RUTHFULLY YOURS

A specter is haunting the conservative movement. From the dark underbelly of corrupt Washington, D.C., an unyielding “Republican establishment” has come out to feast upon the mutilated corpses of Reagan, Goldwater, and Buckley. The smarmy hucksters who make up its rank are masters of disguise: During the day, they insist that they represent the great silent majority of conservative Americans; at night, they prove that they’re in it only for the money, the power, and the Georgetown social scene. The monsters have names — such as Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Nikki Haley, Trey Gowdy, Mike Lee, and . . . wait, what?

To turn on talk radio or to sift through the murkier regions of the Internet is, invariably, to be told that the leaders of today’s reform conservative movement are RINOs — Republicans in Name Only — through and through. According to many who inhabit the Right, even those men and women who rose in the 2010 tea-party wave have fallen now to the dark side. Once, they led the fightback against Barack Obama; now, just a few short years later, they have allied themselves with official Washington in a dastardly scheme to maintain the status quo.

Is this claim true? No, it is not. Indeed, by simply taking a look back at the last five years of conservative commentary on three well-known reform conservatives, we can see that the storyline of “tea-party champion becomes establishment stooge” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

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.