NYT The Lessons of Kasich (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/rossdouthat/index.html) _Ross Douthat_ (http://www.nytimes.com/column/ross-douthat) APRIL 14, 2016 We have reached, at last, the _John Kasich_ (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/john-kasich-on-the-issues.html?inline=nyt-per) moment. The next six Republican primaries are in his kind of territory: blue states, Northeastern, moderate, exactly the sort of places where his positioning as the electable, reasonable Republican is designed to pay off big. But unfortunately he’s not likely to win any of them. Which makes this Kasich moment a lot like the last Kasich moment, when the campaign moved to his native Midwest … and he lost Illinois and Michigan handily. And, for that matter, a lot like the Kasich moment before that, when he camped out in New Hampshire, the state that his campaign was obviously scripted to win … and finished 20 points behind Donald Trump. Yet say this for Kasich: Despite having lost every single Republican contest except on his home turf of Ohio, despite having finished behind Marco Rubio in Arizona after Rubio dropped out, despite running a campaign that has failed at signature gathering and filling delegate slots and made pointless forays into unwinnable states, when this dust of 2016 settles he will have one claim to bragging rights. He’ll probably be the only Republican nominee to ever lead Hillary Clinton by 11 points in a national poll. Now that was just one survey, from Fox News in mid-March. And Kasich’s average lead over Clinton, a healthy 6.7 percent in the _RealClearPolitics average_ (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_kasich_vs_clinton-5162.html) , is clearly padded by his status as an also-ran in the Republican contest. Nobody’s attacking him on the trail, nobody in the national media is going over his record, nobody’s looking at his current policy positions in any detail. (Or, really, at all: Quick, name one!) But for all of that, it’s also true that if you laboratory-grew a Republican politician to win a presidential election in the current political climate, he would probably look a lot like Kasich. Now and likely more so in the future, the G.O.P.’s path back to the White House is likely to run through the Midwest. Now and likely more so in the future, the G.O.P. would benefit from nominating a candidate who is religious but not a Southern evangelical, who has a blue-collar background and affect, who can point to at least one major break with his party’s economic orthodoxies (in Kasich’s case, that would be his support for Ohio’s Medicaid expansion) and who generally projects an air of moderation rather than ideological zeal. Of course not every aspect of Kasich’s persona fits this ideal profile (his sojourn at Lehman Brothers, especially). But he’s closer to the profile than Scott Walker, once (and perhaps again) the conservative movement’s Great Midwestern Hope, precisely because he has a little more distance than Walker from the official conservative movement line. And he’s far, far closer than either Trump or Ted Cruz, which is why the gap between his general-election polls and theirs isn’t just an artifact of his also-ran position. The question, then, is whether the party could ever actually nominate a figure with this profile. Or put another way, is there a 2016 counterfactual in which John Kasich doesn’t end up as an extraordinarily persistent loser? It would be foolish, in this year of Trump and Cruz, to answer yes. But Kasich’s struggles do suggest two lessons for electable Midwesterners running in the future. First, disagree with conservatives on some issues, but don’t lecture them about your virtue. Kasich’s record is hardly left-wing, and he clearly passes more conservative litmus tests than the record Mitt Romney campaigned on in 2012. But like Jon Huntsman before him, another governor with John Weaver as his campaign manager, Kasich hasn’t really tried to woo or reassure the right, to promise that while there are differences, he’s mostly on their side. Instead he has consistently virtue-signaled to the media in ways that have the opposite effect. In Huntsman’s case, this habit included smug barbs about how much more reasonable and science-y he was than the average Republican. In Kasich’s case, it has included _pious lectures_ (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/does-john-kasichs-religiosity-turn-off-religious-conservatives/article/2566734) about how his Medicaid expansion makes him more Christian than the average small-government Republican. He’s allowed to think that, of course, and in the light of eternity he might be vindicated. But phrasing it that way, in a party in which piety and limited government sentiment are a package deal for many voters and activists, was clear political malpractice. Second, target blue-collar voters with more than biography. As much as Kasich’s failure to reassure ideological conservatives hurt him, his real problem is that he’s been boxed out by Trump among what should have been his campaign’s target demographic: working-class, economically moderate Republicans in the Rust Belt and Northeast. (He didn’t lose New Hampshire or Michigan to Ted Cruz, after all.) That happened for many reasons, starting with Trump’s celebrity and media domination, and obviously Kasich couldn’t have imitated Trump’s toxic race-baiting without making himself just as toxic in the general election -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
[RC] NYT Ross Douthat The Lessons of Kasich
BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community Thu, 14 Apr 2016 13:04:26 -0700
