RUTHFULLY YOURS

MANCHESTER, N.H.—Republican front-runner Donald Trump said Monday he would slash funding for the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency if he is elected president.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal and New Hampshire’s WMUR at a local diner here, the businessman said he would do “tremendous cutting” of the federal government. Education policy, he said, should be returned to the states, and he said he would end the Common Core education standards, which conservatives view as federal overreach.

“Education should be local and locally managed,” said Mr. Trump, who also attacked the administration’s environmental policies. “The Environmental Protection Agency is the laughingstock of the world.”

Mr. Trump’s focus on domestic budgetary issues is a new plank in his presidential policy proposals. It is also one likely to appeal in New Hampshire, where voters have long rewarded candidates who promise fiscal restraint and to reduce federal government spending.

The case for incrementalism is based on the observation that extremism – whether from the right or the left – does not work in a country that prizes freedom. A democracy, by definition, is not efficient. It is not meant to be. It cannot totally satisfy all people with their myriad opinions, but it should satisfy most and be representative of the people.

Unfortunately, extremism has characterized politics for the past seven years and perhaps longer. Mr. Obama came to the White House promising to heal the wounds caused by an election in 2000 that many Democrats felt was illegal and from two wars that had grown increasingly unpopular. Instead, rifts deepened.

Immediately following the election in 2008, compromise went the way of the Dodo bird. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank – all passed with no (or minimal) support from the opposition. This “my way, or the highway” attitude on the part of the imperious Barack Obama has also led to deteriorating relations with Israel, an aggressive Russia, a rogue North Korea and a confrontational China. It brought about a premature troop withdrawal from Iraq, “leading from behind” in Libya, the abandonment of principle in Syria and a nuclear deal with Iran, perhaps conceived with good intentions, but executed in such a manner that it could turn the Middle East into a nuclear maelstrom. And, it has led to re-establishing relations with the most repressive Communist regime in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba.

On Tuesday night, my daughter and her friends went down to Claremont, New Hampshire to see Donald Trump in action. She and her chums range from the not terribly political to those with the usual enthusiasms of youth, so they went mainly because Trump’s a hot ticket, and we don’t get a lot of those in the Granite State. Her only other candidate encounter this season was at the North Haverhill Fair last summer when Lindsey Graham pounced outside the 4-H barn, no doubt with an eye to recruiting her for one of his “rotating first ladies”.

At any rate, after hearing my daughter’s account of the night, my sons said they wanted to see Trump, too. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, having wasted far too much of my time in New Hampshire on campaign events, going all the way back to the oxymoronic “Dole rallies” of 1996. But they persisted. So we checked out the schedule and discovered that he was due to be in Bernie Sanders’ socialist fortress of Vermont on Thursday. Which is how we wound up crossing the Connecticut River and traversing the Green Mountain State, and eventually found ourselves in an unusually lively Burlington. Herewith, a few notes on what I saw:

~THE VENUE: When was the last time a GOP presidential candidate held (in the frantic run-up to Iowa and New Hampshire) an event in Vermont? Every fourth January, Republican campaigns are focused on the first caucus and the first primary states, as Bush, Rubio, Christie, Kasich, Huckabee, Fiorina et al are right now. But in fact the Green Mountain primary is on March 1st, and its delegates count as much as any other state’s. In recent cycles, the American electoral system has diminished and degraded itself by retreating into turnout-model reductionism and seriously competing only over a handful of purple states. Even if he’s only doing it as a massive head-fake, Trump understands the importance of symbolism: By going into Berniestan, he’s saying he’s going for every voter and he’s happy to play down the other guy’s half of the field.

“There is absolutely nothing to admire in Kim or Putin. They are the enemies of civilized behavior and should be held in utter contempt. That Trump doesn’t place their actions in a moral context should be worrying to anyone who cares about U.S. leadership.”

First, candidate Trump carried on a long-distance bromance with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, calling him “a strong leader” and saying it was a “great honor” to have Putin compliment him.

Now Trump has expressed admiration for an even loonier goon: North Korea’s boy tyrant Kim Jong Un. Speaking at a rally in Ottumwa, IA, Trump veritably gushed about the leadership qualities of Kim.

The Hill:

“If you look at North Korea, this guy, he’s like a maniac, OK?” Trump said at a rally in Ottumwa, Iowa, on Saturday.

“And you’ve got to give him credit: How many young guys — he was like 26 or 25 when his father died — take over these tough generals and all of a sudden, you know, it’s pretty amazing when you think of it. How does he do that?” he added.

40-something Hillary Clinton should Worry DemocratsBy Silvio Canto, Jr.
The latest FOX poll is bad news for Mrs Clinton:

She loses to Senator Rubio (50-41%),
Senator Cruz is up 7 (50-43%),
she ties Bush (44-44%),
Trump leads (47-44%),
and Christie leads (47-44%).

Dr. Carson is the only candidate that she defeats, according to this poll.

It takes more than one poll to persuade me one way or another. However, there is a trend in the polls that should scare Democrats: Hillary is 40-something time after time.

Hillary Clinton is between 42-45% in the average of polls. This is scary for such a well-known candidate.

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!”