RUTHFULLY YOURS

As we come to an end of another grim week in politics, two views of how Campaign 2016 is going from Team Bush:

First, the dean of the consultant-industrial complex, the man who gave us Presidents McCain and Romney** and is now seeking to make it a hat-trick as head of Bush’s SuperPac; Mike Murphy explains why Donald Trump doesn’t matter:

He’s dead politically, he’ll never be president of the United States, ever. By definition I don’t think you can be a front-runner if you’re totally un-electable. I think there’s there an a-priori logic problem in that.

So that’s great news for Jeb. Because if you discount the front-runner, and the runner-up to the front-runner, and Cruz and Rubio and whatnot, then the real front-runner is Jeb, who’s totally electable even if no actual electors want to elect him. Why is that?

We see Feb. 1 to March 15, 45 days, as our period to seize the nomination and get in front—and there are a lot of states and a lot of congressional districts and a lot of targeting to that. One of the reasons we’ve worked so hard and Jeb, frankly, has inspired so many people to donate to us is so we have the resources to pursue that campaign. Most of these other guys are all running on spec. We’re at a point now where we’re significantly funded for those 45 days, cash in the bank today. Nobody else is in that situation in this race. Nobody’s close…

For most of these guys, it’s: Well, lightning’s going to strike, Jindal-mania is going to hit the New Hampshire primary, I’m going to win and I’m suddenly going to turn around a ton of money and then I’m going to run the momentum all the way through March. Here’s the problem with that: let’s say it’s the 10th of February, you have won the New Hampshire primary two days ago. You’re only 20 days out so you should be on the air already…

Bill Clinton in his two successful races for the White House in 1992 and 1996 won overwhelming majorities among Jewish voters, with margins not seen since the election of Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964 or of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to his third and fourth terms in 1940 and 1944. Since 1992, the Jewish vote has slowly become more competitive between the two major parties, approaching a 2/3 versus 1/3 split between Democrats and Republicans. The 2016 presidential race is likely to offer a choice between Hillary Clinton, who does not appear to have the same tight hold over Jewish voters that her husband did, and a Republican with far stronger pro-Israel credentials.
The early debates and campaigns for the nomination in both parties have been revealing for the issues that seem to matter to partisans on each side, and those that do not. With regard to United States relations with Israel, the topic has been almost entirely absent from discussion on the Democratic side. Democrats, and especially those on the Left who increasingly dominate the Democratic Party, are far less supportive of Israel or strong American-Israel ties than previous generations of Democratic presidents or leaders — such as Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, Bill Clinton and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

It was inevitable that Bernie Sanders would be accused of sexism sooner or later.

His day came over the weekend. At the signature Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, Hillary Clinton hit the Vermont senator for saying in the first Democratic debate that “all the shouting in the world” wouldn’t keep guns out of the wrong hands. According to Clinton, Sanders had directed a notoriously sexist insult at her — although not one of the 15 million people watching at the time had noticed it.

“I haven’t been shouting,” Clinton intoned, “but sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting.” What Clinton’s plaint lacked in plausibility, it made up for in bad faith.

Shouting has not typically been considered a loaded term. Sanders didn’t say “screeching.” He didn’t say “nagging.” In fact, he had been saying that shouting is ineffectual in the gun debate long before he was entangled in an argument about gun control with Hillary Clinton.

There can be no doubt now: The U.S. economy is struggling, inequality is on the rise and too many Americans feel uncertain about their future.

On the campaign trail, I have met many of these men and women, who sit at the kitchen table each week, straining to stretch their dollars from shrinking paychecks. Families who can’t save for retirement with near-zero interest rates. Young parents who are being crushed by their student debt. Shop owners who can’t get a loan because their community bank went out of business.

We’ve had more than six years to watch the left’s prescriptions in action and the verdict is in: They don’t work. Under President Obama, the economy has been hobbled. The 73,000-page tax code is too complex to navigate without an army of accountants. The administration has added $7 trillion in new federal debt, and has doubled down on environmental regulations that crush business owners and farmers while raising energy prices.

Greenburgh, a town in Westchester, an area which has some of the fastest growing Jewish suburban communities in the country, is an unlikely place to find hate groups holding forth in its Town Hall auditorium. It’s certainly not the place where you expect a man linked to a shadowy terrorist bank to be promoting hatred against Jews and Israel with the acquiescence of the town supervisor.

And yet, bomb-sniffing dogs and metal detectors were the order of the day in the Greenburgh Town Hall as Jewish protesters gathered outside while inside opponents of Israel denounced the Jewish State.

The Jewish Rapid Response Coalition had come to stand up to hate, but found itself blocked and harassed while hate groups enjoyed the use of a taxpayer funded building. The event went ahead against the recommendation of Police Chief Chris McNerney. It went ahead even though its main speaker had defended terrorism and had authored an article titled, “Did Israel Really Think Hamas Would Turn the Other Cheek?”

She lied to the nation in 2012, and she’s lying again now. You don’t look surprised.
‘We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

Those words, depraved words, were spoken by then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton, with President Obama by her side, on September 14, 2012. This was at Joint Base Andrews, during the most sacred of rites: the return of the remains of Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, and Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, all slain in the line of duty in Benghazi.

And all slain, it must never be forgotten, by jihadists carrying out what Clinton, Obama, and high-ranking national-security officials throughout the United States government knew full well was a planned terrorist attack, not a “protest” run amok and incited by “an awful Internet video.”

That obvious fact is now explicit after Mrs. Clinton’s galling testimony on Thursday before the House select committee investigating the Benghazi massacre.

The American people continue to tell pollsters that they want a candidate to talk issues and substance rather than attack opponents.This is a load of crap. Americans may “want” that kind of campaign, but the kind of contest they respond to is the slash-and-burn, take-no-prisoners approach of candidates like Donald Trump.

Hillary Clinton’s recent rise in the polls has Senator Bernie Sanders playing catch-up. And many politicians believe that the best way to do that is not so much elevate your own numbers, but drag your opponents’ ratings down.

Sanders appears to have opened a new chapter in his campaign that employs a modified strategy of attacking Hillary Clinton’s record, and by extension, Clinton herself.