RUTHFULLY YOURS

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is drawing sharper distinctions with front-runner Hillary Clinton, casting her policy reversals over the years as a character issue that voters should take into account when they evaluate the Democratic field.

Sen. Sanders of Vermont, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, also said the federal investigation of the security surrounding Mrs. Clinton’s private email account is appropriate.

In the Democratic debate last month, Mr. Sanders said voters were “sick and tired” of the focus on Mrs. Clinton’s “damn emails.” Afterward, many Democrats and political analysts said that he had appeared to dismiss her use of a private email account and server in her four years as secretary of state.
Mr. Sanders rejected that assessment on Wednesday. If her email practices foiled public-records requests or compromised classified information, those are “valid questions,” Mr. Sanders said.

The swirl this week over Marco Rubio’s personal finances brings to mind that popular children’s word game, “Would You Rather.” Cut through the hype and the question Mr. Rubio presents to the electorate is this: “Would you rather a president who is above it all, or who has lived it all?”

Only the voters can answer that question—if they have the chance. The press for its part is more interested in presenting Mr. Rubio’s financial history as some evidence of scandal. The New York Times has devoted near novel-length inches to the non-news (this was all covered in Mr. Rubio’s Senate race in 2010) that as a Florida legislator he used a Republican Party charge card for personal purchases.

And? The card was used primarily for political expenses—which were covered by the party. Mr. Rubio occasionally used it for a personal expense, which he then paid for each month by writing a check to the card company. No one is suggesting that the party paid a dime toward Mr. Rubio’s expenses, or that the candidate was a dime short in promptly paying back his personal charges. If this is a scandal, we’ve found a cure for insomnia.

PORTSMOUTH, N. H.—In a Republican primary filled with intense rivalries, none is more personal than the one between Jeb Bush and his one-time lieutenant Marco Rubio.

Mr. Rubio got the better of his former governor in the last GOP presidential debate, undermining Mr. Bush’s standing in the primary and thrusting the Florida senator to the head of the pack of candidates with elected experience.

That raises the stakes heading into a critical week in which they will appear at the next GOP debate in Milwaukee Tuesday and a forum in Florida on Friday before a hometown audience both will eventually need to keep their presidential hopes alive.

“You have two people from the same state, the same county, literally neighbors who have spent so much time together and been on the same page politically, and when one of them starts attacking the other, it becomes personal,” said former state Rep. Gaston Cantens, who served with both men in Tallahassee and is backing Mr. Rubio. “It is the ugly side of politics.”

Two long weeks ago, Hillary Clinton was declared the undisputed winner in her face-off with Republicans on the House subcommittee over the part she played during the Benghazi attacks of September 11, 2012. But that was before an Optimus Prime–sized hole was blown right through her campaign’s and the media’s narrative that Benghazi has finally been put to rest.

The bomb was the release of two new trailers for 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, director Michael Bay’s action-heavy portrayal of events (already labeled “Bayghazi” by the Internet), which hits theaters January 15. Its pop-culture treatment of events that night will have people talking and debating in a way that all the Fox News specials and C-SPAN hearings in the world couldn’t. The recently released trailer has shown that no matter how scarce the names “Hillary Clinton” and “Barack Obama” are in the film, their involvement in what’s depicted is unmistakable. The film is based on the Mitchell Zuckoff bestseller of the same name, which deals primarily with events on the ground that night, and the efforts of a small group of operators and security forces to extract their fellow Americans from the attacks.

Voters roundly rejected Democrats and “progressive” ballot initiatives favored by President Obama in local and statewide elections Tuesday. In many cases it wasn’t close, and in many cases the left failed despite a heavily Democratic local population:

– The transgender “bathroom ordinance” was flushed by voters in liberal Houston, 61 percent to 39 percent, thus “staining the city’s reputation” for tolerance, according to the mayor.

– Anti-ObamaCare and Tea Party favorite Matt Bevin easily defeated Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway (D) to become governor. Bevin is only the state’s second Republican governor in more than 40 years. The race was expected to be close, but Bevin triumphed by nearly nine points.

– In Virginia, where Democrats fought hard to turn some districts blue, the Republican Party retained control of the state Senate. With both of the state’s chambers still controlled by Republicans, Governor Terry McAuliffe will struggle to enact his left-wing agenda, which includes a push for more gun control laws, before his term is up in 2017.

– In Pennsylvania, the GOP will have a 31-19 edge in the Senate. This is the largest majority since 1954.

Democrats outspent and outpolled Republican novice Matt Bevin and expected their candidate, Attorney General Jack Conway, to keep the Kentucky governorship in Democrat hands, where it had been for all but one term of the last half-century. Instead, Tea Partier Bevin, who had previously challenged Mitch McConnell for the GOP nomination for senator and lost big, pulled off a near landslide victory with an 85,000-vote margin.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Alan Blinder of the New York Times:

In beating his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Jack Conway, by almost nine percentage points, Mr. Bevin, 48, shocked people in his own party, who believed that the climate in Kentucky was ripe for a Republican but feared that Mr. Bevin, a charismatic conservative with a go-it-alone style, was too far out of the mainstream and too inexperienced to win.

But in a year when outsiders like Donald J. Trump and Ben Carson have captured the attention of voters in the Republican presidential race, Mr. Bevin’s tendency to thumb his nose at the political establishment — coupled with President Obama’s deep unpopularity here — helped him upend Kentucky’s political status quo.

Richard Baehr emails:

I was in Kentucky 8 days last month and everyone thought Conway would win. Bevin ran against Mitch McConnell in the GOP Senate primary in 2014. Pretty hard right guy. This will be a boost for Cruz backers – that very conservative candidates can win.

The GOP establishment, in the form of the Republican Governors’ Association, wrote off the race until late in the contest. Kevin Robillard of Politico:

Ben Carson is the candidate most Republicans would like to see become president. “Like” is the keyword. They like his demeanor, his personality and his remarkable life story. This personal affinity has translated into a six-point lead over Donald Trump in The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll. His unfavorable numbers are the lowest in the poll.

Jeb Bush is the most qualified candidate to be president. For all the “establishment” criticism, any fair reading of his eight years in office shows it would be hard to design a more successful conservative governorship—lower taxes, limited spending, Medicaid reform, landmark school-choice initiatives. He left office in 2007 with a 60% approval rating.

With all this potential, how is it that Ben Carson and Jeb Bush have been the two most poorly prepared candidates in the GOP debates, including the undercard?
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that a sitting president of the United States actually would have to know something about things like federal spending, tax policy, entitlements and foreign affairs.

An internal investigation by the Obama State Department discovered information that a top State Department aide to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, disgraced Democrat Anthony Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin, while working as a government employee was involved in activities that could be construed as serious conflicts of interest.The investigation also discovered evidence of overpayments by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to her alleged “closest aide.”

In an unanswered letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Sen. Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, stated that a special probe by the State Department’s inspector general uncovered possible leveraging of a State Department job by Huma Abedin that appears to have benefited her other employers while she worked for Mrs. Clintion. The two paid positions were with the now infamous Clinton Foundation and a consulting firm called Teneo Strategies that is also tied to former President Bill Clinton.