RUTHFULLY YOURS

Thursday’s cordial meeting between President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama was a reassuring ritual of democracy. But Obama was far from convincing when he told Trump “we are now going to do everything we can to help you succeed.” There are some highly disparate ideas here about what constitutes success, both foreign and domestic. There are also big areas in which one might reasonably wonder if Obama and his team are in a quandary over the prospect of a Trump administration inheriting the internal records of the most transparent administration ever.

Take, for instance, the Iran nuclear deal, Obama’s signature foreign policy legacy, the chief accomplishment of his second term. The Obama administration’s Iran file has been a realm of murk, crammed with dangerous concessions and secret side deals for terror-sponsoring Tehran — to a degree that has left some critics wondering if Obama’s real aim was to empower Iran as the hegemon of the Middle East (equipped with ballistic missiles to complement its “exclusively peaceful” nuclear program).

The cherry on top — officially separate from the nuclear deal, but highly coincident — was the Obama administration’s secret conveyance to Iran early this year of cash totaling $1.7 billion for the settlement of an old claim against the United States.

Like Obama’s other legacy achievement, the unaffordable Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, these Iran dealings were so intricate, extensive and opaque that we are still discovering just how duplicitous the official narratives were. Obama never submitted the Iran nuclear deal as a treaty for ratification by the Senate. Instead, he rushed the deal to the United Nations Security Council for approval less than a week after the final text was announced, and left Congress wrestling through the ensuing weeks, during the summer of 2015, to try to extract vital details from the elusive Obama and his team, subject to a legislative bargain so convoluted that the process, and the deal, never came to a vote.

Donald Trump’s improbable victory on June 8 exploded much of the received political wisdom, especially political correctness, that many Republicans had considered an immutable inhibitor of policy reform. Now we will see if the deeper structural changes of the past decades created by political correctness can be corrected.

As the rhetoric of the NeverTrumpers revealed, identity politics ideology about various subgroups in America had been accepted as truth. Many so-called conservatives endorsed dubious victim-narratives and group identities as realities that Republicans had to accept and adapt to. “Hispanics,” we were told, are the fastest growing minority, a demographic time-bomb that will shatter the Republican party unless it acknowledged their grievances and proposed remedies. Rhetoric criticizing illegal aliens was counterproductive and “insensitive,” if not racist. Hence in 2013 the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” put forth a “comprehensive” immigration bill that set a low bar for illegal aliens to become citizens, without first ensuring that the border be controlled or putting in place stringent mechanism for vetting applicants. Yet despite those drawbacks, many Republicans, believed that such legislation would create good will and future votes among “Hispanics.”

For obvious reasons, these efforts did nothing to increase the Republican share of these voters in 2014 and help Mitt Romney. The first problem is that “Hispanics” don’t exist. In reality there is a complex diversity of peoples from various ethnicities and national cultures. A recent Mexican-Indian immigrant from Oaxaca who picks grapes has little in common with a third-generation Mexican-American who speaks little if any Spanish and works for the DMV. A Honduran Indian dishwasher has no solidarity with a Caucasian Cuban lawyer.

Like everybody else, these groups have diverse interests that may overlap, such as wanting government to provide more social welfare transfers, and give them a similar interest in voting for Democrats. But, as the cliché goes, thinking that bringing illegal aliens “out of the shadows” was the prime concern of these diverse millions was dubious at best, and contrary to most polling data that put this issue low on the list of concern for Hispanics. That may be why for all Trump’s allegedly “racist” and “xenophobic” rhetoric about illegal aliens, he did slightly better among Hispanic voters than did Mitt Romney.

What can Republicans learn from Trump’s victory? The biggest lesson is that the old way of politics is dead. McCain and Romney showed that twice. Now Trump has shown how Republicans can actually win.

1. Find Your Natural Base

The GOP is ashamed of its base. It doesn’t like being associated with the very voters who made 2016 happen. Its autopsy last time around searched for ways to leave the white working class behind.

There’s a party that did that. Their symbol is a jackass. They just lost big because they ran out of working class white voters.

The Democrats have tried to manufacture their base using immigration, victimhood politics and identity politics. The GOP has wasted far too much time trying to compete on the same playing field while neglecting its base. Trump won by doing what the GOP could have done all along if its leadership hadn’t been too ashamed to talk to people it considered low class because they shop at WalMart.

The GOP wanted a better image. It cringed at Trump’s red caps and his rallies. And they worked.

Trump won because he found the neglected base of working class white voters who had been left behind. He didn’t care about looking uncool by courting them. Instead he threw himself into it.

That’s why McCain and Romney lost. It’s why Bush and Trump won.

The GOP is not the cool party. It’s never going to be. It’s the party of the people who have been shut out, stepped on and kicked around by the cool people. Trump understood that. The GOP didn’t.

The GOP’s urban elites would like to create an imaginary cool party that would be just like the Democrats, but with fiscally conservative principles. That party can’t and won’t exist.

You can run with the base you have. Or you can lose.

2. Media and Celebrities Don’t Matter

The first rule of Republican politics is to look in the mirror and ask, “Are we trying to be Democrats?”

Twice Obama’s big glittering machine of celebrities, media and memes rolled over hapless Republicans. Republican operatives desperately wondered how they could run against Oprah, Beyonce and BuzzFeed. How were they supposed to survive being mocked by Saturday Night Live and attacked by the media?

The answer was to find voters who weren’t making their decisions based on any of those things.

The GOP’s approach in the last few elections was to try and duplicate the Obama machine. These efforts were clumsy, awkward, expensive and stupid. The Obama machine was great at influencing its target electorate of urban and suburban millennial college grads because that’s who ran it and directed it. But that’s not the Republican base. And chasing it was a waste of time, money and energy.

Instead of trying to duplicate the Obama machine, the Trump campaign targeted a class of voters who didn’t care about those things. The white working class that turned out for Trump was a world away from the cultural obsessions of the urban elites who had traditionally shaped both sets of campaigns.

Romney wanted everyone to like him. Being rejected hurt him so much because he wanted to be accepted. Trump ran as an outsider. Being rejected by the establishment was a badge of pride. He couldn’t be humiliated by being mocked by the cool kids because he wasn’t trying to be accepted.

Asking, “Are we trying to be Democrats?” isn’t just for policy. It’s also something for Republicans to remember when Election Day comes around. The Republican base isn’t the Democrat base. When Republicans commit to pursuing their base, they can stop worrying about what Saturday Night Live, Samantha Bee and random celebrities think of them. And they can just be themselves.