RUTHFULLY YOURS

Can the American people be trusted?

We’ll find out the Republican answer in a few hours, when their presidential contenders take the stage in Las Vegas for their first post-Paris, post-San Bernardino debate. It promises to be a boisterous night, given how they are already mixing it up offstage. Their challenge will be to get out from under the rhetoric of both President Obama and Donald Trump.

Mr. Obama does not trust the American people. We saw this earlier this month, when he used an Oval Office address about the carnage in San Bernardino to lecture the rest of us about tolerance. Once again he refused to call Islamist terror by its rightful name, perhaps because he is not sure how Americans he once described as clinging to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” might react if he were to speak honestly.

Today Mr. Obama has become our most politically correct president, with nothing real to say on the threats we face. No surprise, then, that the chief beneficiary would be our most politically incorrect candidate, Mr. Trump.
Because when Mr. Trump speaks about suspending Muslim immigration or “bombing the s—t” out of oil fields controlled by Islamic State, what supporters hear is this: I won’t let political correctness stand in the way of keeping America safe. And when Republicans respond by tut-tutting about how distasteful they find him—instead of showing why his argument is full of holes—they too come across as condescending, implicitly sharing the president’s belief that the knuckle-dragging American public just can’t handle the truth.

Not everything in Ted Cruz’s foreign policy speech on Thursday at the Heritage Foundation was awful. There was enough intellectual heft in there to suggest that the senator from Texas is too smart to believe the ideological contrivances and strategic impostures by which he seeks to gain the GOP nomination.

The central foreign-policy challenge facing the next president is how to re-establish American credibility with friends who no longer trust us and enemies who no longer fear us. Mr. Cruz gets this, just as he gets that the purpose of U.S. foreign policy cannot be to redeem the world’s crippled societies through democracy-building exercises. Foreign policy is not in the business of making dreams come true—Arab-Israeli peace, Islamic liberalism, climate nirvana, a Russian reset, et cetera. It’s about keeping our nightmares at bay.

Today those nightmares are Russian revanchism, Iranian nuclearization, the rise and reach of Islamic State and China’s quest to muscle the U.S. out of East Asia. How to deal with them? Mr. Cruz has thoughts on these and other important matters, but first he wants you to know that he intends to finish the wall along the border with Mexico. And triple the border patrol. And quadruple the number of aircraft patrolling the border.

Why? Because “when terrorists can simply swim across the Rio Grande, we are daring them to make the journey.”

On December 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” The announcement came on the heels of the San Bernardino massacre committed by two Muslim extremists one of whom was a citizen of Pakistan who entered the United States on a K-1 (fiancée) visa.

While Trump’s announcement received support from several quarters of the American public and conservative media, it drew immediate condemnation from many on both the Left and the Right — with some even questioning the constitutionality of such legislation. White House Spokesman Josh Earnest let loose with a torrent of pejoratives directed at Trump, taking aim at his “fake hair” and stated that his position “disqualifies him from serving as president.” Hillary Clinton, who stands to gain most by seeing Trump surge in Republican polls, echoed those sentiments, noting that Trump’s comments were “shameful,” “wrong,” and “dangerous.”

Donald Trump is all about winning. “If we win Iowa, we run the table,” he told a Des Moines rally on Friday. “It will be over quickly; we win virtually every state in the union.” But how will he handle defeat if the Superman of the Polls suddenly starts losing?

Now there are three respected polls (Monmouth, Des Moines Register, and Fox) that show Trump losing to a surging Ted Cruz in Iowa. Trump could certainly surge back in the next 50 days, but right now, Cruz is on track to win. He is relentlessly using social media data to build what he calls “very much the Obama model – a data-driven, grassroots-driven campaign.” And, he says, “it is a reason our campaign is steadily gathering strength.” Trump is relying on rallies and the endless free TV coverage the media provide him.

Trump promises he will bring a flood of new voters into Iowa’s caucuses, dwarfing the traditional total of 125,000 Iowans who vote in a typical presidential-election year — even though the caucus method requires voters to express their preference in public, over two hours, on what will probably be a frigid February evening.

Is the tide turning against Donald Trump in Iowa? According to the latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll, the answer is clearly “yes.”

The billionaire businessman and loose cannon extraordinaire has fallen to second place in the poll with 21 percent. He picked up 2 percentage points since the last poll, but is trailing Ted Cruz by 10 percentage points. The senator from Texas is now the favorite of 31 percent of likely Republican voters in Iowa.

There are two stories here. The first is that Trump seems to have reached his peak in Iowa. The second story is Cruz’s amazing surge. The senator is rapidly ascending; he has experienced a 21-point leap since the last DMR/Bloomberg poll. No other candidate in history has seen such a big surge in such a short amount of time.

Dishonest, incompetent, greedy, very angry, fundamentally unlikeable, and lacking a trace of integrity; you might think that the woman, now running to be our president, would get a bit of a grip on her more obvious failings. Like telling unnecessary whoppers. But she just can’t help herself – she has lived a lie for so long that she no longer can tell the difference between truth and falsehood. She very much reminds me of a statement made by David Horowitz (a real truth teller and a true patriot) in an effort to distinguish Al Gore and Bill Clinton: Clinton lies to help himself, Gore lies because he can’t help himself, i.e. he invented the internet, Love Story was about him and Tipper, etc.

While Hillary’s lies remind one of Gore’s fables, they are actually worse. Why? Because they are so transparent and thus so easily proved wrong. That is, Gore told self-aggrandizing lies (because he had actually accomplished so little) so that his statements took on the color of an adolescent trying to invent an adult resume, i.e. they were not only transparently false, they were silly. Hillary tells lies that are not only unnecessary (the thing might just die of its own weight), she compounds the problem by making the lie much more blatant by giving it that much more exposure, e.g. her taking sniper fire at Tuzla, or Chelsea was in harm’s way on 9/11.

For political veterans, much of what we’re starting to hear about Ted Cruz has an eerily familiar ring. Too extreme. Unelectable. Scares people. A radical, not a conservative.

The American people will hear a lot about Cruz’s extremism in the year ahead, just as they were told about Reagan’s. It may cause them to hesitate before supporting him. But over the course of the campaign they’ll be able to make that determination for themselves. In fact, Ted Cruz represents the mainstream of conservative thought in this country, just as Reagan did two score years ago. Reagan’s victory vindicated everything we’d been saying for twenty years. A Cruz win next year would do so again.

Precisely 36 years ago Reagan was on his way to the Republican nomination. George Will and the church ladies of the party were concerned, even trying to lure former President Ford into the race. Reagan was just too conservative to get elected. A few years earlier Will had described Reagan’s support as “. . . kamikaze conservatives who thought the 1964 Goldwater campaign was jolly fun.” The reasonable, establishment Republicans settled on Bush 1 as their candidate, and it was game on. Marco Rubio is, or will be, their choice this time. Same song, same singers.

Even those of us in the Reagan campaign had concerns. In January of 1980 Reagan trailed Carter 62-33. This in spite of the fact that our embassy in Iran had been overrun, and hostages taken, a couple months before. Carter had earlier been openly humiliated by Brezhnev in Afghanistan. A weak economy, and soaring inflation, combined to give us the worst of both worlds, stagflation. The previous summer Carter had complained to the American people about their malaise. He seemed to be over his head. In the face of all these troubles, Carter still had a 2-1 lead. Reagan was too extreme.

Sen. Ted Cruz has surged in the 2016 GOP presidential primary contest, consolidating support from the party’s most conservative voters and emerging as a leading alternative to businessman Donald Trump, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

The latest poll, coming after a tumultuous month of international and domestic terrorism, found Mr. Trump tops in the GOP field, with Mr. Cruz in second place. The Texas senator appears to be benefiting from the sharp decline in support for Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who led the pack in Journal/NBC News polling six weeks earlier.

The poll also showed a substantial lead for Hillary Clinton over her main rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, although the gap has narrowed.

Until recently, Messrs. Trump and Cruz have refrained from attacking each other, saving their barbs for other rivals in the crowded Republican field. But with a separate poll showing Mr. Cruz rising to first place among likely Republican caucusgoers in Iowa, he has increasingly come under direct and pointed attack from Mr. Trump, suggesting a messy new chapter in the GOP campaign on the eve of a nationally televised debate from Las Vegas on Tuesday night.

If not a smoking gun, veteran journalist Edward Klein exposes a smoldering pistol in his new book about Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary cites three of her former State Department colleagues who saw Clinton weave her diplomatic duties with her financial interests in the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. They also report that Clinton let her foreign-policy responsibilities take a back seat to her presidential ambitions. These three sources insisted on anonymity.

“The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative have very distinct logos. . . . Often, when I went into the secretary of state’s conference room, I saw those logos on papers that were strewn all over the big table,” one of Clinton’s college interns told Klein.

This observer’s low rank gave him surprisingly high-level exposure to Clinton and her confidantes. “It was like I was the invisible man,” he said. “Nobody gave me a second look. They obviously didn’t think it mattered what a young intern saw, so they didn’t make an effort to hide anything from me.”