RUTHFULLY YOURS

Marco Rubio is suddenly everywhere in Iowa. He’s campaigning alongside Joni Ernst, the state’s popular senator. He’s in the headlines of the Des Moines Register and Sioux City Journal, both of which endorsed him. He’s playing to standing-room-only crowds, jamming in three or four events a day.

That is a change for the Florida senator—and a carefully planned one. Of all the Republican candidates, none is playing a more complex (or longer) game than Mr. Rubio. Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz are following the conventional route of betting that big early victories will lock in the nomination. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and John Kasich are using another classic approach—putting all their chips on one state, hoping to jump-start a move.

Mr. Rubio by contrast is flouting the usual rules, playing everywhere at once and nowhere on top. It’s the Wait Them Out strategy. The plan hinges on edgy calculations and big risks. Yet given the unusual nature of this primary cycle, the approach may prove as plausible as any other.

The first of those Rubio calculations is that he has the ability to finish strong in Iowa. The Rubio team has bided its time in the state, convinced that it is possible to peak too soon. And Iowa voters do tend to be last-minute deciders. Rick Santorum, a few weeks from the 2012 Iowa caucuses, was averaging about 7%; he finished with nearly 25% of the vote. Newt Gingrich, by contrast, saw his numbers tank in the homestretch.

Donald Trump missed Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate, and a funny thing happened: A serious conversation broke out.

The conversation was, among other things, about what it would take to ensure American security in a time of Islamic State terrorism, what it means to be a conservative in the mixed-up environment of 2016 and, most heatedly, about what to do with illegal immigrants.

The seven candidates who did show up argued with one another, pointedly and occasionally angrily but rarely on personal terms. Significant differences emerged, which is what is supposed to happen in debates.

The last Republican presidential debate before the Iowa caucuses focused on many issues from immigration to Putin. Watch the highlights in two minutes. Photo: Getty

The consensus second-ranking contender, Sen. Ted Cruz, had to explain why there was no inconsistency between his votes against defense budgets and his fiery rhetoric about sending waves of American bombers to attack Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq.

Sen. Marco Rubio tried to sound the toughest notes on fighting extremists. At one point he said Islamic State forces “want to trigger an apocalyptic Armageddon showdown” and “need to be defeated militarily, and that will take overwhelming U.S. force.”

The Hillary Clinton apparat has never obeyed Marquess of Queensberry political rules, and they’re most vicious when cornered. So perhaps it reveals something about the probe into Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified material on her personal email server that her enforcers are now assailing the integrity of the investigators.

The latest target is David Seide, who serves as counselor and acting senior adviser to State Department Inspector General Steve Linick. A decade ago as an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Mr. Seide was tangentially involved in the prosecution of David Rosen, the finance director of Mrs. Clinton’s New York Senate campaign in 2000, who was acquitted at trial.

“You have a guy who used his former position to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into Mrs. Clinton that amounted to nothing, who then continues that work in the State Department. That has fingerprints on it that are just too visible and just lead to all sorts of questions,” Steve Israel told Politico for a Jan. 25 hit and run.

The wired-in New York House Democrat is a Clintonista in good standing, and Mr. Israel went on to speculate: “It actually seems to be a pattern emerging. This is the second known high-ranking official in the IG office with a glaring conflict of interest.” Emilia DeSanto, the deputy IG at State, is a former aide to Republican Senator Chuck Grassley.

A spokesman for the IG denied any conflict, noting that Mr. Rosen was indicted by a different federal prosecutor after Mr. Seide left the government. Mr. Seide did investigate the same 2000 Brentwood gala and fundraiser whose alleged campaign-finance violations led to the Rosen charges, and he won a conviction against a separate Clinton donor, who helped bankroll the event, for stock-price manipulation.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz both have been described as “insurgency” candidates, but it is important to ask: Insurgents on behalf of what, exactly? An excellent example of what this means in real terms is the question of ethanol, the useless gasoline additive that the federal government inflicts on American consumers at the behest of corn growers, processors, and related special interests.

Ethanol is, inevitably, dear to many hearts in corn-producing Iowa, which makes it a tender subject for presidential candidates of both parties facing the early test of the Iowa caucus. It presents a test of principle. One of the basic problems of American governance is the interaction of what is known in political-economy terms as “concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.” A manufacturing tax credit that subsidizes Starbucks as a “manufacturer” to the extent that it puts beans into bags doesn’t mean very much to the average taxpayer or member of Congress, but it may mean a lot to Starbucks. Special-interest groups will fight very hard for their perks, and no one has as strong an incentive to fight against them.

RELATED: Refusing to Kiss King Corn’s Ring in Iowa

The ethanol program is pure corporate welfare. It is marketed as an environmental initiative to the Left and a hedge against filthy “foreign oil” to the Right, but it is simply a mandate, a federal rule that says gasoline producers must buy ethanol and mix it into their product. It’s nice to have a marketing department with nuclear weapons and an IRS, so the corn-juice guys are very defensive about their mandate.

To stand against the ethanol mandate in Iowa is a test of political character.

In April 2009, Katrina Pierson was a disappointed Obama voter and, she emphasized, “just a mom,” when she made her first foray into politics: a seven-minute speech at the Dallas Tea Party Tax Day Rally. “No president is going to change your life circumstances,” she reminded the crowd. “No government, no friends, no family, but most certainly no president is going to change your life circumstances.”

How things change.

In November, Donald Trump handpicked Pierson, a Texas tea-party activist, conservative pundit, and erstwhile Republican candidate for Congress, to be his national spokesperson, assigning her a seemingly superhuman task. In fact, it has proven an inspired choice. In Pierson, Trump found someone whose relationship to conservatism, and to the truth, is as elastic as his own.

Start with Pierson’s professional history. Ironically, it was as a volunteer for Ted Cruz’s insurgent campaign for a Senate seat in Texas that Pierson first found the national spotlight, becoming a regular guest on cable news (including and especially Fox News). A review of appearances from Pierson’s early political career reveals no particular trenchancy, but certainly a dose of that inimitable and inborn quality: “media savvy.”

Perhaps that is what she brought to the Cruz campaign, since the actual work she did remains a point of contention among the Cruz faithful. An activist involved in both Cruz’s senatorial and presidential campaigns told Politico, “My 8-year-old did more work for Ted than she ever thought about doing,” and Cruz insiders added that the senator never considered bringing Pierson in on his national efforts. (He did describe her as an “utterly fearless principled conservative” when she launched an unsuccessful primary bid against Texas congressman Pete Sessions in 2013.)

In any event, Pierson became a prominent Cruz supporter and even appeared on stage with him the evening of his general-election victory. And she continued to support Cruz long after Election Night: In January 2015, Pierson introduced him at a tea-party event in South Carolina, and in March she told Megyn Kelly that Cruz was “a walking testament to immigrants who have fled their countries to seek freedom and achieved the American dream.”

But since joining the Trump campaign, Pierson has been eager to suggest that it is Cruz himself who is the immigrant. “There’s a ton of voters who are a little uncomfortable voting for someone outside of the country,” she told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this month, insinuating that Cruz’s birth makes him ineligible for the presidency. Oddly, Pierson had no such concerns when she was campaigning for him — or when, in March 2015, just after Cruz’s presidential announcement and shortly after her comments on The Kelly File, she wrote on Facebook: “Repeating your wishes as facts isn’t going to make them so. Ted Cruz is a natural citizen by BIRTH and is eligible to be President,” adding: “For those constantly citing otherwise is plain whiney and the most unintelligent way to prop up your choice. So, your candidate is just going to have to bring it in the debates. Good luck!”

Earlier this week, Senator Ben Sasse launched a barrage of questioning tweets at Donald Trump. Most dealt with policy. Unsurprisingly, the tweet that got personal is getting most of the attention: Low blow? Only if you think voters shouldn’t consider character and personal integrity when evaluating a president. Here’s what Sasse is talking about: Trump engaged in a highly publicized affair with actress Marla Maples while he was married to his first wife, Ivana Trump, and has written about having relationships with married women. “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller,” Trump wrote in his book “The Art of the Comeback.”

Trump also wrote in “Think Big and Kick Ass” that he’s been with married women: “Beautiful, famous, successful, married — I’ve had them all, secretly, the world’s biggest names.” I don’t think affairs — by themselves — disqualify a person from the presidency, but the combination of infidelity and boastfulness is particularly damaging.

Indeed this kind of braggadocio is more reminiscent of professional wrestlers or third-world strongmen than an American president. I’m reminded (with apologies to Jonah for borrowing one of his favorite references) of the Congolese dictator Joseph Desiré-Mobutu, who changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, meaning “the all-powerful warrior who because of his endurance and inflexible will to win will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.” Perhaps for Trump we could find the equivalent translation for “the all-dealmaking mogul who because of his wealth and will to win goes from conquest to conquest leaving divorce in his wake.” I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

Is Donald Trump the sharia of American politics? I’m having trouble finding much daylight between Islamic law’s repressive blasphemy standards and the mogul’s thin-skinned sense of privilege.

None of us wants to be insulted or smeared. But sharia forbids not only ridicule or slander against Islam; it bans any examination that casts Islam in an unflattering light. Worse, truth is not a defense: Even if one’s questions are based on undeniable past actions or verbatim quotes from scripture, tough questioning is considered blasphemous. Retribution, moreover, is often completely out of proportion to the scale of the perceived “offense.”

How is Trump different?

They say politics ain’t beanbag: People in and around it eventually get slammed by opponents and other critics. But to Trump, the mildest criticisms are “vicious” attacks.

Let’s take the exchange last summer with Megyn Kelly that prompted Trump to whine that he was unfairly treated and to heap abuse on Ms. Kelly in the aftermath. (Before I go on, note that I support Mr. Trump’s rival Ted Cruz, and that I am on friendly terms with Megyn Kelly, on whose program I periodically appear.)

Given the limited time, the slew of candidates to engage, and the grave problems faced by the country, could Kelly have made a better choice than to grill Trump on his derogatory remarks about women? As they say in the debate biz, that’s debatable. But the questions she asked were hardly irrelevant.

Presidential temperament is often a decisive electoral consideration. Furthermore, the “war on women” meme is a bread-and-butter Democratic attack: regrettably effective against Republicans in the last presidential election and certain to be reprised if Hillary Clinton is the Dems’ nominee. How do we gauge Trump as a prospective nominee if we don’t get a sense of what ammo can be fired at him and how he is apt to handle it?

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are the same candidate. They’re both leftist radicals with degrees in political science who held back some of their more radical ideas to pursue political office. In the two years that they served together in the Senate, they voted the same way 93 percent of the time.

They’re also political opportunists. Bernie Sanders, no less than Hillary, reinvented his political views, including his allegiance to Socialism, numerous times over the years. Sanders moderated his positions on everything from gun control to Israel when it helped his political career. He’s now modifying plenty of positions all over again in order to appeal to new and different voters.

Bernie Sanders is no more authentic than Hillary Clinton and she is no less radical than he is. Both her attempts to appear mainstream and his efforts to seem radical are political poses that they deploy to bring in money and support from major blocs within the Democratic Party. Underneath the theater, Hillary Clinton is a longtime Alinsky fan while Bernie Sanders stumbles trying to update his views with the current obsessions of the radical left on everything from immigration to gun control to race.

The real struggle isn’t over beliefs, but over tactics.

While Hillary Clinton and her allies are attacking Bernie Sanders over his radical backing for Single Payer, in 1993, she told her husband that “managed competition“ was a “crock” and that “single-payer” was necessary. Hillary had proposed her own version of “Medicare for All” and when asked if it would be a backdoor for single payer, said, “What are we afraid of? Let’s see where the competition leads us.”

Here’s How He Would Defend America Against Threats from the Middle East, Russia and China, According to His Chief National Security Advisor Dr. Victoria Coates

You might not think that the national security and foreign policy advisor for one of the leading 2016 presidential candidates would have the pedigree of a University of Pennsylvania art history Ph.D. specializing in Italian renaissance studies, and a former consulting curator title at the Cleveland Museum of Art. But then you haven’t met Dr. Victoria Coates, the self-described Renaissance woman and the chief articulator and defender of Cruz’s Jeane Kirkpatrick-inspired philosophy that has vexed many across the Republican political spectrum to date.
During an in-depth interview with Dr. Coates on her new book, David’s Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art, we had the chance to pick the brain of Cruz’s national security consigliere on topics including:

The principles that underlie the “Cruz Doctrine”
Dr. Coates’ challenge to Cruz’s critics in the GOP foreign policy Establishment
What “winning” in the Middle East would look like for America under a President Cruz
The single greatest underestimated or ignored threat to America’s national interest

Ben Weingarten: Who are some of the individuals, or what are some of the works that have had the greatest influence on your worldview as it relates to foreign policy and national security, and by extension the worldview of Senator Cruz?

Reagan and Kirkpatrick (Wikipedia)
Dr. Victoria Coates: Well certainly in terms of David’s Sling, it’s in many ways a cautionary tale about how one chooses to understand the development of democracy, and how it can be spread. I mean because certainly this tells us it is a trial-and-error process, it takes a long time and it can’t be taken for granted. So certainly that’s how it has informed my worldview. For Senator Cruz, I know he looks very much for models of success, which sounds very simple, but it’s amazing to me how many people will look at failed models and sort of “try, try again,” using tactics that have not been particularly successful. So he looks at a President like Ronald Reagan, which is very popular to do, but it’s very hard to actually imitate the Reagan model because you have to make a number of very difficult choices, you have to set your priorities clearly, and you have to just stay focused on them like a laser. And so as he looks at our challenges today, he would see Reagans’ and [Jeane] Kirkpatricks’ and Fred Iklés’ interactions with the Soviet Union as a great model: That you don’t pretend that you can domesticate them; you don’t pretend that they are suddenly going to become your friend; but rather that they are a terrible threat that has to be fought every time they poke their heads up. And that does not mean necessarily invading, but it does mean being extremely mindful of America’s interests.
“[Senator Cruz] would see Reagans’ and [Jeane] Kirkpatricks’ and Fred Iklés’ interactions with the Soviet Union as a great model”
Ben Weingarten: Do you view Islamic supremacism as the analogue — although obviously differing in some ways — to the ideology and forces of the Soviet Union?
Dr. Victoria Coates: Certainly in terms of being an existential threat, it was interesting over Christmas the [Iranian] Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini came out with a little-noticed statement about how he felt Iran was locked in a “civilizational struggle” with the West. Now, I’m not in the business of destroying anybody else’s civilization, but I am in the business of protecting my own. And when somebody says they’re out to destroy it, I think we should probably pay some attention. And so, it’s not as you said, directly analogous to Soviet totalitarianism, but it could only be a matter of time. And so I think we need to organize the way we think about this in terms of protecting and celebrating both our culture, our allies because I think we are a tremendously powerful force for good around the world, and so that’s something I’d like to perpetuate.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) today recalled “the good old days” when Donald Trump “did a fundraiser or two for me.”

Reid was asked outside a closed policy luncheon on Capitol Hill today about Trump’s compliments.

“I’ve always had a good relationship with Nancy Pelosi. I’ve never had a problem. Reid will be gone,” Trump told MSNBC yesterday, in reference to the Nevada senator’s impending retirement. “I always had a decent relationship with Reid, although lately, obviosuly, I haven’t been dealing with him so he’ll actually use my name as the ultimate — you know, as the ultimate of the billionaires in terms of, you know, people you don’t want.”

“But I always had a great relationship with Harry Reid,” Trump continued. “And frankly, if I weren’t running for office I would be able to deal with her or Reid or anybody. But I think I’d be able to get along very well with Nancy Pelosi and just about everybody. Hey, look, I think I’ll be able to get along well with Chuck Schumer. I was always very good with Schumer. I was close to Schumer in many ways.”

Since Trump began his presidential run, Reid has slammed many of the real-estate mogul’s statements on topics like immigration and Muslims from the Senate floor.

Today, Reid noted, “We’ve gotten along fine.”