RUTHFULLY YOURS

Norm Coleman is free Thursday after all. The former Republican senator from Minnesota was supposed to co-host a fundraiser for Jeb Bush, but the former Florida governor on Saturday gave up his bid for the GOP nomination after a limp finish in the South Carolina primary. Now Mr. Coleman – who originally backed South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham before he quit the race in December — is throwing his support to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.

Virginia Republican fundraiser Bobbie Kilberg, who joined Mr. Bush’s camp last week, said nine donors reached out Sunday morning to say that if she backed Mr. Rubio, they would, too.
“That’s a lot of people to call you at 10 in the morning on a Sunday,” said Mrs. Kilberg, who originally backed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s now-defunct presidential campaign. “I really believe (Mr. Rubio) is the only candidate around which mainstream Republicans can coalesce in order to win this nomination and win the general election.”

It’s the presidential version of musical chairs, as one candidate after another no longer sees a path to the nomination, goes home and leaves rivals jockeying for their cushion, so to speak.

Mr. Coleman and Mrs. Kilberg are among the first wave of major donors, elected officials and party leaders who are gravitating to Mr. Rubio after Mr. Bush’s exit. Despite his resistance to being lumped with the Republican “establishment,” Mr. Rubio is emerging as that wing of the party’s top choice. READ MORE AT SITE

http://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-moment-of-trump-1456076806

Donald Trump’s convincing victory in South Carolina Saturday marks a moment of truth in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. The businessman is now the clear favorite for the Republican nomination, yet he is also the candidate most disliked by GOP voters and according to the polls the least likely to win in November. Are Republicans really going to jump off the cliff into the great Trump unknown?

Perhaps so. About a third of GOP voters seem to be confirmed cliff-divers, as Mr. Trump won handily by rolling up a similar share of the vote he won in New Hampshire. He won again across most demographic and ideological groups, especially with those most fed up with Washington and GOP leaders. Mr. Trump should also send a thank-you note to the pope for attacking him, since he won 34% of evangelical Protestant voters who may have resented the Catholic pontiff’s ill-conceived intervention.

Mr. Trump now heads into Nevada and the March 1 southern primaries with momentum that would typically carry him to the nomination. The difference is that Mr. Trump engenders passionate support and also passionate opposition. His unfavorable ratings are the highest in the GOP field, with a net negative in the most recent WSJ/NBC poll of minus-31. Hillary Clinton is only minus-13.

The blustery businessman also doesn’t seem all that eager to expand his support. In his victory speech Saturday night, he offered a passing grace note to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz for doing well but he was mostly self-referential and didn’t mention Jeb Bush, who had earlier announced he is leaving the race. Mr. Trump declared that he is leading “a movement,” but for that to be true he will have to unify the Republican Party. It still isn’t clear what his movement represents other than Mr. Trump’s blunt persona, his family and ultimatums to various countries. READ MORE AT SITE

Senator Marco Rubio’s performance in CNN’s GOP town hall Wednesday was a 45-minute lesson on how to articulate conservative Republican ideas.

Some conservative voters might prefer, for example, Senator Ted Cruz’s approach to Syria policy or his push to abolish the IRS. But in terms of being able to attractively and convincingly communicate the value of conservative ideas to everyone, regardless of race or class, Rubio may be unmatched among the Republican candidates. His rhetorical ability and political talent alone make him an asset to the Republican party.

Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), who has endorsed Rubio, cut an ad Tuesday in South Carolina that concluded, “Democrats fear Marco the most.” A New York Times headline from May declared that “A Hillary Clinton Match-Up With Marco Rubio Is a Scary Thought for Democrats” — as it should be if polling indicates anything. Rubio is the only Republican candidate since August who has consistently beaten Clinton in head-to-head poll matchups, such as those conducted by NBC/WSJ, Quinnipiac, and USA Today/Suffolk University.

The roots of his appeal are manifold. His relatability and charm contrast starkly with Mitt Romney’s wealth, John McCain’s woodenness, and Donald Trump’s loud-mouthed egotism (to say nothing of Hillary Clinton, overall). Rubio had student loans; he postdated checks; and he smiles about the future while others yell and warn of America’s demise. His humor is self-deprecating without being pathetic — he has joked about his colorblindness, his high-heeled boots, and about having a football-addled head.

A president like Rubio could help transform the perception of how Republicans handle race and class issues. During the CNN town hall, he demonstrated sincerity and empathy by employing personal narrative when asked how, in light of such events as the Charleston church shooting of nine African Americans, he would address racism without being divisive.

With his response, Rubio appeared to take seriously the lived experiences of minorities, recounting that an African-American friend of his, who is a police officer, was pulled over about eight times over several years for no reason. He had earlier recounted the story on Fox News, when discussing legitimate reasons for the anger of Black Lives Matter. Criminal-justice reform might be a truly bipartisan concern, and Rubio has been the most prominent Republican candidate to spotlight it.

It has been said that Rubio’s Cuban heritage will not be enough to win more minority votes for the Republican party. And it shouldn’t be. Republicans should not exploit a candidate’s minority status as a tool to gain power, as Democrats often do. Rather, Republicans can reach minority voters by offering alternative ideas and policies to the Democratic ones that have failed them, as in Baltimore and Detroit. Nonetheless, Rubio’s life story has been an undeniable rhetorical advantage.

He speaks to the unique problems facing minorities, including those he faced, while stressing that his parents didn’t raise him to feel like a victim. This is how conservative Republicans should discuss issues of race: They can and should acknowledge minorities’ setbacks while emphasizing the role of family and personal virtue in overcoming them. At the town hall, Rubio described a childhood experience when kids taunted him and his immigrant family, telling them to return to Cuba. He said he “saw it as a reflection on those kids, not a reflection on America.” Again he recognizes the reality of prejudice, but he condemns the individuals who are to blame, rather than condemning all of America as profoundly racist.

Donald Trump has made it clear that international law will not stand in his way when interrogating terrorists. He has threatened to bring back waterboarding and “worse.” But did he have to repeat a totally fabricated story circulating via email about General Pershing summarily executing Muslims rebels in the Philippines using bullets dipped in pig’s blood?

MSNBC:

Donald Trump closed his South Carolina campaign on Friday with a rambling speech highlighted by a giddy, almost childlike, enthusiasm for torturing and summarily executing the suspected enemies of America in the name of safety.

Trump was in free-association mode ahead of Saturday’s primary, dwelling for an extended time on one topic, like heroin in New Hampshire or Japan’s monetary policy, and then jumping to another.

“I’m really good at the trade,” the billionaire told a crowd of thousands. “I’m really good at the borders.”

The standout topic, however, was terrorism and national security. Trump repeated – favorably – an apparent myth about how General John Pershing summarily executed dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines with tainted ammunition during a guerilla war against the occupying United States.

“He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said. “And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, okay?”

The story appears to be a hoax spread via e-mail forwards, according to rumor tracker Snopes.com,with no evidence it occurred.

The moral of the tale, according to Trump: “We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks.”

Trump was unimpressed with waterboarding, a banned interrogation tactic that he has pledged to bring back against suspected terrorists, and supplement with far worse forms of abuse.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-young-and-the-economically-clueless-1455924699?mod=trending_now_4

B ernie Sanders, the 74-year-old self-described democratic socialist, is surprising even himself with his primary-season success against Hillary Clinton, fueled by a staggering 83% majority of the under-30 vote in New Hampshire and 84% in the Iowa caucuses.

As this newspaper reported on Tuesday, voters in the millennial bracket, 18- to 34-year-olds, will for the first time equal the baby-boomer share of the electorate, at 31%. These young voters appear to be falling headlong for the Vermont senator’s plaintive narrative of economic “unfairness.” His throwaway prescriptions for redistributing income and wealth are being echoed by an increasingly nervous Mrs. Clinton—despite such policies’ having been jettisoned during her husband’s administration in the 1990s.

Then again, Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s vague promises that he will “make America great again” aren’t much more comforting—except to the masses of Americans responding to his populist diatribes against free trade and immigrants. He too scored well with the young in New Hampshire, though, winning 38% of the 18-29 support, more than double his closest competitor for that group, Ted Cruz, at 17%.

These young voters seem not to realize that the economic policies they find so resonant are the least likely to promote the growth and the social mobility they desire. They deserve to be lead from the discredited backwater of equalizing outcomes, forward with policies that instead help eliminate barriers frustrating their access to opportunities. READ MORE AT SITE

I’m watching the fierce South Carolina primary contest among the six remaining candidates for POTUS and a few things strike me as astounding.

The first is that all the seasoned politicians on stage––Governors Bush and Kasich, Senators Cruz and Rubio––have been relegated to straggler status by the non-politician in the race, billionaire businessman Donald Trump. (Dr. Ben Carson, the other non-politician, is hanging in there but not lighting any fires).

Second is that only Mr. Trump is raising the biggest issues facing our country, among them:

Closing our borders, which are being flooded with un-vetted illegal aliens who number, by now, into the millions
Bringing both corporations and jobs back to America
Fixing our Mt. Kilimanjaro of debt and Mt. Everest of unemployment
Strengthening our military
Third is that he is challenging our longtime and ridiculous policy of military intervention for the purpose of nation-building in exchange for…nothing! Why haven’t we taken our enemy’s oil or exacted other prices for the blood we’ve spilled and the honor we’ve spent?

Fourth is that he is saying out loud what most Americans have been thinking and feeling for almost eight years, specifically that as a result of our thunderously ineffective “leadership,” we have utterly failed to destroy ISIS and the other Islamic terrorists who spend every waking hour figuring out how to obliterate America, which they call “the great Satan,” and our staunchest ally, Israel, “the little Satan.”

ISIS has about 50,000 adherents, maybe even 75,000. In one week, the American military could obliterate this murderous sect from the face of the earth. But Barack Obama seems to have a peculiar aversion to fighting the enemies of America, hence the rise of this homicidal cult and the escalating threat it poses to our country.

And fifth is the degree to which Mr. Trump is already negotiating with both domestic and foreign leaders. He is letting American politicians know that deals can and will be made but that all of them must benefit America! And he is telling the entire world that the vacation that overseas leaders have had from true American leadership will be over the very second he enters the Oval Office.

All the while, Mr. Trump’s competitors and critics carp and whine about his “bluster,” “naiveté,” and “crudeness.” Wasn’t President Teddy Roosevelt accused of bluster? Wasn’t President Ronald Reagan accused of being naive? Wasn’t the liberals’ hero LBJ accused of crudeness? These are trifling criticisms, as are the accusations that Mr. Trump is “not a true conservative” and that in the past he was, gasp, a liberal. Well, we’ve given the self-described conservatives the entire House and Senate and they’ve failed us, so it’s time to give a born-again conservative a chance!

Tim O’Brien did not set out to write a conclusive assessment of Donald Trump’s wealth. But it was those three pages in a 275-page book that occasioned what is, even in the annals of frivolous Trump lawsuits, a special display of petty, thin-skinned litigiousness.

In October 2005, O’Brien, then a business reporter for the New York Times, published a book about Donald Trump, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald. The book was not a hatchet job. Not only did O’Brien interview friends and employees and business associates and political rivals and much of the rest of the Who’s Who of the World of Donald, he also chatted with the man himself — repeatedly. They met for formal interviews in Trump’s various homes and offices. Trump drove O’Brien around in his Ferrari and in his Mercedes. They watched Pulp Fiction together on Trump’s gold-laden private jet. It all went into the book, from which emerges a portrait of a complex, fickle, charming, self-obsessed, cinematic American original.

Of course, no book about Trump can avoid the quasi-impenetrable question of his wealth. In 2004, O’Brien had co-authored a piece for the Times detailing Trump’s financial woes — he had recently filed for the third of what would be four Chapter 11 bankruptcies — and quoted anonymous sources who reported that Trump’s wealth was not nearly what he claimed; in fact, it was in the hundreds of millions, they said. (Contemporaneous reports in the Washington Post and Time magazine suggested the same.) Trump, meanwhile, notoriously unreliable in his own estimates, offered figures ranging from $1.7 billion to $9.5 billion. In TrumpNation, O’Brien cited those numbers, alongside “three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances” who estimated his wealth was “somewhere between $150 million and $250 million.” Trump denied it, in his usual colorful fashion: “You can go ahead and speak to guys who have four-hundred-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I’m a great builder.”

Washington, D.C. — It was meant to be Bernie Sanders’s chance to demonstrate his familiarity with the issues facing African Americans. But when Sanders met with civil-rights leaders at the National Urban League’s D.C. headquarters on Thursday, all eyes were on Al Sharpton.

The reverend had participated in a similar gathering with Hillary Clinton earlier in the week, and seemed to suggest then that Clinton had already earned his endorsement. “Only you know, and you’re not telling,” he said playfully, pointing to Clinton as they left their Harlem meeting on Tuesday.

That exchange gave the wrong impression, Sharpton says Thursday. “I told her and Sanders that I was not making an endorsement until after we have put forward what is in our interest as a community,” he tells National Review, saying he wants the issues to take precedence over the horse race — at least for now.

Still, it looks almost certain that Sharpton will endorse one of the two remaining Democratic candidates. And he made it abundantly clear Thursday that he plans to use his clout with the African American community on behalf of whomever he ultimately chooses to support. When National Urban League president Marc Morial stressed that the leaders in attendance represented non-partisan organizations that do not endorse a candidate, Sharpton was quick to add a caveat. “Even though each organization does not endorse, some of us may individually,” he said. He later told reporters he’d be making up his mind between Clinton and Sanders “in the next day or so.”

“He has the ear of black America,” says Dominic Hawkins, a Sharpton spokesman, pointing out that the reverend is syndicated in over 40 media markets, “including many in South Carolina.” Though he says Sharpton could still decide to forgo a “formal endorsement,” Hawkins promises that the reverend has every intention of using his public platform to influence the Democratic race’s outcome in South Carolina and beyond.