An Iowa To-Do List

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An Iowa To-Do List

by Gail Collins | Jan. 29, 2016

Iowa Republicans have a lot of choices on Monday, none of whom bear any resemblance to the second coming of Abraham Lincoln.

They’re not going to pick a paragon. But maybe they could at least get rid of somebody awful. Ted Cruz? Please, Iowa, if you could do anything to knock Ted Cruz out of the race, the country would be grateful. I know he has supporters. But the intensity of loathing among the rest of the population is very strong.

In Iowa, Cruz has been attempting to overcome his personality handicap by visiting every single one of the state’s 99 counties. That’s a sort of tradition, among candidates who don’t know how to prioritize. It didn’t even work on television for Alicia Florrick’s husband on “The Good Wife.” Who, admittedly, was under the handicap of having gone to jail for using public funds to hire prostitutes.

Probably Cruz felt that since he had failed to endorse Iowa’s most beloved government subsidy — the ethanol program — the least he could do was make his way to the town of Fenton, population 279.

Cruz spent most of this week’s debate sniping at Marco Rubio — and Iowa, if you could get rid of both these guys, it’d be appreciated. I know that’s a lot to ask.

But Rubio, who used to be sort of the Boy Scout of the pack, has been getting more and more irritating with every passing day. He’s been trying to glom onto Cruz’s religious constituency, although he sounds less like a young evangelist than Eddie Haskell on “Leave It to Beaver.” During Thursday’s debate, Rubio was asked about a magazine cover that called him the “Republican savior,” and he quickly announced that the only savior was “Jesus Christ who came down to earth and died for our sins.”

Cruz and Rubio are both the offspring of immigrants, and both have a stupendous record of duplicity when it comes to the issue of what to do with more recent arrivals. First Cruz loved all legal immigrants, then some not so much. He offered an amendment to allow undocumented immigrants to stay in the country, then claimed it was only a ploy to destroy immigration reform. Rubio went from immigration hard-liner to bipartisan reformer — cynics say because he wanted to cozy up to Republican donors. Then he changed his mind entirely when the Tea Party got steamed.

Donald Trump, of course, was not around for that debate. We are not going to spend one more second discussing him except to point out that at the counter-event he staged for veterans, he introduced his daughter Ivanka, who is very pregnant. If the baby came over the weekend in Iowa, that really would be a kind of coup. Even better than the time Senator Christopher Dodd tried to win Iowa by enrolling his child in a kindergarten there.

So many worthy targets for political elimination, but is there a Republican we’d want to see Iowa keep in the game? I do look forward to future Republican debates when we could play a drinking game based on every time Chris Christie mentions 9/11 or says “… as a former federal prosecutor.”

Probably not Ben Carson. Granted, he’s a candidate who’s easy to listen to, since it’s hard to hear anything he’s saying. But Carson probably hurt his chances when he responded to a question about Russia by saying “Putin is a one-horse country.”

How about Jeb Bush? Bush really picked up some steam when Trump vanished from the stage this week. And he seems to have made peace with the family-dynasty problem by simply embracing it. At the debate he described George I as “the greatest man alive” and George II as “my brother, who I adore.”

There was also the requisite bouquet to his mother, although nothing weird, like Jeb’s recent announcement in New Hampshire that he loved his mother more than his dad. Who tells a room full of strangers that you like one parent better? Remember the rule about always saying that you love each of your children equally? Works both ways. Even if it’s not true, you stick to the code.

How about Rand Paul? He can be a little strange — we never did get past that day in the Senate when he ranted on about environmentalists ruining his toilet. But at least he’s interesting. And he does do a lot of free eye surgery for the poor. Plus he cuts his own hair. And he’s pretty good at making fun of Ted Cruz.

Or John Kasich? He’s the only candidate who brings up religion and then suggests that God might like to see our government spend money on the sick and the mentally ill. And if you wake up on Tuesday and read “IOWA PICKS KASICH” you’d know that there was a genuine miracle.

The truth, of course, is that someone awful will win, and nobody will go away. There’s still hope. And New Hampshire! Equally cold, but only 10 counties.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/opinion/an-iowa-to-do-list.html?emc=edit_th_20160130&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=65886944

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Why Conservative Peter Wehner Will Never Vote for Donald Trump

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Why I Will Never Vote for Donald Trump

Peter Wehner * | JAN. 14, 2016

Beginning with Ronald Reagan, I have voted Republican in every presidential election since I first became eligible to vote in 1980. I worked in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and in the White House for George W. Bush as a speechwriter and adviser. I have also worked for Republican presidential campaigns, although not this time around.

Despite this history, and in important ways because of it, I will not vote for Donald Trump if he wins the Republican nomination.

I should add that neither could I vote in good conscience for Hillary Clinton or any of the other Democrats running for president, since they oppose many of the things I have stood for in my career as a conservative — and, in the case of Mrs. Clinton, because I consider her an ethical wreck. If Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton were the Republican and Democratic nominees, I would prefer to vote for a responsible third-party alternative; absent that option, I would simply not cast a ballot for president. A lot of Republicans, I suspect, would do the same.

There are many reasons to abstain from voting for Mr. Trump if he is nominated, starting with the fact that he would be the most unqualified president in American history. Every one of our 44 presidents has had either government or military experience before being sworn in. Mr. Trump, a real estate mogul and former reality-television star, hasn’t served a day in public office or the armed forces.

During the course of this campaign he has repeatedly revealed his ignorance on basic matters of national interest — the three ways the United States is capable of firing nuclear weapons (by land, sea and air), the difference between the Quds Force in Iran and the Kurds to their west, North Korea’s nuclear tests, the causes of autism, the effects of his tax plan on the deficit and much besides.

Mr. Trump has no desire to acquaint himself with most issues, let alone master them. He has admitted that he doesn’t prepare for debates or study briefing books; he believes such things get in the way of a good performance. No major presidential candidate has ever been quite as disdainful of knowledge, as indifferent to facts, as untroubled by his benightedness.

It is little surprise, then, that many of Mr. Trump’s most celebrated pronouncements and promises — to quickly and “humanely” expel 11 million illegal immigrants, to force Mexico to pay for the wall he will build on our southern border, to defeat the Islamic State “very quickly” while as a bonus taking its oil, to bar Muslims from immigrating to the United States — are nativistic pipe dreams and public relations stunts.

Even more disqualifying is Mr. Trump’s temperament. He is erratic, inconsistent and unprincipled. He possesses a streak of crudity and cruelty that manifested itself in how he physically mocked a Times journalist with a disability, ridiculed Senator John McCain for being a P.O.W., made a reference to “blood” intended to degrade a female journalist and compared one of his opponents to a child molester.

Mr. Trump’s legendary narcissism would be comical were it not dangerous in someone seeking the nation’s highest office — as he demonstrated when he showered praise on the brutal, anti-American president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, responding to Mr. Putin’s expression of admiration for Mr. Trump.

“It is always a great honor,” Mr. Trump said last month, “to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

Mr. Trump’s virulent combination of ignorance, emotional instability, demagogy, solipsism and vindictiveness would do more than result in a failed presidency; it could very well lead to national catastrophe. The prospect of Donald Trump as commander in chief should send a chill down the spine of every American.

For Republicans, there is an additional reason not to vote for Mr. Trump. His nomination would pose a profound threat to the Republican Party and conservatism, in ways that Hillary Clinton never could. For while Mrs. Clinton could inflict a defeat on the Republican Party, she could not redefine it. But Mr. Trump, if he were the Republican nominee, would.

Mr. Trump’s presence in the 2016 race has already had pernicious effects, but they’re nothing compared with what would happen if he were the Republican standard-bearer. The nominee, after all, is the leader of the party; he gives it shape and definition. If Mr. Trump heads the Republican Party, it will no longer be a conservative party; it will be an angry, bigoted, populist one. Mr. Trump would represent a dramatic break with and a fundamental assault on the party’s best traditions.

The Republican Party’s best traditions, of course, have not always been evident. (The same is true of the Democratic Party, by the way.) Over the years we have seen antecedents of today’s Trumpism both on issues and in style — for example, in Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns in the 1990s, in Sarah Palin’s rise in the party, in the reckless rhetoric of some on the right like Ann Coulter.

The sentiments animating these individuals have had influence in the party, and in recent years growing influence. But they have not been dominant and they have certainly never been in control. Mr. Trump’s securing the Republican nomination would change all that. Whatever problems one might be tempted to lay at the feet of the Republican Party, Donald Trump is in a different and more destructive category.

In these pages in July 1980, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator from New York, declared, “Of a sudden, the G.O.P. has become a party of ideas.” If Mr. Trump wins the nomination, the G.O.P. will become the party of anti-reason.

I will go further: Mr. Trump is precisely the kind of man our system of government was designed to avoid, the type of leader our founders feared — a demagogic figure who does not view himself as part of our constitutional system but rather as an alternative to it.

I understand that it often happens that those of us in politics don’t get the nominee we want, yet we nevertheless unify behind the candidate who wins our party’s nomination. If those who don’t get their way pick up their marbles and go home, party politics doesn’t work. That has always been my view, until now. Donald Trump has altered the political equation because he has altered the moral equation. For this lifelong Republican, at least, he is beyond the pale. Party loyalty has limits.

No votes have yet been cast, primary elections are fluid, and sobriety often prevails, so Mr. Trump is hardly the inevitable Republican nominee. But, stunningly, that is now something that is quite conceivable. If this scenario comes to pass, many Republicans will find themselves in a situation they once thought unimaginable: refusing to support the nominee of their party because it is the best thing that they can do for their party and their country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/opinion/campaign-stops/why-i-will-never-vote-for-donald-trump.html?emc=edit_th_20160114&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=65886944&_r=0

* Peter Wehner is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who has served in the last three Republican administrations. In 2001, he was named deputy director of speechwriting for President George W. Bush. He later served as director of the Office of Strategic Initiatives, where he reached out to prominent thinkers and advised the White House on a range of domestic and international issues. A senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, he has been affiliated with several leading research organizations.

Mr. Wehner is a frequent commentator on television and radio and has written widely on political, cultural, religious and national security issues. A regular blogger for Commentary magazine, he is the author (with Arthur C. Brooks) of “Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism” and (with Michael Gerson) of “City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era.” The Washington Monthly has called him one of the most influential reform-minded conservatives, and in Forbes, the political consultant Mary Matalin featured him on a short list of conservatism’s leading “educators and practitioners of first principles.”

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The Brutalism of Ted Cruz

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The Brutalism of Ted Cruz

by David Brooks | Jan. 12, 2016

In 1997, Michael Wayne Haley was arrested after stealing a calculator from Walmart. This was a crime that merited a maximum two-year prison term. But prosecutors incorrectly applied a habitual offender law. Neither the judge nor the defense lawyer caught the error and Haley was sentenced to 16 years.

Eventually, the mistake came to light and Haley tried to fix it. Ted Cruz was solicitor general of Texas at the time. Instead of just letting Haley go for time served, Cruz took thecase to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years.

Some justices were skeptical. “Is there some rule that you can’t confess error in your state?” Justice Anthony Kennedy asked. The court system did finally let Haley out of prison, after six years.

The case reveals something interesting about Cruz’s character. Ted Cruz is now running strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace. Cruz’s behavior in the Haley case is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy.

Traditionally, candidates who have attracted strong evangelical support have in part emphasized the need to lend a helping hand to the economically stressed and the least fortunate among us. Such candidates include George W. Bush, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.

But Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.

Cruz lays down an atmosphere of apocalyptic fear. America is heading off “the cliff to oblivion.” After one Democratic debate he said, “We’re seeing our freedoms taken away every day, and last night was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously.”

As the Republican strategist Curt Anderson observed in Politico, there’s no variation in Cruz’s rhetorical tone. As is the wont of inauthentic speakers, everything is described as a maximum existential threat.

The fact is this apocalyptic diagnosis is ridiculous. The Obama administration has done things people like me strongly disagree with. But America is in better economic shape than any other major nation on earth. Crime is down. Abortion rates are down. Fourteen million new jobs have been created in five years.

Obama has championed a liberal agenda, but he hasn’t made the country unrecognizable. In 2008, federal spending accounted for about 20.3 percent of gross domestic product. In 2015, it accounted for about 20.9 percent.

But Cruz manufactures an atmosphere of menace in which there is no room for compassion, for moderation, for anything but dismantling and counterattack. And that is what he offers. Cruz’s programmatic agenda, to the extent that it exists in his speeches, is to destroy things: destroy the I.R.S., crush the “jackals” of the E.P.A., end funding for Planned Parenthood, reverse I’s executive orders, make the desert glow in Syria, destroy the Iran nuclear accord.

Some of these positions I agree with, but the lack of any positive emphasis, any hint of reform conservatism, any aid for the working class, or even any humane gesture toward cooperation is striking.

Ted Cruz didn’t come up with this hard, combative and gladiatorial campaign approach in isolation. He’s always demonstrated a tendency to bend his position — whether immigration or trade — to what suits him politically. This approach works because in the wake of the Obergefell v. Hodges court decision on same-sex marriage, many evangelicals feel they are being turned into pariahs in their own nation.

Cruz exploits and exaggerates that fear. But he reacts to Obergefell in exactly the alienating and combative manner that is destined to further marginalize evangelicals, that is guaranteed to bring out fear-driven reactions and not the movement’s highest ideals.

The best conservatism balances support for free markets with a Judeo-Christian spirit of charity, compassion and solidarity. Cruz replaces this spirit with Spartan belligerence. He sows bitterness, influences his followers to lose all sense of proportion and teaches them to answer hate with hate. This Trump-Cruz conservatism looks more like tribal, blood and soil European conservatism than the pluralistic American kind.

Evangelicals and other conservatives have had their best influence on American politics when they have proceeded in a spirit of personalism — when they have answered hostility with service and emphasized the infinite dignity of each person. They have won elections as happy and hopeful warriors. Ted Cruz’s brutal, fear-driven, apocalypse-based approach is the antithesis of that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/opinion/the-brutalism-of-ted-cruz.html?_r=0

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