Goosing the gander: Is Kasich's endorsement worth anything to Mike DeWine?

When Ohio Gov. John Kasich started running what turned out to be his second losing battle for the White House in 2015, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine didn't withhold his endorsement until Kasich made certain commitments to him on certain issues of importance.

Now that AG DeWine won the Republican right to take on Democrat Richard Cordray this fall, Ohio's term-limited, lame duck CEO wants to base his endorsement on what DeWine's plans are for two of his signature policy efforts: accepting expanded Medicaid via Obamacare and the creation of JobsOhio, an entity that wouldn't hold up to constitutional scrutiny, if the state supreme court would allow a case challenging its legitimacy to come to trial.

Until and unless DeWine brokers a deal with the former Lehman Brothers broker turned Ohio governor, Kasich apparently feels it's okay to withhold any level of public endorsement to his Republican colleague.

In Kasich world, what's good for the goose is obviously not good for the gander. The question to Team DeWine is whether Kasichs endorsement is a plus or a minus for him? Kasich's political bi-sexualism, berating both Republicans and Democrats, leaves him a lonely man not liked and definitely not loved by either party.

Kasich's name is bandied about as a possible challenger to President Trump in 2020, should Trump still be president by then. If Kasich got pummeled while the governor of a major swing state while he complained of not having enough money to get his message out, the odds of anyone with deep pockets backing him when he's walking past the political graveyard in two years is so long that Vegas odds makers might not even take that bet. History is littered with losers who thought an independent run or a third-party movement was their magic bullet. The only bullet it produced was one that shot them dead.

John Kasich on Election Night 2010

As Kasich sees it, “The question is how aggressively do I campaign?” for DeWine, who hopes winning in the fall will cap his long political career. At a Michigan Press Association event in East Lansing, Kasich said about whether he'll offer any level of endorsement to DeWine, a candidate he said he'll vote for over Cordray, “And I’ve laid out a couple things that are important to me.”

Unlike DeWine who offered no such bargaining of his support of Kasich for president in 2016, Ohio's 69th governor said he and DeWine "must come to an agreement on the future of the governor’s Medicaid expansion and his job-creation program, JobsOhio."

In response, DeWine’s campaign has said in reports that it would welcome Kasich’s endorsement, then said what it said throughout the nasty GOP primary with Kasich's second in command, Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, "that the plan championed by Kasich to expand the Medicaid government insurance program to cover 700,000 people in Ohio isn’t sustainable financially." DeWine looks to the Trump administration to give Ohio more flexibility to craft its own plan.

In a stunning plot twist, Richard Cordray, the Democratic attorney general Mike DeWine beat and who will again be pitted against DeWine this fall, said he believes the JobsOhio office can play a role in workforce development. “I will work to make sure it fulfills its mission and that it is transparent and effective,” he said, the AP reported in the Washington Times.

In separate but related news that further shows Kasich's ego-centric mindset, he's warning fellow Republican legislators to not "weasel" on his gun-safety proposals. “I’d really like to get my gun stuff going,” Kasich said in remarks after a Statehouse event Tuesday, as reported by the Columbus Dispatch. “You’re either for taking guns out of the hands of someone who presents a danger to themselves or others, or you are not. Say it.”

Third graders know it takes one to know one, so when a long-time weasel like Kasich admonishes his right-wing General Assembly to do his bidding as asked, it takes a lot of brass to do that. “Don’t weasel around on this; take a position ... Get out of the weasel, the weasel activity of ‘I’m going to avoid saying anything because I may make somebody mad.’ ... When you’re all things to all people, you’re really nothing to many people,” reports said on Kasich's comments.

Revealing his always dominant self-righteousness on this and other issues, Kasich said, “I don’t want to get in the area of self-righteousness when it comes to my own political party, but there are just some things I think this party should stand for. I also think there are some things politicians should be able to say.”