Kasich's Dreams of Glory to be Rudely Interrupted by Reality

"I have no idea what I’m doing in 2020,” Ohio Gov. John Kasich recently told a group of Saint Anselm College students in New Hampshire, Dave Weigel reported in "The Trailer" in the Washington Post.

Weigel, who mostly covers the conservative, Republican wing in American politics, said Ohio's term-limited CEO added, “What I don’t want to do is go into it again and diminish my voice, to get back out here and get the beans beat out of me."

On night in 2010, Gov. elect John R Kasich

speaks in downtown Columbus

Like his national and state media colleagues, Weigel appears to have fallen into the trap of thinking that Kasich has a chance in hell of emerging from the Republican primary in 2020 as the party's nominee. To do this, the 66-year old multi-millionaire must knock off President Donald Trump in two years, should the New York real estate titan and reality TV show host still be president, or one of the stable of GOP candidates who decide to enter the race.

After 40 years as a trained politico, 18 years of which he spent in the U.S. House and the last eight years as Ohio governor, the Buckeye State's departing executive leader is both temperamental, easily angered and quixotic. At heart, though, he's a former Catholic boy from McKees Rocks, PA, who gave up a life in the priesthood for the fame and fortune that comes with partisan public office.

Kasich has spent two terms cutting taxes, accomplished by redistributing billions that formerly went to local governments and schools upwards to the already wealthy. Kasich has honed his bashing of others, which ranges from deriding Democrats for no agenda, Republicans for kowtowing to Trump and Trump himself for, well, being Donald Trump.

As some in the media already know, Kasich isn't widely embraced by many in his own party, and is an outright foreigner to Democrats, despite their gushy adoration of him for accepting extended Medicaid in the Buckeye State. Ohio's itinerant governor loves the allure media courts him with, which further shows how out of touch major media stars are to his history of bad policy, as they already dream of the next political horse race in less than two years.

A former Fox News host who often substituted for now disgraced Fox star Bill O'Reilly was also a banker for Lehman Brothers, the storied Wall Street firm whose collapse from being over-leveraged in the sub-prime mortgage triggered the Great Recession of 2007. Kasich claims he has the political chops to heal what ails America by bringing divergent, polarized groups together. With sparse proof of having performed similar miracles before, whether in Congress or as governor, Kasich counts on media ignorance of his past and its inability to confront him with his own lackluster track record, which on hindsight is built on his own calculated rumor mill.

Kasich has such a poor performance record, in fact, that Ohio Republicans are so at odds with the 66-year old multi-millionaire that they have dismissed or severely clipped most of his major policy advances during budget debates in Columbus.

Now entering his last lame-duck session, Kasich confronts the real possibility that his own party will  override vetoes he makes of key legislation in the remaining weeks of his governorship, before he leaves to wander the political graveyard.

But with the divide between pro- and anti-Trumpsters raging, Kasich has found a niche bashing

Gov. Kasich in the Lincoln Room of 

the Ohio Statehouse.

Trump on style when possible while staying silent on Trump policies like tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. But that's enough to garner elite media attention to a contest still two years out that won't bode well for him after he's shed his governor's cloak for the garb of his next gig, probably that of another talking pundit contributor on CNN or MSNBC or another media outlet that thinks his headline grabbing rhetoric will attract viewers.

“All options are on the table," says Kasich, who by making such a statement ignores history's cold facts about independent runs from third-party candidates. Spoiler alert for "The Trailer," independent and third-party challengers get clobbered.

For Kasich, who repeatedly whined about not raising much money in 2016, he'll encounter the same ebb tide of support going forward. Contrary to what he says about how good his future is, reality will send him to the showers early again. All options may actually be off the table for him, as any media pundit or reporter who cares to calculate his chances of being the victor in 2020 will realize.

Ohio media seems completely unconcerned that Kasich milks the public to advance his personal designs. His big new trick is yet another new website, that preaches his same sermon on the mount, through which he wants donors to give him money to fix America.

In what promises to be an even nastier and more costly contest for president, if that's possible (and it is,) Kasich should have red-flagged record of legislation — which includes many bills that harm women on healthcare, limiting voting options, attacking unions, teachers and local governments, being blind to outright graft and corruption on for-profit charter schools, outrageous pension fund fees, increasing the age limit to receive Social Security, not supporting Medicare negotiating for lower drug cost, and his sleeper issue, forcing a would-be challenger off the 2014 ballot  — picked through like bargain hunters at a church bazaar.

How can anyone think Kasich can bring anyone together over anything since he has little if anything to show he's done it before? Saying and doing are two different and sometimes mutually exclusive things. Soon to be gone is taxpayer funding that paid Kasich to spend an inordinate amount of time over the last three years out of state, running for an office Ohio voters didn't elect him to run for.

If John Kasich wants to bring people together, he can start by apologizing to me for ripping up my press availability to him in 2014 at his State of the State address in southern Ohio. Kasich knows me from the days when we first met as Ohio Senate staffers in 1977. He also knows me from the 1980s, when I worked at the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerce and he was a central Ohio congressman from a reliably Republican district.

Weigel reported from New Hampshire, Kasich adopted state, where he bet his future in 2016 on doing well in the tiny, sometimes libertarian-leaning Granite State. But even in his new home, New Hampshire voters went for Trump in a big way, with Kasich coming in a distant second. His phony prophecy of being above politics, when he's actually the ultimate politician, was in clear view even on a hazy day.

Gov. Kasich in 2011 making his first and
only State of the State address from the
Statehouse, before turning it into a road
show, much like Trump does with his
campaign rallies.

As a persona non grata in the Republican Party, and a distrusted carpetbagger in the Democratic Party at best, candidate Kasich will have more to whine about without taxpayer resources propping him up. His biggest support group comes from loyalist on his payroll who cheer him on. In short order, former Gov. John Kasich won't have Ohio Highway Patrol protection to tap as he has over the last eight years, enabling him to be both governor and Buckeye World expat.

Run, John, run. Show us you can do what you say you can. Maybe then you'll have a platform to ride through the GOP primaries.

Until and unless media start challenging him with his own dismal record, Kasich will be the favorite dancing bear of reporters, whose most hard-hitting question is to ask him, it seems, is his favorite softball question: "Are you going to run in 2020?"