John Kasich orbits the GOP convention like a renegade moon
Reporting from Cleveland — John Kasich has gone AWOL from a political party that has gone rogue.
When Cleveland was picked as the site of the Republican National Convention a couple of years ago, Kasich, as the Republican governor of Ohio, certainly expected to be a featured speaker and busy participant in the event. And, of course, in his biggest dreams, he pictured himself as the party’s nominee. Instead, he is spending this week orbiting the convention site, running through a busy schedule of events, but never crossing the threshold of Donald Trump’s extravaganza at the Quicken Loans Arena.
On Tuesday, the day Trump was formally nominated, Kasich threw a party for himself and his many Ohio fans at this city’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame & Museum. Hundreds of people packed the place, jamming together uncomfortably as they waited to hear the governor speak. Talking to one Ohio Republican stalwart, I joked that it looked as though there were enough convention delegates attending the museum event to win Kasich the presidential nomination. “If only it was that easy,” the man said, sighing at the thought of what might have been.
There are still plenty of mainstream Republicans who are also wistful about what might have been. After the campaign of Jeb Bush spent a mountain of money only to get stuck in the mud, Kasich became the favored candidate of traditional Republicans. His conservative ideas were focused on economic policy and more-effective, streamlined government, not talk radio anger and dark conspiracy theories. His Republicanism seemed akin to that of Bob Dole and Gerald Ford, not Ted Cruz and the tea party. Kasich kept his sensible, mild-mannered campaign alive long enough to be one of the three competitors left in the race at the end of May, but this was never going to be his year.
Tuesday’s party was partly a thank-you to all the people who stuck with him in a losing cause. When he got up to speak, Kasich made note of the abrupt end to his campaign. “To go further,” he told the crowd, “I’d have had to tell things that weren’t true.” He did not detail what those fibs might have been, but certainly one of them would have been, “I can still win this thing.”
The winner was clearly going to be Trump, a celebrity outsider with no governmental experience and no coherent, detailed plan beyond “make American great again.” Like so many experienced Republican politicians and intellectually inclined conservatives, Kasich has found it impossible (unlike Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan) to trick himself into thinking it will somehow be OK that Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president. And so Kasich is boycotting the convention and declining to endorse the nominee of his party.
During his brief remarks at the Rock & Roll museum, the governor talked about how the campaign “profoundly changed” him, how it taught him to get past policy and look at what’s going on inside people, and how he learned that politics should be “about connecting hearts and lives in the United States of America.”
When he was done, Kasich hugged his wife, waved to the big crowd and exited without saying a single word about the convention a few blocks away or the man who has turned the Grand Old Party inside out, Donald Trump. Tellingly, the song that boomed through the building as he left was one of the Who’s most famous rock anthems, with words Kasich might have been singing to himself:
“I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution,
Take a bow for the new revolution,
Smile and grin at the change all around,
Pick up my guitar and play,
Just like yesterday,
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again.”
Follow me at @davidhorsey on Twitter
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