GOP’S LAW & ORDER EDGE OVER HILLARY

THE key line Monday night at the Republican National Convention came from Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, who received a hero’s welcome from delegates due to his constant appearances on Fox News. “I want to make something very clear,” he began his speech. “Blue lives matter!”

This direct assault on the Black Lives Matter movement and its hostility toward America’s police officers represents a potent new line of attack against Hillary Clinton, who has spent much of the past year trying to assure left-wing African-Americans that she will be an advocate for their agenda.

The police shootings of the past two weeks, committed by psychotic cop haters, have created difficult cross-currents for Clinton. She wants to focus on complaints against cops to solidify her base but is required by the unambiguous facts in the news to reflect the country’s disgust, anxiety and fear in response to these monstrous slayings.

That came through in her confused remarks to the NAACP on Monday, in which she uncomfortably mixed what might be called her softer-on-crime message (with a great emphasis on reducing incarceration rates) with appropriate assertions that there’s no justification whatever for killing a person whose life is dedicated to securing the safety of the rest of us.

Clarke and Rudy Giuliani, who also spoke on Monday, made careful note of legitimate complaints against excessive force — but came down firmly on the side of order and the threat to it posed by these assaults. They evoked the eroding sense of domestic safety ex- pressed by Americans in countless polls.

Rudy: “The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe. They fear for their children. They fear for themselves. They fear for our police officers who are being targeted — with a target on their backs. We pray for our police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge and their families. And we say thank you to the Cleveland Police Department for protecting us . . . We also reach out our arms with understanding and compassion to those who have lost loved ones because of police shootings, some justified, some unjustified.”

Clarke: “What we witnessed in Ferguson, in Baltimore and in Baton Rouge was a collapse of social order. So many of the actions of the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter transcend peaceful protest, and violates the code of conduct we rely on. American law-enforcement officers understand that race is and has been a heated issue in our country. Most appreciate the vital need for thoroughness and transparency in pursuit of the greater good in their actions, and in their investigations.”

The theme of the night was “Making America Safe Again,” and until the cop shootings, this was clearly going to be a night for foreign policy and national security. And it was, for the most part.

There were three politicianveterans (Sens. Tom Cotton and Joni Ernst and Rep. Ryan Zinke). There were Benghazi attack survivors Mark Geist and John Tiegen, who said, “There were more than 30 Americans saved that night, and that’s because Americans never give up.” There was Afghan war vet Marcus Luttrell, whose extraordinary story was told in the movie “Lone Survivor.”

Again and again speakers contrasted the American grit to which they dedicated their lives with the fecklessness of President Obama’s approach to the world outside the United States — and Hillary Clinton’s complicity in or support for that approach.

We can only hope the feeling of domestic threat and disorder posed by these violent attacks on our police will abate because those attacks abate.

If they do not, Clinton may find herself without a counterargument to make when Trump spends the months from now to November arguing that America is less safe than it was when the Democrats took the White House in 2009.

Police shootings ... have created ’ difficult cross-currents for Clinton.