For those that are inclined to appreciate Ohio Governor John Kasich’s adult-in-the-room act, his performance at the debate on Thursday night was something of a marvel. Repeatedly, Kasich was prodded by Fox News Channel’s debate moderators to contrast himself with his fellow candidates, particularly Donald Trump, but he refused to take the bait. Kasich’s display was more than a tad contrived, and kudos is due to the Fox moderators for exposing it as such.
After almost two hours in which Kasich scolded his three remaining competitors in the Republican primary race from his noble 30,000-foot vantage point, the Fox News Channel moderator Chris Wallace tried to bring him down to earth a bit by noting that his campaign has not been as high-minded as their candidate pretends to be.
Wallace teed-up a campaign spot in which the Kasich team noted accurately that Donald Trump has often made overtures to the autocratic Russian President Vladimir Putin. “If elected, Trump promised that the dictatorial duo would, quote, ‘make tyranny great again,’” the narrator said. When Wallace made Kasich answer for the spot and asked if him if he believed that Trump was too “naïve” to serve as president, the Ohio governor theatrically declined to defend his own campaign tactics. “I’m not biting,” declared Kasich, cloaking a rearguard action in righteousness. Perhaps because of the ugly vulgarity of a political race in which Donald Trump is a candidate, the crowd loved it. It has yet to be determined whether this play will redound to Kasich’s benefit.
The moment was reminiscent of the earliest 2012 GOP presidential debates in which former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty was asked to repeat a criticism he had made of Mitt Romney to the former Massachusetts governor’s face. In a humiliating display, Pawlenty conspicuously declined to support his own tactical approach to the campaign on the debate stage.
“You don’t want to address why you called Governor Romney’s Obamneycare?” CNN’s John King asked Pawlenty with surprise. “It — President Obama is — is the person who I quoted in saying he looked to Massachusetts for designing his program. He’s the one who said it’s a blueprint and that he merged the two programs.”
It was a moment that lost Pawlenty the faith of the conservative movement, which had been looking to him to lead a charge against Romney – the presumptive frontrunner – for his work on a precursor program to the Affordable Care Act in Massachusetts. Pawlenty passed on a moment to position himself early in the race as the anti-Romney candidate. He never got another shot.
The parallels between Pawlenty circa 2012 and Kasich circa 2016 are imperfect. Whereas it was clear that the Minnesota governor wanted to be his party’s most viable alternative to Romney, it’s not at all apparent John Kasich seeks the same status vis-à-vis Donald Trump. In terms of policy, Kasich is leading a restoration movement for the deposed compassionate conservative wing of the GOP. Despite his record as a budget and tax-cutter, Kasich’s support for government intervention in the health insurance market and centralized standards in education like Common Core renders him anathema to the post-tea party conservative movement.
More importantly, though, in terms of style, Kasich’s approach to meeting the anger of the moment is the mirror image of Trump. Kasich has targeted the same demographic voters as Trump – blue-collar Reagan Democrats, white working-class rural voters, and moderate independents – but rather than stoke and indulge their anger, he offers them a sympathetic ear and a hug. The approaches appear radically different, but they’re essentially identical; both seek to harness, rather than to channel the voters’ anxiety, with the hope that it redounds to their benefit.
Conservatives who now pray that Donald Trump can be stopped at a contested convention are pinning their hopes on Kasich’s appeal in Ohio. Neither Ted Cruz nor Marco Rubio appears interested in contesting that race. In fact, Ohio looks today like the only state that Kasich has a hope of winning. If he manages to pull off a victory in the Buckeye State, the right will declare that Trump has been stopped, if only temporarily. That presumes, however, that Kasich won’t support Trump at the convention. That presumption does not seem well founded.
In an interview with CNN on Friday following last night’s debate, Kasich declined to rule out supporting Donald Trump as the race matures. “The Ohio governor said that Trump has yet to say or do anything that would disqualify him as the nominee,” CNN reported. “I mean it is always possible that somebody could do something that is so egregious that I would not want to be behind them, but let’s see,” Kasich insisted. If flirting with white supremacists and refusing to renounce their support, pledging to force soldiers to commit war crimes for which they are personally liable, and if the revolt of the conservative movement against Donald Trump were not enough to dissuade Kasich from backing Trump, nothing will be. Ohio’s 66 delegates could very easily put Trump over the top at a contested convention, and Kasich would be owed quite a debt for his facilitation of the Trump takeover of the Republican Party.
Starry-eyed Kasich backers enthralled by his above-it-all moralizing might be grateful to him if the Ohio governor blocks Trump’s bid in Ohio, but there are warning signs on the horizon that the candidate’s success in March may yield the party’s destruction in June.
