Listen to Kasich, and you realize - even the 'reasonable' Republican candidate is delusional.
I’m watching John Kasich on CBS This Morning, and it’s bizarre as he tries to put positive spin on everything — his lack of delegates, his only hope a contested convention, his observation that maybe the Republican Party has made a few missteps…
He has message discipline, I’ll give him that.
He’s trying to position himself as the only candidate who can beat Hillary Clinton, admits his party needs to be for something instead of just opposing everything. (Not entirely true — they’re still FOR more tax cuts for the rich, more war, more cuts to the safety net, more deregulation, reversing Roe V. Wade, defunding Planned Parenthood...)
And yet, the crazy thing is that Kasich is tacitly acknowledging how extreme the Republican Party has become through his attempts to portray himself as a ‘practical’ politician who is promising to make things work. It’s a hell of a dance, sort of like combining the Limbo with Firewalking. And it has nothing to do with a party that no longer gives a shit about using government to do anything but loot the country for the benefit of the donor class.
The Party’s panic over Trump is because he’s ignoring that donor class, having decided to eliminate the middle men and go for power directly. They’re not happy — but authoritarian theocrat bomb-thrower Ted Cruz isn’t exactly their dream candidate either. But, both of them are doing just fine with primary voters and the base.
Which is why watching Kasich is so bizarre. His own record is right out there full of conservative doctrine: anti-labor, anti-women, anti-education, anti-government. He only looks like a moderate by contrast; there’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t take Ohio in the same direction as Wisconsin under Scott Walker or Kansas under Brownback if he thought he could get away with it. If you look at his positions, they’re pretty much standard GOP doctrine.
The CBS crew is giving him some hard questioning — within limits. What they can’t/won’t ask is “Given that your party has become so radicalized, how do you think you can pull them back from the edge?” It’s still pretty much a media given that both political parties are to be treated as two side of the same coin — one hand, other hand “balance”.
There are also the usual things off-limits: no questions on climate change, how he’d change GOP economic policies that fail over and over again, if he’d end the GOP war on government, and so on.
(Kevin Drum points to an interesting study on what happens in countries where journalism doesn’t make a fetish of faux objectivity.)
John Kasich, despite his attempts to position himself as a real alternative to Trump or Cruz, is still practicing the fine art of bubble-blowing, trying to craft an alternate reality where all questions have simple answers, inconvenient truths can be explained away — and hoping the voters will buy it.
