RUTHFULLY YOURS

After being in the minors for the last debate, Chris Christie graduated to the main stage of the Republican clash for the presidential nomination Tuesday night. And he made the most of it.

The governor of New Jersey was on the periphery of the debate’s dramatic fireworks — with Ted Cruz and Rand Paul trying to blow up Marco Rubio on foreign policy and immigration while Jeb Bush tried to elevate himself by going directly at Donald Trump as the “chaos candidate.”

So Christie played to his own strengths, talking tough on ISIS and terror while making the key point that the signal responsibility of the president is to keep the citizenry safe.

Christie’s future in the Republican race rests entirely on his ability either to win or place a very strong second in New Hampshire, which holds the first primary (after the Iowa caucus) Feb. 9.

He’s in the mix there, and his confident bearing and fluent presentation might well have the effect of solidifying his soft support in the state and causing others to take a renewed interest in him.

Certainly, this was the most important and substantive debate so far because the candidates finally began airing out their real differences. No one had yet laid a glove on Marco Rubio, but Tuesday night, Cruz and Paul went for his jugular on policy — and Rubio did everything he could to lay into them in response.

The divisions on foreign policy were stark. Rubio is the hawk of the race, advocating without apology for the use of ground troops against ISIS in Syria. Cruz talks about destroying ISIS in its territorial stronghold in Syria and Iraq from the air, which almost certainly cannot be done.

Since it fell into GOP hands, the House of Representatives has voted more than 50 times to repeal Obamacare, in whole or in part. The exercise was worthwhile, because political theater is sometimes worthwhile. But with the Senate in the way, and a presidential veto as certain as night follows day, there was never much hope that a “frontal assault” on the fortress walls would succeed.

As Senator Marco Rubio has shown, a careful study of how Obamacare works suggests a much better strategy: Besiege the program until it surrenders. Establish a cordon around Obamacare so that it can’t expand, cut it off from its main sources of support, and use sappers to undermine the defenses.

Obamacare has the same congenital weakness as every other law that seeks to “guarantee” issuance of health insurance to all who apply for it: It starts by imposing huge losses on insurance companies that are absolutely vital for the law to function properly. Any program of guaranteed issuance must therefore find a way to subsidize the participation of insurance companies, or they will exit the market altogether. Once insurance companies exit the market, the jig is up, and there is no choice but to repeal the law.

I started the day today on the radio north and south of the border – first with Bill Bennett across the fruited plain of this great republic, and then with John Oakley in Her Majesty’s frosty Dominion. You can hear the Bill Bennett interview here – I show up about two-thirds of the way through, but the whole show is, as always with Bill, well worth a listen.

The subject, of course, was last night’s Republican debate. My main point is that in the Cruz/Rubio showdown Marco Rubio’s weakness is more disqualifying than Ted Cruz’s weakness. Rubio accuses Cruz of being bad on national security. But there is a genuine difference of opinion in the base about the precise balance between security and liberty, between (in its extreme manifestations) the Lindsey Graham position and the Rand Paul position. People might be better disposed to suffer the attentions of the Big Security State if we were pulverizing our enemies, but there’s little to be said for surrendering individual freedom in the cause of unwon wars waged ineffectively and interminably. So there’s a real dispute about that.

But there’s very little dispute about Rubio’s Achilles’ heel: the Gang of Eight deal which betrays a sentimentalized view of mass immigration to which the base is overwhelmingly hostile. As I said to Bill, even when he talks tough, he kind of misses the point: Rubio rejected the plan to bring in 10,000 Syrian refugees because, he said, even if 9,999 of them were okay, we can’t take the risk that the 10,000th would be a terrorist. That’s not where the base is: GOP voters increasingly take the view that, even if that 9,999 never build a single pipe bomb in their garage, large numbers and perhaps even a majority are incompatible with a developed First World society in a more basic, cultural sense, and provide the comfort zone in which the terrorists can move with ease. That’s why Trump’s “gaffe” has sent his poll numbers up into the thirties and beyond. Rubio sounded tough, but he still isn’t where primary voters are.

~After Bill, I joined Toronto’s Number One morning man John Oakley on AM640, for a little more Trump, some thoughts on Jeb!, and some reflections on the big climate beano in Paris, starting with this absurd line from CNN:

The accord achieved one major goal. It limits average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures.

This is the hubris of fools. King Canute gave his demonstration at the water’s edge to teach his courtiers the limits of kingly power. King Barack, Queen Angela, Prince Justin and the rest have neither the irony nor humility to understand the stupidity of an agreement to set the planet’s temperature.