John Kasich leaves the Republican battle with his reputation intact
The governor of Ohio’s campaign could have been viable—in a wholly different election cycle
By LEXINGTON | INDIANAPOLIS
PUNDITS have spent months mocking the Republican presidential ambitions of Governor John Kasich of Ohio, who finally dropped out on May 4th, clearing the field for Donald Trump. As other, more successful rivals dropped by the wayside, leaving the governor to trudge on with his one victory (in his home state, Ohio) and his paltry haul of delegates, commentators called Mr Kasich delusional, vain and a bore. One compared Mr Kasich to a party guest who has stayed too long, and is now angling to sleep on the sofa. But Mr Kasich was not a joke. Yes, he can be moody, sometimes startlingly candid and an undisciplined campaigner. But he is also a successful, experienced and thoughtful governor, touting a distinctive brand of pragmatic, sleeves-rolled-up midwestern conservatism. His campaign could have been viable—just in an election cycle wholly unlike this one.
More doctrinaire conservatives loathed Mr Kasich, accusing him of drawing votes from Mr Trump’s chief rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. They grumbled that he had committed acts of Republican apostasy, as when he took federal money to expand Medicaid, a government health scheme for the poor. Hardliners harboured a personal resentment of Mr Kasich too. They thought him a prig for hinting that stern right-wingery can be un-Christian—one of his favourite lines on the stump is to say that when politicians die and go to heaven, Saint Peter will not ask if they balanced the budget, but instead will ask what they did “for the least among us.”
That faint preacherly air hung over a hastily-organised press conference in Columbus, Ohio on the afternoon of May 4th, as Mr Kasich said that as he halted his campaign: “I have renewed faith, deeper faith that the Lord will show me the way forward and fulfil the purpose of my life.”
Lexington interviewed Mr Kasich for a column in 2014, and has watched him address voters several times since then, from Ohio to New Hampshire and South Carolina. He thinks that hard-right critics misjudge Mr Kasich. Start with the charge that his only achievement was to split the anti-Trump vote, harming Mr Cruz. That is too simple. Travelling to Republican rallies over the past many months, Kasich fans were more common than his poll numbers would suggest.
After a while, Kasich voters could be spotted some way away. They were often more affluent than the norm. They might own their own businesses, or turn up to rallies in suits. Suburban mothers with children in tow might talk of their horror at the crudity of the televised debates involving Mr Trump, and how the one they really liked was that John Kasich, if only he had a chance... and their voices would tail off. Crucially, such folk typically could not stand Mr Cruz, whose sneering, divisive manner they thought un-electable. He was less a man who split the Cruz vote, in short, than one orphaned by his own party. Final proof was offered by a brief stop-Trump pact between the two rivals, with Mr Kasich leaving Indiana to Mr Cruz, in exchange for a free run in two later contests in New Mexico and Oregon. The pact fizzled, in part because the two men’s support-bases had so little in common.
If all this makes Mr Kasich sound like the doomed moderate in the race—the Jon Huntsman of the 2016 cycle—that is not quite correct. He is—at least by the standards of the Republican Party of the Reagan or Bush eras—a stern, tax-cutting, pro-business conservative. He is opposed to abortion and gay marriage (though he told a Republican debate in August 2015 that he had attended the wedding of a gay friend, and would love and accept one of his daughters if she turned out to be gay). He says that the border with Mexico must be made more secure. On the trail he touted his 18 years in the House of Representatives, when he helped to balance the budget under President Bill Clinton (he sometimes over-egged this record, hinting that he was the sole architect of that deal). As governor he approved a Republican-friendly gerrymandering of Ohio’s congressional districts. He can be a bit curmudgeonly: this reporter once watched him at a rally in Dayton, Ohio, fretting about young children who call parents by their first names, citing this as a symptom of national decline.
In the governor’s telling, conservatism must have a moral purpose. Republicans should celebrate those who are successful—Americans do not hate the rich, they want to join them, he likes to say, quoting his late father, a postman. But a prosperous state should use its resources to help the weak—those who, in a favourite Kasich phrase, “live in the shadows”, including the mentally ill or drug addicts.
Vitally, Ohio’s governor is more interested in conservative ends than means. Take that contentious Medicaid expansion. In long, off-the-record briefings, his aides said that they had researched creating private health-insurance for the poorest, but had concluded that government control allowed the most control over costs.
In the presidential primary he attempted to play the can’t-we-just-get-along adult in the room. Thus in contrast with rivals offering fantasy tax-cutting plans which would instantly trigger economic booms, Mr Kasich would explain that as president he would try to balance the federal budget, but that this would take some time and would involve hard trade-offs. He would discuss how such expensive schemes as Social Security payments for older Americans would need to be trimmed back or delayed for younger retirees. Last November, he told an audience in the manicured South Carolina resort of Hilton Head to disbelieve claims by Mr Trump that 11m immigrants living in America without legal papers can all be deported—calling that “as likely as me flying to the moon”.
In recent weeks alas, Mr Kasich was only playing spoiler. His last hopes lay in a contested Republican National Convention, and in frustrating Mr Trump’s efforts to secure the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the presidential nomination in a first round of voting. His supporters imagined Mr Kasich landing the nomination in a third, or a fifth round of voting at the convention—a scenario harking back to the days when party barons chose candidates in smoke-filled rooms.
Thus, less than 24 hours after Mr Cruz dropped out of the race, citing Mr Trump’s sweeping victory in the Indiana primary, Mr Kasich decided that his heart was not in carrying on. Mr Trump dropped half-hints that Mr Kasich is on his list of possible vice-presidents, perhaps because Ohio is a battleground state that Republican presidential hopefuls typically must win to secure the White House, saying he has “a very good relationship with John”.
Kasich aides have long insisted that their boss has no interest in being Mr Trump’s running-mate. Hope that they are right. Ohio’s governor is one of very few members of the once-vast Republican field to leave the contest with his reputation intact. His good name, not to mention his conscience, would not survive an entry into Trump-world.
