For the GOP, a Pickle of a Platform

WASHINGTON -- How do you write a platform for a party whose candidate's positions span the unfortunate gamut from nonexistent to offensive to flatly at odds with those of the party?

Such is the thankless task consigned this year to Sen. John Barrasso. The Wyoming Republican is a Yale-trained orthopedist with a voracious appetite for history (he's currently immersed in a Ulysses S. Grant biography) and a political junkie's love of game and country (Barrasso hasn't missed an inauguration since his father, a Pennsylvania cement finisher, took him to John F. Kennedy's).

Barrasso exhibits a wonk's inclination for policy specifics (he just hosted surgeon and writer Atul Gawande to speak to fellow senators on health care) that puts him more in the "sweat the details" spirit of Hillary Clinton than the details-shmetails approach of Donald Trump.

Barrasso is, in short, the anti-Trump. Not in the sense of being opposed to the nominee -- he isn't, although, like most of his GOP Senate colleagues, he scarcely exudes enthusiasm for Trump.

But where Trump has dispensed campaign cash to both parties, veers from stance to stance, and displays a hummingbird's attention to specifics, Barrasso is resolutely conservative and serious about the enterprise.

And in a conversation with The Washington Post editorial board the other day, Barrasso presented the platform-writing exercise -- it will take place in Cleveland the week before next month's convention -- as a mechanism both for defining a party reeling from the Trump phenomenon and for educating its nominee.

So, I asked, does the platform matter in the age of Trump?

"It does to me. It does to the party," he replied. "It really is who we are, what we believe in, what our values are. That's why I think it matters now more than ever."

Specifically, Barrasso continued, "it matters in terms of being instructive to our nominee for president. I've talked to him and asked him to embrace it and I believe that he will."

How interesting to understand the platform as an instructional document ... for the top of the ticket. One illustration of that needed instruction came as we pressed Barrasso on the question of whether, as he sees it, Trump -- and his calls for a wall on the Mexican border, deporting illegal immigrants, and barring and profiling Muslims -- represents Republican values.

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