'Clown Car'

Ed Kilgore wrote a little something in The Washington Monthly about Gov. Kasich.

WashingtonMonthly:


....Yes, John Kasich is interrupting his tour of Rocky Mountain states promoting that hip new idea the Balanced Budget Amendment to go to an actual early primary state...


....I’m sorry, I just don’t get why so many smart people share this view of Kasich as a world-beater. Yes, his resume is strong, and yes, he’s theoretically “electable.” But if there was ever the wrong time for a Balanced Budget crusade, it’s probably right now, and I just can’t see him rousing a crowd into the kind of hate-frenzy needed to win in the early states...


 Charles Pierce of Esquire, had a very worthwhile article (John Kasich Emerges: One More For The Clown Car) about Ohio Gov. John Kasich.  Here are some excerpts from that Esquire article:

...I remember, back in 1999, how hot a candidate everybody thought John Kasich was; he was the staunch supply-sider who could talk to the young...

....He talked to the young so well that he became the only member of the House of Representatives ever to get the heave-ho at a Grateful Dead concert -- perhaps, as Woody Allen once put it, because several dozen people were rushed to the hospital with bad vibes. Do you know how much of a jackass you have to be to get thrown out of a Dead concert, at least if they don't catch you selling fake crystals or something? Yeesh.

Anyway, Kasich '00 cratered even before the 1999 Iowa Straw Poll -- which made him also the Tim Pawlenty of the '90's -- because George W. Bush was hoovering up all the campaign money. What I remember most about Kasich's brief trip around the track is that he was somebody who thoroughly bought his own publicity. (Here in the Commonwealth -- God save it! -- we have come to know this as the McDreamy Syndrome.) Now, though, he's in his second term as governor of Ohio, where he has a) accepted the government-cootified Medicaid money, and b) lost the fight against public employee unions that Scott Walker won in Wisconsin. And his big campaign pitch is, as I said, the Worst Idea In Interplanetary Politics. I don't know how "I had all these terrible ideas before any of these guys" is going to play as a strategy. It's only a matter of time before he starts arguing that he's not a career politician.



While some (2 or 3 people) in Ohio view Kasich as a visionary, those outside of the state have opinions that are not the least favorable. I'm old enough to remember Kasich's tenure in the House of Representatives.  Although some in the GOP thought Kasich was 'hip,' it is safe to say he wasn't hip then and he isn't hip now.

If there are people out there that think that cutting 100,000 people off food stamps, cutting funding to public schools, restricting women's reproductive rights, turning over public-financed prisons to private corrections companies, allowing less than safe food to be served in some prisons, cutting prison staff, attacking teachers, not supporting marriage equality, attacking union workers,......................then you must be a Republican and a supporter of a pro-business, anti-human agenda.