RUTHFULLY YOURS

Conway, N.H. – Ted Cruz says the Republican presidential primary has reached a “new phase.” He’s acting like it, too.

Less than a month ago, the Texas senator was predicting the contest would narrow, as it typically has, to a two-man race between a conservative and an establishment favorite. But it turns out 2016 may have surprises in store even for Ted Cruz.

On Monday afternoon, as his campaign bus barrels down the highway here, Cruz appears to be surveying an altogether different landscape from the one he’d anticipated: Instead of a potential showdown with Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, he finds himself staring at Donald Trump, perhaps the one candidate with an even bigger claim to the outsider mantle.

“There’s no doubt the contours of the race have changed,” Cruz says, leaning back in the leather seat of his luxury bus, surrounded by campaign aides on all sides.

Cruz now sees Trump as the only man standing in his way. The collapse of their détente has scrambled the Republican race, forcing Cruz to make political calculations he’d planned on avoiding. But he delights in playing political strategist, and he is doing so now, analyzing the field anew, searching for Trump’s hidden weaknesses, and, for the first time here in New Hampshire, going after them aggressively.

Cruz has long scoffed at the traditional notion that there are “three legs” of the Republican stool — that is, that a candidate must satisfy economic conservatives, social conservatives, and foreign-policy hawks. Instead, he has talked about the “four lanes” of Republican voters — Evangelicals, libertarians, tea-party activists, and moderates — and argued that he can win over enough voters in the first three lanes to capture the nomination.

Cruz admits that Trump has eaten into his base. “The voters supporting Trump are coming from multiple lanes,” he says. “He’s got a significant numbers of moderates and liberals that are supporting him. He’s also drawing votes right now from some evangelicals, from some tea-party activists, and from some Reagan Democrats. From three of those four categories — evangelicals, tea-party activists, and Reagan Democrats — we have very, very strong appeal and strong support, and so we are battling him for support in each of those lanes.”

Here in New Hampshire, where Trump leads in the polls, the contours of a Cruz offensive are coming into view. The senator tells me we’re entering the phase of the campaign “when the voters begin seriously examining the records of the candidates.”

The children of political candidates are useful adornments in campaign literature and ads, and when they are older, as character witnesses on the campaign trail.

Rarely are they used as attack dogs, let alone armed with shameless talking points to try to dampen the rise of an inspirational political rival. But nothing is beneath Bill and Hillary Clinton. So they trotted out their daughter, Chelsea, to warn about the dastardly designs that Bernie Sanders has for ending Medicare as we know it.

It’s part of a hammer-and-tongs assault that should feel familiar to Republicans. It turns out that becoming the target of Medicare demagoguery isn’t just for Newt Gingrich or Paul Ryan anymore. No one has released an ad of Bernie Sanders pushing a senior citizen over a cliff yet, but if the Vermont senator continues his rise, just give it a couple of more weeks.

Chelsea Clinton charged that Sanders “wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance.” For those keeping score at home, that’s a lot of dismantling. Chelsea said she worried — the chain of reasoning was left fuzzy — that Sanders would somehow give Republicans “permission” to go back to the pre-Obamacare era and “strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance.”

Frightened yet? What Sanders is proposing is so-called Medicare for all, a universal, single-payer health-care program that has been the goal of progressives for decades. For this, he is being savaged by a Hillary Clinton who in the early 1990s famously immolated herself in a doomed fight for her version of universal coverage.

The gravamen of her case against Sanders is that he is a socialist — and an enemy of the welfare state. He is advocating a further step in the Democratic crusade to expand the social safety net — and is a dangerous radical because of it. He is a threat to all that has been achieved by the Left — because he wants to achieve more.

Max Blumenthal, who was revealed by the Hillary Clinton forced email dump as one of her secret sources and advisers on Israel and Middle East affairs, is one of the great Israel haters in America today.

A writer should avoid hyperbole. But when it comes to Max Blumenthal, son of longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, it’s hard to avoid superlatives. Max is quite simply one of the most biased, anti-Semitic, terrorist-defending, Israel-has-no-right-to-exist haters out there.

Max, who spends most of his professional life being ignored because of his extreme, hate-filled drivel, recently became the focus of scrutiny when it was revealed that his father, Sid Blumenthal, promoted Max’s anti-Semitic writings to Ms. Clinton when she was Secretary of State of the United States. More explosive are Ms. Clinton’s emails praising Max’s work.

Throughout this entire email scandal, both Max and his father have been silent. One might assume the Hillary campaign sees they have a Jeremiah Wright problem and have done everything to muzzle Max.

Now I’ve discovered that Max might have a problem with America too, seeing as he is prepared to repudiate the First Amendment.

It appears Max can malign the Jewish State and falsely accuse it of the most vile atrocities but the moment someone exposes him, he demands press censorship.

After reading my column that exposed the influence of his writings on Ms. Clinton, Max wrote to The Huffington Post demanding my column be removed. A veiled threat of legal proceedings for libel was included.

Once upon a time, in the good old days of the first Clinton presidency, Bill Clinton turned his back on his wife. He did so after her crash-and-burn on HillaryCare helped usher in the first Republican House in 40 years. Mr. Clinton got the message and went on to embrace welfare reform, sign a cut in the capital-gains tax, and even declare that “the era of big Government is over.”

Now his wife is returning the favor. Today Hillary Clinton is running hard against the agenda that defined her husband’s presidency. And not only his economics.

This campaign she has cast aside her husband’s formula on abortion—“safe, legal and rare”—that she herself ran on in the past. Gone is the moderating nuance of yesteryear: reducing the number of abortions, finding “common ground” with pro-lifers, even, in her first campaign for the Senate in 2000, how she would be OK with a limit on partial-birth or late-term abortions so long as it didn’t threaten the life of the mother.

The new Mrs. Clinton has moved to the absolutist position of the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. Today Mrs. Clinton’s formula is safe, legal, unlimited—and federally subsidized. We saw this new Hillary Clinton at a Planned Parenthood rally in New Hampshire this month, where she said she favored “safe and legal abortion” and denounced the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion.