RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump is all about winning. “If we win Iowa, we run the table,” he told a Des Moines rally on Friday. “It will be over quickly; we win virtually every state in the union.” But how will he handle defeat if the Superman of the Polls suddenly starts losing?

Now there are three respected polls (Monmouth, Des Moines Register, and Fox) that show Trump losing to a surging Ted Cruz in Iowa. Trump could certainly surge back in the next 50 days, but right now, Cruz is on track to win. He is relentlessly using social media data to build what he calls “very much the Obama model – a data-driven, grassroots-driven campaign.” And, he says, “it is a reason our campaign is steadily gathering strength.” Trump is relying on rallies and the endless free TV coverage the media provide him.

Trump promises he will bring a flood of new voters into Iowa’s caucuses, dwarfing the traditional total of 125,000 Iowans who vote in a typical presidential-election year — even though the caucus method requires voters to express their preference in public, over two hours, on what will probably be a frigid February evening.

Is the tide turning against Donald Trump in Iowa? According to the latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll, the answer is clearly “yes.”

The billionaire businessman and loose cannon extraordinaire has fallen to second place in the poll with 21 percent. He picked up 2 percentage points since the last poll, but is trailing Ted Cruz by 10 percentage points. The senator from Texas is now the favorite of 31 percent of likely Republican voters in Iowa.

There are two stories here. The first is that Trump seems to have reached his peak in Iowa. The second story is Cruz’s amazing surge. The senator is rapidly ascending; he has experienced a 21-point leap since the last DMR/Bloomberg poll. No other candidate in history has seen such a big surge in such a short amount of time.

Dishonest, incompetent, greedy, very angry, fundamentally unlikeable, and lacking a trace of integrity; you might think that the woman, now running to be our president, would get a bit of a grip on her more obvious failings. Like telling unnecessary whoppers. But she just can’t help herself – she has lived a lie for so long that she no longer can tell the difference between truth and falsehood. She very much reminds me of a statement made by David Horowitz (a real truth teller and a true patriot) in an effort to distinguish Al Gore and Bill Clinton: Clinton lies to help himself, Gore lies because he can’t help himself, i.e. he invented the internet, Love Story was about him and Tipper, etc.

While Hillary’s lies remind one of Gore’s fables, they are actually worse. Why? Because they are so transparent and thus so easily proved wrong. That is, Gore told self-aggrandizing lies (because he had actually accomplished so little) so that his statements took on the color of an adolescent trying to invent an adult resume, i.e. they were not only transparently false, they were silly. Hillary tells lies that are not only unnecessary (the thing might just die of its own weight), she compounds the problem by making the lie much more blatant by giving it that much more exposure, e.g. her taking sniper fire at Tuzla, or Chelsea was in harm’s way on 9/11.

For political veterans, much of what we’re starting to hear about Ted Cruz has an eerily familiar ring. Too extreme. Unelectable. Scares people. A radical, not a conservative.

The American people will hear a lot about Cruz’s extremism in the year ahead, just as they were told about Reagan’s. It may cause them to hesitate before supporting him. But over the course of the campaign they’ll be able to make that determination for themselves. In fact, Ted Cruz represents the mainstream of conservative thought in this country, just as Reagan did two score years ago. Reagan’s victory vindicated everything we’d been saying for twenty years. A Cruz win next year would do so again.

Precisely 36 years ago Reagan was on his way to the Republican nomination. George Will and the church ladies of the party were concerned, even trying to lure former President Ford into the race. Reagan was just too conservative to get elected. A few years earlier Will had described Reagan’s support as “. . . kamikaze conservatives who thought the 1964 Goldwater campaign was jolly fun.” The reasonable, establishment Republicans settled on Bush 1 as their candidate, and it was game on. Marco Rubio is, or will be, their choice this time. Same song, same singers.

Even those of us in the Reagan campaign had concerns. In January of 1980 Reagan trailed Carter 62-33. This in spite of the fact that our embassy in Iran had been overrun, and hostages taken, a couple months before. Carter had earlier been openly humiliated by Brezhnev in Afghanistan. A weak economy, and soaring inflation, combined to give us the worst of both worlds, stagflation. The previous summer Carter had complained to the American people about their malaise. He seemed to be over his head. In the face of all these troubles, Carter still had a 2-1 lead. Reagan was too extreme.