The predicted Republican front-runner flails. The actual Republican front-runner rails, peddling insults instead of ideas. And the story line caroms from misogyny to xenophobia to a tussle over tresses: toupee or not toupee?
It's impossible to see how anyone electable is salvaged from this.
Then again it's not, because if you sort through the rabble, you find John Kasich.
He may never make it out of the primaries. The odds are against him. And he has flaws, serious ones, which I'll get to.
But that doesn't change the fact - obscured for now by the bedlam of the Republican contest - that the party has someone who's comporting himself with unexpected nimbleness, who would match up very well against Hillary Clinton or any other Democratic nominee and who could give Republicans hope, if they just gave him a chance.
Here's the case for Kasich:
He has plenty of experience, plenty of maturity. He knows how Congress works - and, presumably, how to work with it - because he served in the House of Representatives for 18 years, six of them as the chairman of the House Budget Committee.
He's now in his second term as the governor of Ohio, and that's not just any state. Along with Florida, it's one of the two fiercest battlegrounds in a presidential election, a necessary part of the electoral calculus for Republicans.
He won re-election there last year with 64 percent of the vote. That largely reflected the weakness of his Democratic opponent, but Kasich's current approval rating in Ohio of 61 percent affirms his ability to please a constituency beyond Republican partisans. His popularity with the voters who know him best came through in a recent poll showing him well ahead of Donald Trump among Ohio Republicans. Meanwhile, Florida Republicans put Jeb Bush, their onetime governor, behind Trump.
By cutting taxes and controlling spending in Ohio, he proved his conservative bona fides, at least on fiscal issues, something being stressed in a clever new commercial - note the female and black faces, along with the use of the moon landing to capture a yearning for American greatness - that's being shown in New Hampshire.
But there's plenty else that pegs him as independent-minded and might make him acceptable, even appealing, to swing voters, whom he seems as well positioned to capture as any of the other Republican candidates are.
He has expressed openness to some kind of path to citizenship for immigrants who came here illegally. He has shown little appetite for the culture wars that other Republicans gleefully fight (although, it must be noted, he formally opposes gay marriage and abortion rights).
Most strikingly, he broke with Republican orthodoxy and with most other Republican governors and accepted the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare, a decision he defended in a way that illuminated his skills as a tactician and a communicator. He said that what he'd done made practical and cost-effective sense for Ohio, and that his course was consistent with true Christian principles, which call for helping the downtrodden.
"To me, faith is the dos, not the don'ts," Kasich explained last spring, steering the party's religious impulses away from divisive social issues and signaling that conservatism should be as concerned with a big heart as with a small government.
By revisiting that tone and those themes in the first Republican debate earlier this month, he turned in one of the best performances of the night.
"Based on what I heard, he's the most electable," said Douglas Schoen, a Democratic strategist, referring to Kasich's general-election prospects. Schoen said that he was especially impressed with the way Kasich, answering a question about Trump, made clear that he didn't endorse Trump's approach but understood the frustration that has brought many Republican voters into Trump's camp, at least for now.
"That's crucial, because the Trump phenomenon is a bigger thing than just a reality star writ large," Schoen said.
During the debate, Ari Fleischer, who served in the second Bush administration, tweeted: "Kasich is killing it. Hopeful. Uplifting. Optimistic. And he has an appeal to those who think the GOP doesn't care."
And since then I've heard similarly sunny assessments from New Hampshire, where Kasich is focusing his efforts and his "super PAC" is spending millions.
In a poll released early last week, he rose to second place among Republicans in the state, behind Trump. That same survey of New Hampshire voters showed something else interesting: In hypothetical general-election matchups, Clinton beat Trump by 2 points and Bush by 7. But Kasich beat her by 2.
Kasich is hardly the anti-politician that many Americans seem to crave. But he doesn't have the whiff of political royalty that Bush inevitably does. Put Bush up against Clinton and he erases some of her potential liabilities, because they're also his: all the reminders of yesterday, all the time spent in a bubble of privilege, all the unshakable allegiances to over familiar characters.
Kasich can strike a folksier chord, reminding voters, as he frequently does, that his father was a postal worker and his grandfather a coal miner.
He can do something additional that isn't really feasible for Bush - pick, as his running mate, the person who might as well wear a sign that says "perfect Republican vice-presidential candidate."
I mean Marco Rubio, who can seem too green for the top job but not for the No. 2 spot. He's a talented politician. His selection could help with Hispanic voters. He connotes generational change. And he's from Florida (as is Bush, which argues against a Bush-Rubio ticket).
But can Kasich even get to the general election? As of Friday, the Real Clear Politics average of recent national polls of Republicans has him in eighth place among the 17 contenders.
And in the eyes of many disapproving conservatives, "He's the one Republican in the field that not only embraced Obamacare, but took it out in his dad's station wagon and made out with it," as the Republican strategist Rick Wilson told Caitlin Huey-Burns of Real Clear Politics.
There's no reason to think he'll do well in early primary contests in Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada. That puts do-or-die pressure on New Hampshire.
He's known to have attention problems and a mean streak. His congressional career links him to the disastrous mid-1990s effort to shut down the government. And after Congress, he worked as an investment banker with Lehman Bros., the Wall Street firm. That's a resume line out of sync with the electorate's mood.
But he has made the best of it, portraying it as an inside look at a vital part of the economy, a fruitful research mission. He's dexterous that way. And Democrats, trust me, have noticed, enough to hope that Republican primary voters don't wake up to the same realization.
Article Source: The New York Times
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