RUTHFULLY YOURS

At some point between 2006 and 2008, the American people decided to turn their backs on the world. Between the seeming futility of the war in Iraq and the financial collapse of 2008, Americans decided they’d had enough.

In Barack Obama, they found a leader who could channel their frustration. Obama’s foreign policy, based on denying the existence of radical Islam and projecting the responsibility for Islamic aggression on the US and its allies, suited their mood just fine. If America is responsible, then America can walk away. Once it is gone, so the thinking has gone, the Muslims will forget their anger and leave America alone.

Sadly, Obama’s foreign policy assumptions are utter nonsense. America’s abandonment of global leadership has not made things better. Over the past seven years, the legions of radical Islam have expanded and grown more powerful than ever before. And now in the aftermath of the jihadist massacres in Paris and San Bernadino, the threats have grown so abundant that even Obama cannot pretend them away.

As a consequence, for the first time in a decade, Americans are beginning to think seriously about foreign policy. But are they too late? Can the next president repair the damage Obama has caused? The Democrats give no cause for optimism. Led by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential hopefuls stubbornly insist that there is nothing wrong with Obama’s foreign policy. If they are elected to succeed him, they pledge to follow in his footsteps.

WASHINGTON—Democrats backing the effort to overhaul American education have become increasingly concerned that presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton isn’t committed to their cause, and some donors are holding back support for her campaign.

Their worries stem from skeptical comments she has made about charter schools and teacher evaluations, as well as her close relationship with teachers’ unions, who are critical of both.

“There are a lot of deep-pocketed donors who are concerned, and they’re going to hang onto their checkbooks until there is more clarity,” said Whitney Tilson, managing partner of Kase Capital, who has given more than $150,000 to Democrats in recent years. He hasn’t donated any money to Mrs. Clinton or the super PAC supporting her this year “primarily because of this issue.”

Another major Democratic donor, Eli Broad, refused requests for contributions from another friendly super PAC, and only changed his mind after personal reassurances from former President Bill Clinton and campaign chairman John Podesta that Mrs. Clinton will support charter schools.

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.

Hillary Clinton has no record to run on. Family income is lower and the world is more dangerous. Donald Trump nailed it when he told Chris Wallace, “Hillary calls me ‘dangerous’? She’s killed hundreds of thousands of people with her stupidity.” Trump was referring to the Obama administration’s campaign to overthrow Arab dictators like Libya’s Qaddafi and Egypt’s Mubarak, which contributed to the chaos in the Middle East after the so-called “Arab Spring.” Marco Rubio can’t attack Hillary’s disastrous foreign policy record because–as Ted Cruz observes–Rubio supported all the same stupid policies. Picture a Cruz-Clinton presidential debate: Cruz denounces Hillary’s incompetence in promoting chaos in the Middle East. Hillary remonstrates, “But most Republicans supported me!” Cruz counters: “That’s right–I’m running against you and against the Establishment in my own party.” Game, set, match.

Here’s a word of consolation for my neocon friends: It’s not personal, just business. I’m a neocon too, an ex-lefty who went rightward with Reagan and carried my spear in the final phase of the Cold War. I was chief economist at Jude Wanniski’s supply-side consulting firm Polyconomics, which is as neocon as you can get, and I give the neocons all the credit for Reaganomics. I’ve published in Commentary Magazine and Irving Kristol’s Public Interest. I traveled the world promoting the Reagan model between 1988 and 1993–Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua, and most of all Russia–and learned firsthand how Quixotic was the conceit that our model could be exported.

The Republican presidential candidates auditioned to be Commander in Chief on Tuesday in the first debate since the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. The differences with President Obama were less instructive than the GOP fault lines that emerged on antiterror surveillance, the war on Islamic State and the Middle East.

Perhaps the most revealing exchange came on the powers of the National Security Agency, where Senator Marco Rubio and Ohio Governor John Kasich in particular squared off against Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Messrs. Paul and Cruz were among the few Senate Republicans to vote for the USA Freedom Act this summer that barred the bulk collection of telephone records.

Mr. Rubio has been hitting Mr. Cruz’s vote on the campaign trail, and he rightly pointed out that “now the intelligence agency is not able to quickly gather records and look at them to see who these terrorists are calling. And the terrorist that attacked us in San Bernardino was an American citizen, born and raised in this country. And I bet you we wish we would have had access to five years of his records so we could see who he was working with.”

Who needs “Star Wars VII”? We’ve got the Republican presidential competition. As alternative universes go, this one has been hard to beat.

Out of nowhere, Donald Trump (Is he Darth Vader? Luke Skywalker? Both?) landed in his celebrity starship to challenge and terrorize . . . the Establishment. The genius of the American political system is that it has built-in reality checks. The next one arrives in February with the start of 50 individual state primary elections or caucuses. Opinion-poll politics gives way to voting-booth politics.

Will Donald Trump, master of our alternative political universe, survive in the real-world primaries? This question forced itself upon us toward the end of the Las Vegas debate, when Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump about the “nuclear triad.”
This excerpt conveys the gist of his answer: “But we have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. Frankly, I would have said get out of Syria; get out—if we didn’t have the power of weaponry today. The power is so massive that we can’t just leave areas that 50 years ago or 75 years ago we wouldn’t care. It was hand-to-hand combat.”

That answer raises the recent Ben Carson question: How much does a candidate for the U.S. presidency actually need to know about anything in the real political world? The Las Vegas debate suggests we are moving closer to the realities of a voting-booth campaign, made clear in the fascinating, important exchanges between Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Notably, their discussion of dictators.