03-21-2016, 05:22 PM
Some bites from a good article on Salon:
Quote:All the things that “moderate” GOP leaders like about Kasich and hate about Trump–the fact that they can rely on Kasich to incrementally, successfully push forward a right-wing agenda without rocking the boat or sparking a backlash–are exactly the things that make Kasich and his ilk a more insidious long-term threat than Trump.Stop mooning over John Kasich: He’s not more “reasonable” than Trump, he’s just better at camouflaging his agenda - Salon.com
John Kasich is good at making speeches. He’s good at looking and sounding “moderate”. His lines about his fellow Republicans’ “War on the Poor” from 2013 and his Bible-based defense of Obamacare in 2015 were inspiring enough that Democrats in red states should have all been taking notes.
The first thing to point out is that Kasich being a “moderate” at all is a rebranding and a sign of shifting political alignments. John Kasich defeated Ted Strickland in the governor’s race in 2010 as the Tea Party candidate. It’s easy to forget now that the Tea Party turned its back on him after his recent facelift as a bleeding-heart pro-Obamacare moderate, but in 2010 he was the firebreathing right-winger and Strickland was the soft, gooey centrist whose loss was widely blamed on pandering to everyone and standing for nothing.
Kasich ran as an anti-union firebrand in 2010, part of a wave of such candidates in the Year of the Tea Party. His colleague Scott Walker in Wisconsin has kept that reputation, whereas Kasich has been trying to cozy up to unions after his trademark anti-collective-bargaining measure was overturned by voters in 2011–in other words, he changed his rhetoric after his actions were forcibly blocked and he had no choice.
It’s telling that in that same hazy, misty ancient era of 2015 “moderate” John Kasich went after the collective bargaining rights of that well-heeled, affluent, high-status “special interest group,” in-home health-care aides and child-care workers. It’s telling that outside of “feminist” and “women’s issues” spaces it’s been hard to find anyone talking about Kasich’s wholesale assault on reproductive rights in Ohio. It’s quite telling that Kasich has managed to get seen as a moderate on this issue because he spoke out against the anti-Planned Parenthood federal government shutdown (despite quietly signing a bill to do the exact same thing on the state level) and because he’s kept his face out of pro-life rallies.
But try selling Kasich’s “moderate” record to a pregnant woman in rural Ohio who would need to drive for two hours to find an abortion clinic–with her counselor legally barred from talking to her about how to do so–but only five minutes to buy a gun and ammunition. Or tell that to one of the teachers “complaining” in the teacher’s lounge because of his cuts to public schools in favor of an online charter school push that turned out to be a giant scam–a scandal that his underling David Hansen has been tarred and feathered for in the Ohio press but that somehow hasn’t stuck to Kasich nationally at all.