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John Kasich, Unscripted

By Michael Warren
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Windham, N.H.

“I’m not a scripted man,” John Kasich said Monday afternoon. He’s not joking. Kasich does not speak in prepared remarks or easy-to-follow bullet points. Instead, it’s like a stream-of-consciousness disquisition on the country, philosophy, government, spirituality, and his own personal journey. He glides seamlessly from one idea to the next, rarely pausing or altering his tone. Without notice, his response to a question about the national debt may transform into a jeremiad about our overreliance on technology.

In his 105th town hall event in New Hampshire Monday, Kasich opened with an odd meta-commentary on his town hall events. “I’m trying to get the right pitch here,” Kasich said. “Not the pitch for a vote, but pitch.”

So Kasich went looking for his pitch:

When you get down to the final hours, you want to think about kind of the panoply of what’s flashing before you, and I have so many good memories of being here. As I’ve said, I’ve learned a lot here and you could say, well, what’s the most important lesson? These town halls, in some ways, now that they’re bigger with all the press, some of the intimacy is gone from them. But I have seen people come and tell about their hurts and about their joys. And I’ve learned, and I’ve kind of always known this, you might say, why, what are you talking about? Well, in 1987, I got a phone call, one of those calls you don’t want to get. My parents had been in a horrible automobile accident. My father was dead, and my mother was going to die the next morning. And so I drove all night to get to my mother’s bedside, and it was a complete nightmare for me, because when I was a little boy, my father would leave late at night to pick my mother up at work. They would drive on this narrow little street, and I was always worried that one night, they wouldn’t come home. And here I am, grown man, member of Congress, and one night that nightmare came true. But I will tell you, the interesting thing about it, my parents lived a life—look, I got all my values from them. My father was a Democrat. My mother was a Democrat, became a Republican later in life. They never took care of themselves. Everything was for the kids. You don’t go out to fancy dinners, they don’t smoke, you don’t, you know, you might have a beer. They just lived not as well as they should have, because the next generation never appreciates all the sacrifices of the mom and the dad. But I learned common sense and respect and God-fearing and all of that. And I will never forget how dark it was. It was like, and I just talked to somebody who’s been through hell, and for those who have been through it, it’s all black, isn’t it? Except for one little, tiny pinprick of light. And a man came to see me. Actually it was there that I really found my faith. The man said over time, you’re going to heal, but you need to get yourself squared away with your eternal destiny. And in the process of that I somehow received the grace to be healed, to have had an experience that was, as hard as this is to believe, to turn lemons in a lot of ways into lemonade. And it’s made me so much more sensitive to the problems that people have. And it allows me to go right into their world, because I know what that world was like. Though I didn’t lose a child, God forbid. But what it’s allowed me to do is, in some ways, to just have the credibility. And I learned something from the Book of Job…

Forget the right pitch. Can Kasich find a point? And yet, if the polls are any indication, Kasich’s James Joyce impersonation is effective. With just a day before the New Hampshire primary, Kasich is just behind Marco Rubio in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. The trend suggests he could overtake the Florida senator for second place behind Donald Trump.

There are a few reasons for this. Kasich has had the benefit of staying out of the crosshairs of both Trump and his main gubernatorial rivals, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie. He’s also had more campaign events in the Granite State than any candidate in either party. His style is unconventional, but oddly charming, too. Kasich told a long, rambling story about when he publicly criticized a budget proposed by then-President George H.W. Bush. Bush and his vice president, Dan Quayle, were supposedly “very mad” at Kasich for the young congressman’s impertinence. In his telling, Kasich called up a girlfriend, a little distraught, worried about the idea the president of the United States was upset with him.

“A couple hours later I got flowers delivered to my desk with a note that said, ‘The president may be mad at you, but I’m mad about you,'” Kasich recalled. The audience in Windham let out a collective “aww.” Like I said, charming. Or maybe a little weird.

There are some reasons related to policy that explain why Kasich may have a shot at performing well in Tuesday’s primary. He travels from stop to stop with a large national debt clock that updates in real time. “This is sloppy,” Kasich says, sliding over to the clock and gesturing toward it. “This lacks discipline. This is a bunch of people who are not doing their jobs. And they’re putting their own interests, much of the time, ahead of the interests of the job creators in our country. This is unbelievable. Nineteen trillion. This, right here, is immoral.” That kind of straight-talking budget hawkishness has a certain appeal in New Hampshire.

So does Kasich’s technocratic, good-government message. In Windham, he riffs about how cell-phone technology demonstrates how far we’ve come and how fast the world is changing from the days, in recent memory, of big, clunky public telephone booths. “Medicine, transportation, every single thing is changing. And what isn’t changing?” Kasich said. “Government is not changing! It’s big, it’s slow, it’s like a dinosaur, and if we’re going to fix things there…what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to start changing the way we look at government, innovating, and take a risk.”

But there was an interesting exchange Kasich had with an undecided voter that suggests the Ohio governor is getting some help in New Hampshire’s open primary by positioning himself policy-wise and rhetorically to the left of his Republican rivals. The voter told Kasich she was choosing between him, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. “That’s interesting,” Kasich interjected, to laughter.

“Why should I vote for you in the Democratic primary?” the voter continued. Kasich didn’t try to correct her that he is actually running as a Republican.

Kasich argued that Sanders’s socialist dream “isn’t going to happen” and that Clinton makes every decision based on what “the latest polls say, what’s the latest focus group.”

“I’m the right porridge,” he said. “One of them’s too hot, the other one’s too cold. But I’ve got the right temperature.”

If enough Democratic-leaning independents believe him, Kasich may have found his ticket—out of the Republican primary, that is.

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