clinton, but the gap is so small that not one serious pundit is willing to call it for anyone, which — of course — doesn’t prevent the Clinton camp from claiming victory nonetheless.

But there’s nobody who’s running with that.

This is a situation in which a draw is actually a defeat for Clinton. And a big one too. Early last year, Hillary was leading Sanders by 50 percent. She’s lost that lead completely and is trailing Sanders in New Hampshire; chances are that the Vermont senator will pull off a clean win there.

With record-high turnout in the Iowa caucus, the top three Republicans were separated from each other by just a few points.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) came in first with 28 percent, followed by Donald Trump at 24 percent. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) surged past his polling expectations to take 23 percent with 99 percent of precincts reporting.

“So this is the moment they told us this would never happen,” Rubio told supporters in Des Moines. “…They told me I had no chance because my hair wasn’t gray enough and my boots were too high.”

“I’m just really honored,” Trump said at his Iowa headquarters, congratulating the others in the race. “We’re leaving tonight and tomorrow afternoon we’ll be in New Hampshire… I think we’re going to be proclaiming victory, I hope.”

Cruz was the last GOP candidate to take the stage as his victory really, accompanied by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) and his father, Rafael Cruz.

“Iowa has sent notice that the Republican nominee and the next president of the United States will not be chosen by the media,” Cruz said.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton was locked in a tight race with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at 49.8-49.6 percent with 95 percent reporting.

The American political revolution appears to be exaggerated. Iowa Republicans played to their social conservative form Monday by vaulting Ted Cruz to victory over Donald Trump in their first-in-the-nation caucuses, while as we went to press Democrats were narrowly turning back Bernie Sanders’s populist challenge in favor of Hillary Clinton’s interest-group machine.

The night’s biggest loser, to borrow a word, was Mr. Trump, who in the end couldn’t turn his large crowds and polling leads into enough caucus voters. There’s no doubt the New York businessman helped to generate higher turnout, which broke recent caucus records for Republicans. But perhaps he should have attended that debate last week after all, or maybe there are limits to his unconventional media-dominated, celebrity politics.

Mr. Trump still leads in the New Hampshire polls, but one question is how he will respond to the uncomfortable reality of second place. His speech on Monday night was, to borrow another phrase, low-energy.

Instead Mr. Cruz prevailed like Mike Huckabee (2008) and Rick Santorum (2012) by mobilizing the state’s cultural conservatives into a 28% plurality. The first-term Texas Senator had the support of Iowa’s conservative pastors network, he spent months organizing across the state, and his campaign invested heavily in voter analytics. The Texan also passed the first test of his theory that he can win the GOP nomination, and then the Presidency, with a hard-edged conservative message.

Ted Cruz did what he had to do. Donald Trump fell well short of the shock-and-awe moment he hoped would set up a blitz through the rest of the country. Marco Rubio bought himself a seat at the big table. And Hillary Clinton flirted all night with disaster.

Those were the big story lines that emerged from Iowa’s caucuses Monday night. It’s early—ridiculously early, actually—to draw too many conclusions. But the results suggested that a fight still lies ahead on the Democratic side, and a potentially much bigger and longer battle is ahead on the Republican one.

Perhaps most important, the Iowa results suggest that those fights will take place in two parties deeply divided between insiders and outsiders, between young and old, and between the most and least wealthy. The situation is volatile, and, as a consequence, unpredictable.

By late last night, it was clear that Mr. Cruz rode his strong support among evangelical conservatives to a victory. He had to do that to be a viable long-term candidate; if he couldn’t charge ahead in a state where evangelical voters traditionally have an outsize influence, his candidacy would have been seriously compromised.

Mr. Trump calculated that he could make a late surge in Iowa, put away Mr. Cruz and pave the way for a big win in New Hampshire to start putting away the competition. That didn’t happen. His brand has been that he is a winner; it remains to be seen what the Iowa outcome does to that brand.

DES MOINES, Iowa—Texas Sen. Ted Cruz outmuscled Donald Trump to win the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses on Monday, delivering a stinging rebuke to the celebrity businessman and establishing himself as a leading contender for the GOP nomination.

The results Monday set the stage for a series of high-stakes showdowns in the weeks ahead between the top two finishers and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose appeal as a general-election candidate was good enough for a late surge that nearly overtook Mr. Trump.

“Tonight is a victory for the grass roots,” said Mr. Cruz to a raucous victory party in Des Moines. “Tonight is a victory for millions of Americans who have shouldered the burden of seven years of Washington deals run amok.”

Mr. Trump kept his post-caucus remarks brief, thanking his family and the state of Iowa before turning his attention to contests that follow. “We love New Hampshire, we love South Carolina,” he said.

In 2014 I wrote a book that made the case that the United States, for all of its problems, was not in decline. Now and again I have my doubts.

The results of Monday’s Iowa caucus won’t be known until after this column goes to print. But here’s what we know already about the four top contenders. No prizes for matching names to descriptions:

1) A compulsive liar with a persecution complex, a mania for secrecy, and a bald disdain for rules as they apply to lesser people.

2) A bigoted braggart with a laughable grasp of public policy and leering manners of the kind you would expect from a barroom drunk.

3) A glib moralizer who is personally detested by every single senator in his own party, never mind the other one.

4) A Sixties radical preaching warmed-over socialism to people too young to know what it was or too stupid to understand what it does.
Such are the character traits of the candidates now vying to possess the nation’s nuclear launch codes. This being a free country, they are entitled to their ambitions. This also being a democracy, we are responsible for our political choices. So how is it that we have come to choose this?

Nebraska senator Ben Sasse crossed the border into neighboring Iowa last week to warn fellow Republicans of the dangers of voting for Donald Trump.

Although Ben Sasse has Ivy League degrees and was the president of Midland University from 2010 to 2014, he had broad tea-party support in his 2014 Senate run from groups such as the pro–free market Club for Growth and the libertarian-leaning Freedom Works.

“I ran because the country is in constitutional crisis,” Sasse told me in an interview. “America already has a president who has run roughshod over the Constitution; we don’t need another. I’m pro-Constitution, and if that makes me anti-Trump, that’s Mr. Trump’s problem,” he told reporters in Iowa.

So Sasse began his Trump critique with a series of Twitter questions for him on where he stands on issues such as support for government-run health care in Canada and Scotland. He also threw in this zinger: “You brag abt many affairs w/ married women. Have you repented? To harmed children & spouses? Do you think it matters?”

Other than calling that question “a cheap shot,” Trump ignored Sasse until the day after Thursday’s Trumpless GOP debate. He then let loose with two Twitter barrages. In the first one, he wrote: “The great State of Nebraska can do much better than @BenSasse as your Senator. Saw him on @greta — totally ineffective. Wants paid for pols.”

In the second tweet, he sneered that Sasse’s donning of Nebraska Huskers football gear while on TV made him look “more like a gym rat than a U.S. Senator.”

The “gym rat” responded by saying that since he was the son of a football and wrestling coach, he viewed Trump’s taunt as “high praise.”

Hillary Clinton’s continually evolving defense of her apparent mishandling of classified information is starting to sound a lot like a running gag from Get Smart, the Sixties spy sitcom. Trapped in life-or-death situations at the hands of his archenemies, Agent Maxwell Smart would always seek to bluff his way out of trouble. When Mr. Big wouldn’t budge, Agent Smart moved on to the next prevarication until he found something that might stick:

Maxwell Smart: I happen to know that at this very minute seven Coast Guard cutters are converging on this boat. Would you believe it? Seven.

Mr. Big: I find that pretty hard to believe.

Maxwell Smart: Would you believe six?

Mr. Big: I don’t think so.

Maxwell Smart: How about two cops in a rowboat?

Hillary Clinton is trying the same gag, without the benefit of Don Adams’s comic timing. In a March 2015 press conference at the United Nations — her first public comments after news broke of her exclusive use of a private e-mail server to conduct official business — the former secretary of state drew a line in the sand, insisting categorically that “there is no classified material” on her home-brewed server. That story quickly took on water. The Department of Justice began withholding classified material from public releases of Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails — to date, more than 1,500 e-mails have been withheld as classified, with more to come. And inspectors general for both the intelligence community and the State Department revealed that even a small sample of the Clinton e-mails they reviewed contained information classified as top secret. The State Department confirmed late last week that nearly two dozen of her e-mails were so sensitive that they would be withheld in their entirety from public disclosure.

Hillary Clinton told ABC this morning that her email scandal “is very much like Benghazi… the Republicans are going to continue to use it, beat up on me.”

“I understand that. That’s the way they are,” she said.

Clinton’s Sunday show appearance came after 22 emails the State Department originally planned to release with Friday’s batch were withheld because of top-secret classification.

The State Department’s Diplomatic Security and Intelligence and Research bureaus will investigate whether information in the censored emails was classified at the time they were sent. Clinton has maintained any classified information sent in emails using her private server received the classification later.

Very soon after the story broke — just a few days away from the first votes to be cast in the 2016 presidential primaries — Hillary for America press secretary Brian Fallon called the withholding “over-classification run amok.”