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[font size=5]Paul Ryan’s secret plan to save the GOP, after Trump: Turn it into Uber[/font]
A hilarious GOP report on winning back millennials disses Trump, avoids all major issues and embraces Uber politics
Andrew O'Hehir
.... No, I’m serious. At least I think I am. To quote one especially illiterate highlight from the deep trove of comedy gold called “Growing Up GOP: Fresh Ideas From the Fresh Faces of the Republican Party,” published this week on the website millennial.gop — I know! You can’t make this stuff up — ahem: “We can appeal to the voters of the future by asking them to choose between an approach that works more like uber (sic) and less like an old, yellow, taxi-cab company.” First of all, read that so-called sentence over a couple of times while telling yourself that someone who presumably went to college, and whose native language is presumably English, wrote it, and that someone else presumably read it before it went out the door. Fresh ideas from the fresh faces of the Republican Party! Who do not know how to read. ....
Either “Growing Up GOP” is the greatest spoof in the history of spoofery, or it represents Ryan’s blueprint for hauling the smoldering remnants of the Republican Party out of the Trumpian abyss after what most Republicans believe (and some hope) will be a cataclysmic defeat in November. One of the wonders of our age is that we have reached a singularity of meaninglessness, and there is no difference between those things. Political satire has become indistinguishable from political rhetoric. “Growing Up GOP” would have struck George Orwell as too shallow and too devoid of psychological insight for modern politics; it would have struck Tony Hendra and Michael O’Donoghue, master satirists of National Lampoon magazine in the ‘70s, as too obviously fake. (I’m going to send this article to P.J. O’Rourke as soon as I’m done writing it. Either he’s responsible for millennial.gop or it will send him into a monastery.)
I have twice accused Paul Ryan of being the driving force behind “Growing Up GOP,” although he is not the report’s official author or sponsor. It was largely produced by the College Republican National Committee, with support from other GOP entities, and its principal author is pollster and consultant Kristen Soltis Anderson, a person who has written an actual book called “The Selfie Vote.” But this hilariously incoherent hodge-podge of generational buzzwords and business-school clichés could not carry the House Speaker’s ideological DNA any more clearly if he had … well, I had an analogy in mind, but let’s drop it. Ryan is its baby-daddy, if I am using that term correctly. (Marketing to millennials!)
Furthermore, the fact that this report was released to the public on the same day that Ryan finally and begrudgingly admitted he would support Donald Trump in the fall was obviously no accident. It was Ryan’s nod-plus-wink to Republican cognoscenti: I’m on board this train, kind of, but I’m jumping off five seconds after Trump’s weepy concession speech. “Growing Up GOP” is the crossed fingers, visible to all, that Ryan holds behind his back as he vows allegiance to the stupid choice made by the stupid Republican base.
Ryan is referenced and quoted over and over in “Growing Up GOP” as a leading example of the “open, bottom-up approach to problem solving” that will supposedly create inroads for Republicans among the younger voters they have so spectacularly lost. No other living Republican politician is ever mentioned by name, unless you count a nostalgic backward glance at Mitt Romney, who will never again be a candidate for anything and who — come to think of it! — picked Ryan as his running mate in 2012. ... ....
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