RUTHFULLY YOURS

She is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough,” said the president of the United States in 2013. “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country.”

That would be former California Attorney General Kamala Harris, daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, and now the state’s junior U.S. senator. As it happens, Barack Obama was not the first prominent Democrat to be dazzled by the UC Berkeley beauty.

As speaker of the California State Assembly from 1980 to 1995, Willie Brown was by far the Golden State’s most powerful shot-caller. In 1994 Brown, 60, met Kamala Harris, a full 30 years his junior, and she became “the Speaker’s new steady,” Brown’s “girlfriend” and “frequent companion.” The two-year relationship worked out well for Harris.

Willie Brown appointed Harris to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which paid $97,088 a year. She served six months and Brown then appointed her to the California Medical Assistance Commission, which met only once a month but paid Harris $72,000. Call it “poontronage,” a politician’s appointment of his steady girlfriend, frequent companion, and main squeeze to a lucrative government position requiring little work.

Brown also raised money for Harris in her run for San Francisco district attorney in 2003. She defeated her former boss Terence Hallinan but promised never to seek the death penalty. She kept that promise the next year when gang member David Hill used an AK-47 to gun down San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza. Even Dianne Feinstein took Harris to task, as she alienated police across the state.

In her 2009 Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make us Safer, written with ghostwriter Joan O’C. Hamilton, Harris found the number of nonviolent offenders “truly staggering” and put them at the top of her “crime pyramid.” The next year, Harris ran for state attorney general and the Sacramento Bee endorsed her Republican rival Steve Cooley. Harris won by less than one percentage point, but as the Bee saw it, “she could be more aggressive on public corruption cases, though her handlers might worry that would cause friction with fellow Democratic politicians.”

The new span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge—10 years late, $5 billion over budget and riddled with safety issues—had whistleblowers calling for a criminal investigation. Duly apprised of the fathomless corruption, Harris failed to launch any criminal probe. With voter fraud and violent crime she simply looked the other way.

Imagine a combination of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and you’ve got Kamala Harris, the current seat-warming senator from California who, like Obama, is using the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body as a resume-puncher before swiftly moving on to bigger things: the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination. Even as a nobody senator, she’s been the subject of dozens, perhaps scores of speculative stories about her future, so now — lest they build her up too quickly — Politico and other Democrat cheerleaders are cautioning her to get her ducks in order before heading out on the hustings:

Kamala Harris has been called “the female Barack Obama.” She’s built a national following with her outspoken criticism of Donald Trump and prolific fundraising for fellow Democrats. But the California senator’s rapid rise — she’s just 15 months into her first term — has created an awkward issue: Even as progressives tout her as one of the top 2020 contenders, Harris remains something of a mystery back home.

Her approval ratings are solid, but not stratospheric. And 28 percent of California voters say they don’t know or have no opinion about Harris, according to a recent Morning Consult poll — placing her in the bottom 10 of name recognition among U.S. senators in their home states. A Berkeley IGS Poll in September found California voters — by a more than 2-to-1 margin, 49 percent to 22 percent — would rather Harris stay in the Senate than run for president in 2020.

Since Jon Ossoff nearly snatched away a safe Republican congressional seat in suburban Atlanta last summer, Democrats have been certain a “Blue Wave” midterm election is coming.

Democrats are hyping every electoral pickup—an Alabama Senate seat, a close Pennsylvania congressional race, a Wisconsin supreme court justice—as proof that American voters are repelled by President Trump and will return them to power this November. A special counsel, an onscreen prostitute, and a rabid niche of anti-Trump Republicans are helping boost those prospects.

The tide seems even more favorable for Democrats as a record number of incumbent Republicans, including the speaker of the House, will not run for re-election. But less than seven months out, a strong undercurrent is pulling the Blue Wave out to political sea. A trove of new polling shows the once-formidable lead Democrats had in the generic congressional ballot is nearly gone.

Wedge issues, such as gun control and immigration, are not working in Democrats’ favor. In fact, thanks to Trump even independent voters believe Democrats are using the children of illegal immigrants for political purposes rather than legitimately protecting their welfare. Although Trump’s job approval ratings remain underwater among Democrats and Independents, voters give him props for a number of achievements, not the least of which is a strong economy, proving it is politically possible to dislike a man but like what he does.
Let’s Look at Those Polls in Greater Depth

Harriet Hageman, running for governor of Wyoming, began learning to drive when she was four years old. She would steer the family pickup across open ranchland, avoiding holes, bumps, and ditches, while her dad stood in the back, throwing out bales of hay for the cattle.

Hageman grew up differently from how most Americans did. Her childhood had more freedom, more responsibility, and more hard work. It harks back to an earlier century. These are real Wyoming credentials. They are also values the country needs, and needs badly.

Hageman’s belt is notched with victories fighting the feds on behalf of the little guy. As a land and water rights lawyer going up against EPA and Forest Service overreach, she won precedent-setting victories for embattled ranchers, farmers, and businesses, protecting their rights over their own private property. Now she is aiming for political victory as a principled conservative going up against overspending and overregulation.

Wyoming is a peculiar state. It is one of the largest states in the nation, the emptiest and most wild – and most regulated. Half the state is owned by the federal government – Forest Service, BLM, and national parks. Mining and ranching, the mainstays of the economy, require federal permission of some kind for much of what they do.

Wyoming is the kind of flyover country the elites ignore but couldn’t survive without. It is one of the top ten states crucial for our national prosperity. Wyoming is our number-two energy powerhouse, right behind Texas. It produces more coal than the next six coal-mining states combined. Wyoming’s Powder River Basin is one of the greatest coal fields in the world, but Americans have never heard of it. If Wyoming stopped producing coal, natural gas, and uranium, 30 states would go dark.

America needs Wyoming’s voice. It needs to hear from Wyoming on energy, on how to win free from federal over regulation, on Wyoming’s lived principles of helping neighbors and taking care of one’s own family. America needs more of Wyoming’s old-fashioned individualism. Hageman has the potential to be that voice on the national stage.

This week, an assemblywoman from Brooklyn — the New York City borough with approximately 2.7 million people, not some far-flung hamlet in flyover country — went on an near-hour-long rant in which she accused Jews of conspiring to gentrify her district and steal her home. In the midst of this outburst, Diane Richardson reportedly referred to one of her rivals as the “the Jewish senator from southern Brooklyn.”

This incident comes not long after a DC Council member named Trayon White Sr., a Democrat who represents the Eighth Ward of the capital of the free world in the twenty-first century, posted a video offering some of his thoughts on how “the Rothschilds” were controlling the climate to squeeze money out of the oppressed.

Both of these people have been treated as raving lunatics, which they might very well be. But a person could easily imagine the fate of any elected official in a large city had he or she aimed similar conspiracies at African-American neighbors. We would almost assuredly be plunged into a national conversation about the shameful bigotry that plagues our cities.

That’s not to argue that we should overreact to these incidents. Although certainly a serious concern, anti-Semitism is a relatively minor problem in American life. It is, however, getting difficult not to notice a trend among liberals of either ignoring, rationalizing, or brushing off anti-Semitism, which seems to be more commonplace on the Left than it has been in a long time.

But when identity politics and class warfare propel your movement, as it does the progressivism that’s becoming increasingly popular on the American Left, it’s almost inevitable that the Jews, who’ve tended to successfully navigate meritocracies, will become targets. This hate has traveled with socialists since Karl Marx first declared that “Money” was the god of the Jews.

Is a big blue Democratic wave poised to sweep the Republicans out of Congress in the 2018 mid-term election?

To listen to much of the media, you might think so. A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post quoted Nate Silver, the Yoda of Dem pollsters, who suggested that the “Democratic wave in 2018 may be swelled substantially by the enthusiasm gap into a tsunami.” Last month, when the conservative Democrat Conor Lamb eked out a narrow victory over Rick Saccone in a special Congressional election in Pennsylvania, CNN gleefully reported that “Lamb’s performance is ominous for Republicans as the November midterm elections approach.” As I write, Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin is warning about an impending “blue wave” after a liberal won a judicial seat on his state’s court. There are intermittent bulletins urging caution about these prognostications, but prevailing meme emitted by the punditocracy forecasts a huge Democratic victory.

Let me introduce a dollop or two of doubt into this orgy of excited anticipation.

In the first place, Conor Lamb’s victory, far from limning the future, suggests why the Democratic Party as currently configured is likely to continue to lose seats. Forget that Lamb squeaked to victory by a margin of 755 votes. More important is his ideological profile. An ex-Marine, he is a patriotic pro-Second Amendment social conservative, i.e., an extreme outlier in a party whose right wing is tacked down by the socialist Bernie Sanders and whose left-wing is represented by the faux Injun Elizabeth Warren and whatever species of incontinent glossolalia Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi represent. If the Democratic Party had more Lamb Chops, they might look forward to more victories, but then the Democratic Party would not be the modern Democratic Party, whose cynosure is class-warfare fired by identity politics and various forms of exotic sex panic.

It’s a certain indication that NeverTrump is miserable when it turns on Rich Lowry, embraces Michelle Obama, and imitates Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps rattled by new poll numbers showing President Trump with rising approval ratings, NeverTrumpers seem particularly unnerved this week. To some degree, their columns and tweets expose (again) their fundamental contempt for Trump voters and preference for Democrats when given the choice.

But this week, die-hards such as Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, and Kevin Williamson have taken it up a notch: Their collective spite has nothing to do with Trumpism, “conservatism,” or even good manners. Realizing they’re once more on the losing side of a colossal political battle—Trump is getting politically stronger, their beloved Mueller probe is foundering, and the GOP isn’t yet vanquished—NeverTrump is lashing out in an ugly way.

Good Riddance to the “Libertarian Moment”
In his inaugural column for The Atlantic, Kevin Williamson, a longtime writer for National Review and savage NeverTrumper, presented a mostly warmed-over version of his many anti-Trump rants at NR. (The Atlantic faced a fierce backlash for hiring Williamson over his comments about abortion and minorities. Just weeks before his hiring was announced, Williamson, a prolific tweeter, deleted his entire Twitter account to cover his tracks.)

The piece is classic Williamson: Bursts of compelling prose mixed with childish ridicule and pretentious preening. He laments that the “libertarian moment” is gone, sniffing how “libertarianism is an intellectual tendency rather than a cultural instinct, one that benefited from the rigor and prestige of the economists who have long been its most effective advocates.” Translation: Trumpists are morons and I am superior.

He portrayed Trump’s base this way: “Those who celebrated Trump the businessman clutch their heads as his preposterous economic policies produce terror in the stock markets and chaos for the blue-collar workers in construction firms and manufacturers scrambling to stay ahead of the coming tariffs on steel and aluminum.” (As if to unwittingly counter Williamson’s poor political temperature-taking, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page article that same day about how Midwest manufacturers can’t find enough workers amid the tightest job market in 20 years.)

I’m sure the media will be discussing this as much as they’ve discussed Obama’s photo with Louis Farrakhan. And then they’ll us that the real anti-Semitism we should be worried about is on Twitter.

Assemblywoman Diane Richardson’s 50-minute rant during the Board 17 meeting Monday night faulted Jews for gentrifying in her district, which includes East Flatbush, Flatbush, Crown Heights and Prospect Lefferts Gardens, according to an eyewitness.

During a rezoning talk, a board member complained that people constantly ring her doorbell to ask if she’s interested in selling her home.

“It must be Jewish people,” Richardson responded, according to Lew Fidler, a former City Council member who is Jewish and attended the meeting as a representative of Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.

Before faulting Jewish interlopers, Richardson snidely referred to Brooklyn state Sen. Simcha Felder as “the Jewish senator from southern Brooklyn.”

Richardson suggested that the real-estate industry is gunning for her but developers had the mayor and the borough president in its pocket, an attendee said.

“All they have on me is a broomstick,” Richardson reportedly said.

That was a reference to her 2016 arrest for allegedly beating her son with a broomstick — a charge that was later dropped.

A broomstick seems appropriate. What the story leaves out is that Diana Richardson (proper spelling) is a creature of the Working Families Party. That’s spelled ACORN. And is an incubator for radical leftists. And it’s no surprise that a politician associated with the hateful WFP would be anti-Semitic. And you can bet that the WFP will keep standing by her. As they did during the broomstick incident.

Jonah and Ramesh have written a response to my column last week titled, “The Never Trump Delusion.” It always pains me to disagree with them. But the good news is that, judging by their response, we don’t disagree much. The bad news is that we are apparently talking past each other.

I made several points in the column: I. Trump deserves to be criticized in many ways; II. That there is unlikely to be a serious primary challenge, and that Trump’s welfare at this point is caught up with the party’s. III. He has delivered for his coalition and achieved some significant conservative policy victories; IV. We need to take account of his populism and nationalism, which have very often been part of a successful Republican politics. Not wanting to acknowledge points II. and IV. is what I call “the delusion.”

Jonah and Ramesh dwell a lot on I., address II. somewhat glancingly, ignore III., and even more glancingly address IV.

Forgive me for being pedantic and quoting a lot, but it’s necessary to disentangle some of the agreements that are presented as disagreements or corrections, and clear up some misunderstandings.

First, there is the definitional issue. Jonah and Ramesh say that Never Trump is hard to define. I agree and that’s why I said this coterie of critics is “loosely referred to as Never Trump.” I could have spent more time delineating who they are and distinctions among them, but as Jonah and Ramesh know, space goes fast in a column, even a longer one of 950 words.

The lines are obviously a little fuzzy. I’d say Never Trumpers tend toward a totalist critique of Trump, are very reluctant to praise him for anything, and give a sense — perhaps unfairly — of being emotionally committed to their opposition. Never Trump gave us Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot.

Yes, there are many judicious critics of Trump out there and some who are fully aware of the need for a more populist direction in the GOP (I’m colleagues with many of them, obviously), but it’s not true that it’s only Jeff Flake and John Kasich who exemplify the attitude I was criticizing in the column, as Jonah and Ramesh imply. I direct you, for instance, to George Will’s columns, Morning Joe, and Bill Kristol’s Twitter feed, for starters. None of them, nor do many former Bushies who are anti-Trump, give much of a sense of wanting to take Trump’s populism seriously and learn anything from it.

Remember when, in early 2011, in the wake of the massacre that wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed 6 others, President Obama called “for a New Era of Civility in U.S. Politics”?

The scene inside McKale Memorial Arena was a mix of grief and celebration, where a capacity crowd of 14,000 gathered beneath championship banners for the University of Arizona Wildcats. The service, which was televised nationally on the major broadcast and cable news networks, gave the president an opportunity — and burden — to lead the nation in mourning during prime time.

Aides said Mr. Obama wrote much of the speech himself late Tuesday night at the White House. Laden with religion nuance, the speech seemed as though Mr. Obama was striking a preacher’s tone with a politician’s reverb.

That was when blame was being heaped on Sarah Palin for issuing a map with targets on congressional districts that were believed to be possible wins for the GOP. There mere visual metaphor of a target was an outrageous incitement, according to the theory of the moment, because clearly insane people like the perp, Jared Loughner, could be so suggestible.

That was before the Left began its campaign to incite an assassination attempt on President Trump. The campaign has encompassed publicity-seeking entertainers as well as the ostensible guardians of high cultures, such as Shakespeare in the Park.