It has become par for the course at national political party conventions to have a member of the other party address the crowd. Zell Miller and Artur Davis famously made appearances at Republican conventions as renegades — Democrats who supported Republican presidential nominees because their own party had gone off the rails. And similarly, every Democratic convention must feature its token Republican — this time, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
Kasich, whose no-hope, bitter-ender presidential campaign in 2016 was one factor among many that made the extraordinary nomination of Donald Trump possible, was the Democrats’ choice to speak last night.
It’s no surprise that Kasich would agree to this — in fact, he is just the right Republican for the job. Republicans who find Trump distasteful are a dime a dozen, but Kasich outdoes them all in his desire to draw attention to himself.
Kasich had long teased a 2020 primary challenge to Trump before abandoning the idea when it became abundantly clear that it would end in humiliation. He was polling about 60 points behind the incumbent early last year.
Kasich, when in office, quickly abandoned most of his conservative principles after an initial major defeat. A massive effort by labor union activists successfully overturned his reform of public sector unions in a 2011 referendum. As much as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s early victory on this issue energized him, Kasich’s early defeat seemed to deflate him.
Subsequently, Kasich took up a more squishy, centrist place in the Republican firmament. The low point probably came when he circumvented his state’s legislature to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, cynically citing the scriptures as he did so. Yet the former House Budget chairman, once considered a staunch conservative and a rising star in his party, is only now truly abandoning his claim to conservatism.
For example, just as he left office in December 2018, Kasich signed a ban on abortions after 12 weeks into pregnancy. Although he had vetoed the stricter “heartbeat bill,” his statement that “I’m pro-life” was not an empty claim. Kasich continues to point to his pro-life bona fides as proof that he is a conservative and a model for conservatives who feel they cannot support Trump in good conscience.
Yet now, he is not only refusing to vote for Trump, a perfectly defensible position for a conservative to take, but he has actually endorsed and campaigned at a convention on behalf of the most aggressively pro-abortion presidential ticket in U.S. history.
Joe Biden’s running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, proposed a federal law that would invalidate state abortion laws on late-term abortions, let alone the early-term ones that Kasich banned in Ohio. She also wants to require Justice Department preclearance on all state abortion restrictions.
Of course, abortion is just one example of how ludicrous it is to assume that opposition to Trump should translate into support for a Democratic Party so far to the left of where it once was.
In his speech, awkwardly delivered from a patch of grass where two roads met (a “crossroads,” get it?), Kasich said that as a lifelong Republican, he was endorsing Biden because he would unify America. This is the same Biden who led the takedown of Robert Bork and oversaw the “high-tech lynching” of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, two bitterly partisan affairs that set the precedent for today’s toxic judicial confirmation battles.
This is also the same Biden who warned an African American audience during the 2012 election cycle that Mitt Romney’s Republican Party would “put y’all back in chains.” It’s also the same Biden who more recently signaled openness to eliminating the filibuster so Democrats can ram through their agenda without needing any Republican support.
Kasich acknowledged the underlying reality — that Republican and independent voters who “fear Joe may turn sharp left and leave them behind.” He then offered a completely vapid, meaningless reassurance that it wouldn’t happen. “I don’t believe that,” he said, “because I know the measure of the man — reasonable, faithful, respectful. And you know, no one pushes Joe Biden around.”
What does that even mean?
In the real world, Democrats are talking about packing the Supreme Court, banning gun sales by executive order, and, of course, spending $90 trillion that no one has on a laughably futile attempt to change the weather.
Biden has even supported a national version of the law that is currently destroying the gig economy in Harris’s home state of California. This should strike fear in the hearts of those who have turned to nontraditional gig employment in the age of COVID as a lifeline.
Does Kasich support this sort of thing? Did he feel comfortable speaking on the same night as Bernie Sanders, the aged socialist who defended every brutal socialist dictatorship in his early career and now thinks that people are poor because the United States has too many brands of deodorant?
We could have respected Kasich had he launched a spirited but doomed primary challenge to Trump last spring. We might even respect him now if he were running for or campaigning for a third-party nomination, or just urging conservatives to sit the election out.
But the role of lackey for a ticket as radical as Biden-Harris is unworthy of anyone claiming to be a conservative of any kind. Kasich had already disappointed so many conservative voters and thinkers before last night that one could hardly think he’d find one last way to do it. He did.
