Concord, N.H.
John Kasich has discovered himself in New Hampshire.
“I have found great clarity in New Hampshire,” he says, about ten minutes into a town hall in the state’s heavily Democratic capital city. It’s a fortuitous development. As luck would have it, Kasich has built his campaign around success in the state’s first in the nation primary Tuesday. And Kasich wants to use this town hall to share his newfound wisdom with voters.
At times, he sounds less like a presidential candidate than a national therapist. “I think many of us just feel lonely,” he says. “We don’t know where to go. There’s nobody around to celebrate some of our victories. And sometimes there’s nobody around to celebrate—or to just cry with us. Don’t we want that back in our country again?”
Kasich shares stories of people who have come to his town halls to share their stories with him. Some of the stories are compelling and dramatic, others are hokey, forced. But he’s not done.
“Don’t we need to slow down our lives a little bit and listen to somebody else and celebrate with them and mourn with them and struggle with them? Cause, you know, we’re all connected. Everybody on this earth is connected. We’re just part of a mosaic in a moment of time. And when people are broken, it hurts all of us.”
It’s an unorthodox approach to winning votes, to be sure. And the crowd reaction appears mixed, with some in the audience nodding their heads in agreement and others wearing looks of befuddlement on their faces.
Kasich doesn’t stop with his diagnosis of the problem. “What am I going to do about it?” he asks himself. “I’m going to try to slow my life down.”
It’s an odd promise from a man running for president who will, with a performance here strong enough to allow him to continue, find his life appreciably more chaotic than it is now and who, if he were to win the Republican nomination, would be in for a general election campaign that would leave him little time for his family, to say nothing of sleep, and who, if he were to win that contest, would be the leader of the free world.
The only thing that would allow Kasich to slow his life down anytime soon would be a bad loss here Tuesday. And there are reasons to believe that won’t happen. Kasich’s rivals believe he is poised to over-perform his polling here. He has risen to fourth in the RealClearPolitics polling average, with 12.4 percent, nearly double his standing of a couple months ago. Private polling has him doing even better, with some campaign and super PAC polling putting him in a strong second place.
Kasich didn’t use all of his prepared remarks playing Robert Putnam. He spent much of his opening describing how he battled his own party to cut defense spending, working alongside former New Hampshire Representative Charlie Bass, who has endorsed him and introduced him here. The two men collaborated to tell the story of their efforts to force the Pentagon to drastically scale back production of the B-2 bomber. “The Pentagon wanted 130, I was at 13, we settled at 20,” he boasted.
It would be the only substantive discussion of national security issues in Kasich’s speech. He did not raise ISIS or al Qaeda, Iran or Russia, North Korea or Syria. Unlike his rivals, he didn’t pledge to restore defense spending cut dramatically by Barack Obama. He didn’t promise to relaunch the war on terror or vanquish the global jihadist movement. At a time when voters tell pollsters that they’re concerned about terrorism and national security issues, it was quite an oversight. And for a moment, it seemed like he recognized it. As he wrapped up his opening remarks—some 20 minutes after he started—he paused for a moment and asked out loud if he’d forgotten anything. “I want to go to questions here but I’m thinking if I left anything out.” He paused, thought for a minute, and then moved on. “We can solve these things.”
Kasich is clearly running an updated version of Jon Huntsman’s 2012 campaign—running as a liberal Republican problem-solver, hoping to appeal to many of New Hampshire’s unaffiliated or Democrat-leaning voters. He talks about putting Democrats in senior positions in a Kasich administration and often laments partisanship.
After laying out the country’s challenges—other than national security—Kasich put his finger on the problem. “People,” he said. “Partisanship.” And then he mocked politicians who want to avoid difficult votes. “I just don’t want to make a vote like that because I might lose an election.” He added: “We need to let people know in those jobs that you’re an American before you’re a Republican, before you’re a Democrat—you’re an American.”
It was an odd argument for Kasich to make, given the reasons he has cited for taking Ohio’s Medicaid expansion around the Ohio legislature. In an exchange last week with Philip Klein from the Washington Examiner, Kasich acknowledged that he didn’t take Ohio’s Medicaid expansion to the Ohio legislature and instead pushed it through the “controlling board”—a small group of lawmakers handpicked by legislative leaders.
“The fact is we took this through the Controlling Board, which is a group of legislators who are appointed by the leadership,” Kasich told Klein. “The leadership felt it was better to take it through the Controlling Board than to force a vote in the House and the Senate so people didn’t have to face primaries from people who distorted what we were doing. And it passed.”
That is, Kasich enabled exactly the kind of behavior he would condemn just days later as a symptom of our broken politics—all to implement a massive expansion of government. If it’s contemptible when lawmakers seek to avoid tough votes, what is it when a governor makes such behavior possible? Or when a leader who condemns such cowardice in others practices it himself?
There were other moments in Kasich’s town hall that would make conservatives cheer. At the end of a long, stream-of-consciousness monologue about what to expect at the beginning of a Kasich presidency, the candidate offered an optimistic prediction and a mini-lecture about the importance of reducing the tax burden and cutting government outlays.
If he is elected president, Kasich promised a “robust economy and job growth…in the first hundred days.” If that was perhaps unrealistic, he had the right prescription. “You gotta cut taxes. All the time you have to cut taxes,” he said. “And at the same time, you gotta control spending…Where’s my debt clock. I carry a debt clock around—who carries a debt clock?” he said, pointing to a large debt clock in the corner of the atrium, with the numbers scrolling at an incalculable pace. “I’m getting weird.”
