RUTHFULLY YOURS

A terrible way to forecast the 2016 contest is to gauge whose supporters are the loudest. Presidential elections are not decided by partisans or ideologues.

The arithmetic is pretty simple: 41% of voters in the 2012 presidential election described themselves as moderates, and 29% as independents. Almost all Republicans (93%) and self-described conservatives (82%) voted for Mitt Romney, but that wasn’t enough. Even if Mr. Romney had won every Republican or conservative voter, it still wouldn’t have been enough.

Because there are roughly 5% more Democrats than Republicans, the GOP needs a solid majority of independents to win a national election. In 2012 Mitt Romney outpolled Barack Obama among independents, 50% to 45%. But that didn’t take him across the electoral college finish line.

It is safe to predict that the proportions that held in 2012 will be about the same this year. About two-thirds of the voters will not be Republicans. Thus it is vital to pay early attention to how each of the candidates is doing among independents. A long, drawn-out primary that forces candidates to make strong appeals to the party’s ideological base can hurt the eventual nominee in November

Hillary Clinton today defended a 2011 e-mail instructing her staffer at the State Department, Jacob Sullivan, to remove a document’s classified marking and send it over an unsecured line. “Headings are not classification notices and so oftentimes we’re trying to get the best information we can,” she told John Dickerson on Face the Nation.

“Obviously what I’m asking for is whatever can be transmitted, if it doesn’t come through secure to be transmitted on the unclassified system,” Clinton said. ”So, no, there is nothing to that, like so much else that has been talked about in the last year.”

Dickerson said the e-mail showed she was “very facile” in how to navigate around classification laws and asked, “You’re saying there was never an instance, any other instance in which you did that?”

Clinton replied that her instructions to Sullivan reflect “common practice” and then pivoted to attacking Republicans for throwing things “against the wall … to see what sticks.”

Dickerson followed with a question about another e-mail in which Clinton expressed bewilderment another staffer was using private e-mail to conduct government business — “which is what you were doing.”

Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal has been a difficult one for the public to understand and for journalists to explain. But Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who helped uncover Watergate 40 years ago, clarified things a lot on Fox News Sunday today when he said that an e-mail in the most recently released batch shows Hillary trying to “subvert the rules” that she expected others to follow.

A few days earlier, Joe DiGenova, a well-respected former district attorney for the District of Columbia, told The Laura Ingraham Show that “there is vitriol of an intense amount developing” in the intelligence community and that FBI agents “are already in the process of gearing themselves to basically revolt if [the Justice Department] refuses to bring charges” against either Hillary Clinton or her former State Department staffers.

It was the State Department’s data dump in the wee hours of January 1 that revealed a particularly eyebrow-raising e-mail from Hillary Clinton: In one note in February 2011, she expressed surprise that a State Department employee was using a private e-mail to conduct State business. She wrote this e-mail, seeming to express dissatisfaction at the employee’s use of private e-mail, on her own private e-mail server — through which she sent all her e-mails while secretary of state.

Donald Trump exemplifies one of the strange and lamentable dynamics in democratic discourse: People tend to have the strongest opinions on those things about which they have the least knowledge. Herr Apfelstrudelführer imagines himself issuing decrees that presidents have no power to issue, and he doesn’t seem to understand that illegal immigration — his headline issue — isn’t in the main driven by people walking across the Mexican border. He doesn’t seem to understand how laws are made or how government money is appropriated. He has, to say the least, a lot to learn.

Now he wants to launch a trade war with China over a trade deficit that he isn’t bright enough to understand.

This isn’t that surprising. Trump inherited a fortune, and, like many heirs, he’s a bit thick when it comes to the realities of money — my habitual comparison of him with Paris Hilton is not offered tongue-in-cheek. Those companies didn’t bankrupt themselves. Most of his success as a businessman has been in the entertainment business, and that’s a perfectly respectable racket, but I don’t want to see the troops saluting President Gwyneth Paltrow or President Kim Kardashian, no matter how much money they’ve piled up, and Trump is in essentially the same league, albeit with worse taste than Mrs. Kanye West.

For those of us who toiled in the fetid swamplands of the 1990s culture wars, particularly the boggy tributaries fed by Bill Clinton’s pants, this is a moment of effulgent wonder.

Let’s back up a moment.

That ’90s Show

There’s a lot of talk these days about how feminist attitudes towards sexual assault have evolved in recent years. And that’s true as it far as it goes. What it leaves out is that we’ve been here before. Starting in the late 1980s, “awareness” about sexual harassment and sexual assault became a huge issue. There was the nomination fight over Senator John Tower to become Papa Bush’s Defense Secretary, and allegations about his drinking and “womanizing.”

Side-note: It was a long time ago, but I remember thinking at the time that, given the charges against him, at the last minute the kids from Scooby-Doo would step up, rip off the John Tower mask and exclaim, “Why it’s Ted Kennedy!”

I must admit, when I clicked this morning on Vox’s ”explainer” of Juanita Broaddrick’s rape allegation against Bill Clinton, I expected a whitewash. I was wrong. Not only did Dylan Matthews do an excellent job laying out the story, he reminded me of a number of details I’d forgotten.

Her story is infuriating, painting a picture of casual, callous brutality. Broaddrick, then a Clinton gubernatorial campaign volunteer, claims that Clinton asked to switch a planned meeting from a hotel lobby to her hotel room. After a few minutes of small talk, Broaddrick says that Clinton began kissing her. She resisted Clinton’s advances, but he “pulled her back onto the bed and forcibly had sex with her.” During the alleged attack, he bit her lip. When he saw that it was bruised and swollen, she claims he said, “You better get some ice on that.” Then he “put on his sunglasses and walked out the door.”

I’d forgotten, however, how many people Broaddrick told after the incident:

Several friends of Broaddrick’s backed up the story. Norma Rogers, who was the director of nursing at Broaddrick’s nursing home at the time, told reporters that she entered the hotel room shortly after the assault allegedly took place and “found Mrs. Broaddrick crying and in ‘a state of shock.’ Her upper lip was puffed out and blue, and appeared to have been hit.” Kelsey elaborated to the New York Times, “She told me he forced himself on her, forced her to have intercourse.”

In the Dateline show, Broaddrick’s friends Louise Ma, Susan Lewis, and Jean Darden (Norma Rogers’s sister) all told NBC News that Broaddrick told them Bill Clinton raped her at the time. David Broaddrick — with whom Broaddrick was having an affair at the time; they both eventually left their spouses to marry each other — also told NBC that Broaddrick’s top lip was black after the alleged incident, and that she told him “that she had been raped by Bill Clinton.”

Then there are Broaddrick’s allegations that Hillary not-so-subtly thanked her for her silence:

Ramesh Ponnuru claims on Bloomberg View that Marco Rubio is trying to “turn Ted Cruz into Rand Paul,” and that attempts to label Cruz as weak on national security won’t work. I disagree. Ponnuru admits that his friendship with Senator Cruz could cloud his judgment, so I’ll state at the outset that I am biased too, inasmuch as I support Senator Rubio’s candidacy.

Setting aside for the moment whether this line of argument will resonate politically, there are at least three issues on which Senator Cruz clearly “stands with Rand.” Each of these raises serious questions about Senator Cruz’s true national-security views and his viability as a candidate for Commander-in-Chief.

The first instance was when Senator Cruz entered the Senate chamber to literally “stand with Rand.” Many will recall Senator Paul’s filibuster, in which he stirred up a frenzy over the possible targeting of U.S. citizens in the United States by U.S. military drones. In a bizarre attempt to suggest that a U.S. citizen sitting in a Starbucks café is at risk from the threat of U.S. Hellfire missiles, the senator from Kentucky held up Senate business until the attorney general certified that the president does not have the authority “to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil.” What a revelation!

Instead of focusing the Senate on the threat posed by radical jihadists, Senator Cruz chose not only to stand with Rand, but to join him in attempting to stir up libertarian passions and create a false choice between liberty and security. This may have been good politics and a great way to increase his Twitter followers (Senator Cruz, in fact, spent part of his time on the Senate floor reading tweets praising Senator Paul), but it certainly wasn’t the conduct of a credible would-be Commander-in-Chief.

‘Common Core, the set of education standards that were adopted by 46 states five years ago but have since become toxic with the conservative base, has not been at the center of the Republican primary debate, which has so far been dominated by national security and immigration,” according to an article in The Hill just a few weeks ago. How quickly things change.

In the final four weeks before the voting begins, Senator Marco Rubio is making opposition to Common Core a key part of his final pitch, featuring it in a new television ad: “One high-tax, Common Core, liberal-energy-loving, Obamacare Medicaid-expanding president is enough,” the voiceover says.

And in Cedar Rapids a few days ago, Rubio brought Common Core up again: “This country cannot afford a president that’s not going to reverse the direction Barack Obama’s taken our country. We can’t have another president that supports Common Core or gun control or expanding Obamacare.”

It’s a smart move for Rubio, first and foremost because Common Core is an issue that deeply moves voters, especially important in a caucus state such as Iowa. Second, it distinguishes Rubio from Chris Christie, who was an early supporter of Common Core but who has changed his position to oppose it more recently, at least in part.

Common Core is a policy failure as well. The state of Kentucky has been implementing Common Core for four years, the longest of any state, and certainly long enough that one would expect to see some positive results. Instead, Ed Week reports, the proportion of Kentucky elementary and middle-school students who are proficient in reading and math dropped by one-third.

Simultaneously, as if signals from a council of sachems had summoned them to the warpath, the Republican establishment’s warriors took after Ted Cruz. Pat Buchanan encapsulated this establishment: “… officeholders past and present, donors, lobbyists, think-tankers angling for jobs, party hacks and talking heads [who] discuss how to frustrate the rising rebellion against what they have done to America.”
Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz

The establishmentarian drumbeat against Cruz has involved but a whiff of argument on policy, and a few twisted or out of context attributions. But it has consisted mostly of attacks on the man’s character. Fox News led the way with characterizations ranging from flip-flopper to “servile.”

Britt Hume, heretofore its resident adult, said that Cruz had “difficulty shaking hands with the truth.” The point in print, in the blogosphere, as well as on TV is: he’s not one of us, not of our kind, and hence unsuited for responsible office. This very vehemence ensures the attacks’ success. For sure, Cruz ain’t no part of the establishment. Whether that convinces voters to vote against Cruz or for him is another matter. What follows here is an overview of the written attacks, which reveal more about the attackers than they do about the target thereof.

The Wall Street Journal is the Republican establishment’s intellectual apex. This is what flows down from that hill.

Angelo Codevilla is the dean of conservative strategists, a senior member of the Reagan team during the 1980s, and the author of the best recent book on American security strategy. Like Ted Cruz, Prof. Codevilla rejects the false dichotomy of isolationism vs. neo-conservative interventionism: America is not out to remake the world in its own image, but to secure itself from foreign enemies. Sometimes that means using power abroad, and using a lot of it–but the criteria must be America’s self-interest.

In a new essay for Asia Times, Codevilla make short work of the Establishment counter-attack against Sen. Cruz, taking on the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, the Weekly Standard’s Lee Smith, the American Enterprise Institute’s Gary Schmitt, and other luminaries. It’s a must read. Some choice excerpts:

Simultaneously, as if signals from a council of sachems had summoned them to the warpath, the Republican establishment’s warriors took after Ted Cruz. Pat Buchanan encapsulated this establishment: “… officeholders past and present, donors, lobbyists, think-tankers angling for jobs, party hacks and talking heads [who] discuss how to frustrate the rising rebellion against what they have done to America.”

The establishmentarian drumbeat against Cruz has involved but a whiff of argument on policy, and a few twisted or out of context attributions. But it has consisted mostly of attacks on the man’s character. Fox News led the way with characterizations ranging from flip-flopper to “servile.”