RUTHFULLY YOURS

There wasn’t one Republican presidential debate going on Thursday night in South Carolina, but rather two. And in that sense, the debate neatly and succinctly summarized this year’s unusual race.

The first debate was between the two unlikely front-runners, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. After months of dancing around each other—and in some cases essentially supporting each other—in crystallizing antiestablishment anger, the two now know they are fishing from the same pond with less than three weeks to go before voting begins. And they conducted themselves accordingly.

The night’s second, parallel debate involved the other five aspirants on the stage— Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie and John Kasich—who seemed uncertain whether their mission was to go after the two top dogs or emerge from the rest of the pack as the alternative to them. By and large, they chose the latter course.
So Mr. Trump repeated, volubly and at some length, his assertion that Mr. Cruz, a Texas senator, might not be eligible to be president because he was born in Canada. Mr. Cruz responded by saying that his status under the Constitution isn’t in doubt, and charging that the businessman Mr. Trump fully agreed until he felt threatened by a Cruz rise in the polls.

“The Constitution hasn’t changed,” Mr. Cruz said. “But the poll numbers have.”

For his part, Mr. Cruz embraced anew his assertion that Mr. Trump embodies “New York values,” which, he said, are “socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro-gay marriage.” To a conservative debate audience in the conservative state of South Carolina, he added: “Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan.”

There are many reasons to dislike Hillary Clinton. For one, she’s an unrepentant liar, fabricating everything from her Brian Williamesque brush with death in Bosnia to her parent’s pedigree to her claim that she believed a video caused the deaths of four heroes in Benghazi.

She is also unethical, having accepted large sums of money to the Clinton Foundation from countries and entities working on behalf of foreign governments impacted by her decisions as secretary of state. There is some circumstantial evidence suggesting that she may have been influenced by these rather large contributions. In one well publicized case, Russia was able to acquire 20% of the United States’ uranium reserves in an energy deal that required State Department approval. A paper trail from that transaction reveals that the Clintons’ and their foundation benefited from substantial donations issued by entities with vested interests in ensuring the Russian acquisition of America’s strategic assets. Clinton was required to publicly disclose these contributions but never did. The FBI has now expanded its Emailgate probe of Clinton to include whether the possible “intersection” of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business violated public corruption laws.

Hillary Clinton, who fancies herself as the champion of human rights and women’s rights, is also a serial hypocrite. Records show that the Clinton Foundation accepted funds from countries with abysmal human rights records where misogyny is regularly practiced and the principles of due process are routinely trampled upon.

Yuval Levin has written one of the best analyses of the Republican primary. In it, he argues that the central theme of the campaign is the relationship between America’s political establishment and the public at large, and that each of the four major contenders offers a different diagnosis. To simplify, Trump thinks the establishment is stupid, Christie thinks it is weak, Cruz that it is corrupt, and Rubio that its ideas are anachronistic. There is, of course, an element of truth to each candidate’s message.

Yuval’s framing makes clear an important distinction in the field that is relevant to the ongoing debate on the future of the Republican party. Though the basic “establishment” and “anti-establishment” labels, applied so often to the field by the media, sometimes muddle as much as they clarify, there really are two camps in this primary: Those who seek to revitalize the establishment and the party by fixing their flaws, and those who think there is a more fundamental problem with the nature of the establishment itself, a matter of identity that cannot be repaired merely with the right president or policy platform.

Christie and other so-called “establishment” candidates clearly fall into the former category. So too, though, does Rubio, a candidate with anti-establishment credentials and a genuinely disruptive message and agenda (just ask the insurance industry) that stands out from those of his competitors.

Three truths fuel Donald Trump.

One, Barack Obama is the Dr. Frankenstein of the supposed Trump monster.

If a charismatic, Ivy League-educated, landmark president who entered office with unprecedented goodwill and both houses of Congress on his side could manage to wreck the Democratic party while turning off 52 percent of the country, then many voters feel that a billionaire New York dealmaker could hardly do worse.

If Obama had ruled from the center, dealt with the debt, addressed radical Islamic terrorism, dropped the politically correct euphemisms, and pushed tax and entitlement reform rather than Obamacare, Trump might have little traction. A boring Hillary Clinton and a staid Jeb Bush would likely be replaying the 1992 election between Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush — with Trump as a watered-down version of third-party outsider Ross Perot.

But America is in much worse shape than in 1992. And Obama has proved a far more divisive and incompetent president than George H. W. Bush.

Little is more loathed by a majority of Americans than sanctimonious PC gobbledygook and its disciples in the media. And Trump claims to be PC’s symbolic antithesis.

Making Machiavellian Mexico pay for a border fence or ejecting rude and interrupting Univision anchor Jorge Ramos from a press conference is no more absurd than allowing more than 300 sanctuary cities to ignore federal law by sheltering undocumented immigrants. Is it sober and judicious of the Obama administration to ignore immigration laws and effectively open the southern border wide to all comers?

Putting a hold on the immigration of Middle Eastern refugees is no more illiberal than welcoming into American communities tens of thousands of unvetted foreign nationals from terrorist-ridden Syria. Would the Obama administration allow a mass entrance of persecuted Middle East Christians or displaced Ukrainians?

When Nikki Haley offered the Republican response to President Obama’s final State of the Union, the American people heard an articulate conservative who has twice been elected Governor in South Carolina. It’s a sign of the GOP’s distemper that some conservatives denounced her because she didn’t denounce legal immigration.

Gov. Haley’s parents came to America from India. Her father taught botany at Voorhees College. Her mother started what would become a multimillion-dollar clothing company out of the living room of the family home. As she put it Tuesday, “I am the proud daughter of Indian immigrants who reminded my brothers, my sister and me every day how blessed we were to live in this country.”

Her conservative critics unloaded. “Trump should deport Nikki Haley” went one tweet. The next morning on “Fox & Friends,” Donald Trump declared that Gov. Haley is “very weak on immigration.”
Are we talking about the same Nikki Haley? The woman who says “illegal immigration is not welcome in South Carolina”? Who signed a law toughening the state’s illegal immigration reform act, which requires employers to verify the immigration status of new hires? Who has fought President Obama’s bid to resettle unvetted Syrian refugees? And whose state has joined 16 others in a lawsuit against Mr. Obama for what they say is his unconstitutional executive order on illegal immigration?

Hillary Clinton has taken to attacking Bernie Sanders in the wake of polls showing the Vermont socialist is beating her in Iowa and New Hampshire. The fascinating question is how much Bernie’s comeback is related to his message, and how much to the continuing doubts about Mrs. Clinton’s honesty and thus her ability to win in November.

The former Secretary of State wants voters to believe that her private email server scandal is old news, but every month brings new evidence that she put state secrets at risk in order to hide her emails from the public. The slow public release of new emails commanded by a judge, combined with an expanding FBI probe, may be making Democratic voters wonder if they should nominate such an ethically challenged nominee.

The latest cache hit Friday when the State Department released 1,262 more of Mrs. Clinton’s emails. That dump contained another 66 emails deemed classified, which means State has now discovered some 1,340 instances of the nation’s top diplomat handling sensitive material on an unsecure server—including spy satellite information and the name of at least one confidential CIA source. Given that we know Mrs. Clinton’s server was the target of attempted hacks, this is grossly negligent behavior.

One subplot of the Republican presidential-nomination battle has been an increasingly vicious and personal contest between two first-term senators, both of Cuban descent and separated by just a few months in age.

Florida senator Marco Rubio (44) and Texas senator Ted Cruz (45) are both men of superhuman ambition who have put their personal advancement over virtually everything else, including, many would argue, loyalty, wealth, and family. Both were at least thinking about running for president from the time they arrived in the Senate. Their talent and their years-long focus on reaching the White House are reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s, and it’s entirely possible that the only thing standing between each and it, aside from another Clinton, is the other.

“You interview hundreds of candidates and a few stand out, and Rubio and Cruz stood out,” says Chris Chocola, the former president of the Club for Growth, the free-market group that endorsed both Rubio and Cruz in their Senate primaries. “They knew what they believed, they knew why they believed it, and they could articulate those beliefs.”

Their ascent to the top tier of the presidential field, where they have been trading barbs, is, for conservatives, a mark of astonishing success. Cruz is now viewed as the most conservative viable candidate, while Rubio is widely considered the most viable establishment choice (although he still has major competition from Chris Christie, among others). Yet this is a simplistic and somewhat misleading way to look at a prospective match-up between the two. Rubio was born of the tea-party movement and, during his Senate race, drove the liberal Charlie Crist out of the Republican party. That he is now considered a part of the Washington establishment says a lot about the transformation of the Republican party in the Obama era. “It’s a tremendous testament to what conservatives have been able to achieve,” says Mike Needham, the CEO of Heritage Action for America, a leading conservative-activist group.

Take this as yet another sign that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is in deeper trouble than anyone thought possible:

MoveOn is endorsing Bernie Sanders for president after the liberal challenger to Hillary Clinton won 78 percent of votes cast by its membership.

Ilya Sheyman, MoveOn Political Action’s executive director, lauded Sanders for his run-away win and promised to help turn out voters in the early states of Iowa and New Hampshire, where the group has 43,000 members and 30,000 members respectively.

Sheyman explained:

This is a massive vote in favor of Bernie Sanders, showing that grassroots progressives across the country are excited and inspired by his message and track record of standing up to big money and corporate interests to reclaim our democracy for the American people.

That’s bad news for Hillary Clinton, but what makes this even worse is that MoveOn will actively and energetically campaign for Sanders. Sheyman:

Multiple explanations exist for Donald Trump’s popularity, but one stands out above all: his willingness to violate that taboos of Political Correctness and speak the unvarnished truth on such hot button topics as immigration and Islam. Nearly all Americans are angry at being lied to and having to watch themselves as if they lived in Stasi-run East Germany. Who wants to risk ending a career by admitting that some groups are more crime-prone or intelligent than others? Or announcing that men are naturally better suited to combat than women and having this self-evident pronouncement treated as an embarrassing gaffe that requires immediate groveling and begging forgiveness? In a nutshell, Trump is unafraid to speak truth about the overly sensitive, easily offended groups protected by the mendacious “establishment.” Now, at last, millions of potential voters long starved for honesty have a champion.

As Trump refuses to fold, it is inevitable that his rivals (and perhaps the Democratic nominee) will grasp the benefit of similarly embracing this anti-PC view. We can already see hints of this copycat strategy in the new “tough” Jeb Bush commercials.

But while it is all too easy to be anti-PC in the abstract, the proof of a candidate’s seriousness can only be displayed in the specifics. With that in mind, let me propose a five-question test to assess a candidate’s aversion to PC that could, in principle, devastate a political career. Destroying careers is not, however, our aim; rather, the goal is to calibrate the sincerity of those who condemn PC on the cheap. We do not expect perfect frankness; more important is how they hem and haw and run for cover when asked “offensive” questions.

WASHINGTON—South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley accused President Barack Obama Tuesday of falling “far short of his soaring words” while also cautioning her own party not to fall for its own populist rhetoric.

Those twin themes dominated Mrs. Haley’s rebuttal to Mr. Obama’s final State of the Union address, with the Republican governor faulting the president for “the squeeze of an economy too weak to raise income levels” and warning her own party against following the anti-immigration rhetoric that has propelled Donald Trump to the lead in GOP presidential election polls.
More on the State of the Union

“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” she said, without mentioning Mr. Trump or other 2016 candidates by name. “We must resist that temptation.”

Instead, she said Republicans should focus on bringing prosperity back to America. If a Republican is elected president, “taxes would be lower for working families, and we’d put the brakes on runaway spending and debt.”

Mrs. Haley, who has occasionally been mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate, said Republicans share blame with Democrats for the nation’s polarized political culture.

“We need to be honest with each other, and with ourselves: while Democrats in Washington bear much responsibility for the problems facing America today, they do not bear it alone,” she said. “There is more than enough blame to go around.”