You could be forgiven for not knowing what a John Kasich is. In the moral geography of his own party, he comes from neither the Sodom of New York nor the Gomorrah of Washington DC — instead residing in the non-coastal swathe called Heartland. You could be forgiven for not knowing that he is the Republican Governor of Ohio, in the same way that many non-Ohioans do not know Ohio-relevant facts, like where Matthew Dellavedova’s accent comes from. You could even be forgiven for being unaware that he announced his candidacy for president on Tuesday, given that he is an outlander from beyond the current Republican/media fever dream. Kasich is Not Trump which, for the time being, means that he is no one. Trump is our leader .
To borrow another label, this is, as things go, Too Bad: Kasich is an interesting fellow in his own right. He is a nine-term member of Congress who worked with the Clinton administration to balance the budget and a twice-elected Republican governor of a significant swing state who forsook his uber-conservative roots. He’s a bizarre speechmaker who rants about cops, cries, gives a shout out to Ohio State and mentions his hot wife, and a man of faith who is condemned to apostasy by the Republican Party, which is now just a militant evangelical splinter faction of the Chamber of Commerce dedicated to eradicating all record of the policies of the historical Jesus.
Kasich’s apostasy would make him interesting if Republicans weren’t in Trump’s thrall. Despite being elected in the Tea Party wave and immediately cutting social programmes from the budget, despite warring with the public sector unions only to be beaten at the ballot box, despite being far from a centrist, Kasich then moved towards the centre in a key state that went for Obama twice. He famously worked around Ohio Republicans to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, defending his move at a Koch Brothers retreat by saying, “I don’t know about you, lady, but when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.” ( Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal laid into him at the same event for “hiding behind Jesus to expand Medicaid.”)
He accepts the federal Common Core educational standards, worked with black activists following the Tamir Rice shooting to reform law enforcement standards and favoured a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Kasich’s across-the-aisle appeal to dedicated Democratic voters (especially African American ones), voters skewing more Democratic (Latinos) and those who might support Democratic programmes (poor people who might get sick and die) could make him a compelling candidate in a general election and a significant threat to not-really-a-Jeb Bush’s rarified position as the “sane” practical Republican.
But Kasich flubbed his intro: he appeared disorganised and sometimes antic. He spoke without a formal speech or teleprompter, and it showed. Instead of a concrete mission statement and a coherent launch, he told Reagan stories and mentioned expensive Pentagon screwdrivers (item #4 from a future BuzzFeed listicle, “Ten Scary Political Talking-Point Anecdotes Only 80s Kids Will Understand”), balanced budgets, the mentally ill and his “great friend John Sununu”, who spent the 2012 election blowing a racist dog whistle the way Gabriel blew a trumpet. By the end, you might have gotten the sense that, after all this time to prepare, Kasich isn’t much of a candidate.
Skewed news coverage
You might think that, but that would require that you saw Kasich at all. I watched seven hours of CNN following his speech, and in that time — one storm-related power outage aside — I probably saw 10 minutes of footage of him, an amount best expressed as 0.07 Trumps. And most of the images of Kasich appeared during a recurring news-rundown segment, in which Kasich appeared speaking, under a voiceover that said, “...largely overshadowed by The Donald...” before smash-cutting to Trump. Ironically, much of the overwhelming Trump coverage entailed panel discussions with commentators like Gloria Borger lamenting the fact that the wall-to-wall Trump coverage is crowing out engagement with any serious candidates like John Kasich, which is like watching an underclassman, mid-keg stand, gargling out, “I could get my life together if only I weren’t binge drinking!” Any journalism outlet — this one included — indulging in finger-wagging at CNN while pointing to their own marginal abstemiousness in this regard is essentially bragging about being the leper with the most fingers.
Guilty of overdoing it
Everyone is guilty of overdoing it on Trumpy, because Donald Trump is a jackass of galactic proportions. (Even Lindsey Graham - Lindsey Graham! - said as much .) Trump and his appeal embody certain universal tropes about bullying, humiliation and comedy. He is the Alpha and Omega of “ Man Getting Hit By Football “: at any given moment, he is simultaneously both the person throwing it and the person being hit in the groin by it. Journalism is a dull game a lot of the time: on the local level, every day someone’s gotta cover city hall press statements, then write up an article nobody will read; on a national level, every day that a global climate scientists says, Soon millions of us will drown as other millions will starve in droughts and famines and millions more will be killed by severe new weather patterns, a journalist has to find a response quote from a scientician named Dr. Cody from the ExxonMobile/Royal Dutch Shell Institute for Ethics in Climatism to attribute weather changes to “sun malaise” and dog flatulence.
Trump, on the other hand, is a wild card — a generational wild card — as a man who loves the spotlight for its own sake and generally thrives in it because his only engine is an ego moored to reality about as well as the Hindenburg was moored to the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey. Trump’s response to Graham calling him a jackass, for instance, was to read out Graham’s private cell phone number on an international broadcast: he couldn’t just teach at Troll So Hard University, he could be the entire curriculum. You’re never going to hear the end of Trump, because we can’t help ourselves. He’s just too unique, too tempting, too interesting — which is why you’re never going to hear enough about someone like John Kasich, who could blow up Bush’s pretensions to being the only “smart” and “adult” voice in the party and then potentially go on to blow up the Democrats’ chances of being the only party to win significant numbers of votes across the aisle. You’re never going to hear enough about that, because that’s not enough explosions. Donald Trump can blow up everything — the debates, the primary process, Lindsey Graham’s cell. Donald Trump could blow himself up with dynamite tomorrow, and we’d all say “of course he did” and they’d talk about it on cable news for weeks without saying anything interesting about it.
The only one who would say anything worthwhile about his dynamite mishap would be Trump himself, and of course it would be amazing. This is vintage Alfred Nobel dynamite. The explosion is yoooooooge, everyone loves it. It’s $5,000 a stick, but I don’t care. I bought it because I have a great dynamite guy. In fact, I have 12 guys who buy me the most exclusive and expensive dynamite in the world. Very sorry for the haters and losers who can’t appreciate that. Blammo. — Guardian News & Media Ltd
