John Kasich, Mainstream Republicans’ Last Hope
BY BENJAMIN WALLACE-WELLS
The Republican voters in Ohio who made up their minds in the last days of the election turned to John Kasich on Tuesday, as they had in Michigan and New Hampshire, and not to Marco Rubio. The recent interest in the Ohio governor, who has now outlasted the more obviously formidable candidacies of Rubio, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush to become the last traditional Republican standing in the race, has seemed more about his manner than his policies, a campaign that emphasizes “pulling us together,” as Kasich put it last night. On the eve of Tuesday’s contests, knowing that his own candidacy was near its end, Rubio urged his remaining supporters in Ohio, where his polling numbers were meagre, to back Kasich, in the hopes of denying Donald Trump a victory there. Perhaps he hoped that Kasich would return the gesture in Florida, but he did not. It wouldn’t have mattered. Trump won forty-six per cent of Florida’s votes, and all of its delegates; Rubio lost his home state by nearly twenty points. Victory wasn’t in “God’s plan,” Rubio said last night, as he announced the suspension of his campaign.
Pull back and it is a little strange that Rubio ended up chasing votes in the same minor lagoon of the Republican electorate as Kasich, where attorneys and investment advisers cluster, where well-educated conservatives live in cosmopolitan places in which they are badly outnumbered by liberals. Earlier in his candidacy, Rubio carried the banner of working-class decency. The largest part of his stump speech was an attack on the system of student debt and the élitist culture of credentialism behind it. Why had we decided that being a philosopher was a higher calling than being a welder or an aircraft mechanic? He asked the question so often that you wondered about some long-suppressed anxiety about his own white-collar career. And why were we so convinced that philosophy was a dream worth insisting that our children take on crippling debt to chase? Rubio fashioned himself as the candidate of the community college, of the salvation of Social Security, of the first-time home purchase, of a more responsive Department of Veterans Affairs, of a more judicious system of legal immigration that more carefully selected the skilled of the developing and threatened world. He was praised for his dexterous deployment of his family’s story, about what America could do for a poor immigrant. But the experience he channelled most emotionally was that of Florida during the housing crash, when all the old certainties about upward mobility collapsed. This wasn’t a pitch aimed at lobbyists, or at the voters who became his, or Kasich’s. It was aimed at the voters who, it turns out, prefer Trump.
This has been a pretty pitiful election for psychological insight. Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders are all exactly who we thought they were. Chris Christie, regrettably, turned out to be Chris Christie; Trump, fathomlessly, is Trump. Alone among them, Rubio seems a person different from the one we were conditioned to expect, a constitutionally sunny and confident young politician, certain in his judgments and his vision, who discussed his hip-hop preferences with reporters and is married to a former cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins. In his place is a Hamlet of South Beach. Rubio, we learned, could be thrown into a despairing fugue for days by a lousy headline in, of all places,National Journal. For days after Christie lacerated him in a debate, exposing his reliance on his talking points, Rubio kept apologizing to his supporters for the display, a rare political moment of public self-flogging. At times he overcompensated. His devastating attack on Trump University, on behalf of the working-class aspirants whom Trump had duped, got lost in his suggestion that Trump had a small penis. “Little Marco,” Trump sneered, and there was Little Marco, apologizing for himself again. Rubio’s intense, variable religiosity (he attends both a Catholic church and an evangelical church) came to seem less like the calculations of a smooth politician and more like the personal questing of a man about whom the most basic matters remains uncertain.
Self-doubt isn’t deadly to a politician (previously performing the role of Hamlet: Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Abraham Lincoln). But it is a tricky condition from which to perform the double pandering required of Rubio, who needed to be overly solicitous to donors, because he had little money, and to conservatives, because he lacked bona fides. The pandering got him. Rubio wound up with a highly orthodox conservative policy platform, which cut taxes by seven billion dollars and zeroed out the capital-gains tax, ideas directly at odds with the vision of a more secure middle-class society that he laid out in his speeches. (In this campaign, Sanders has been the great enemy of the campaign-finance system, but Rubio has been its tragic trapped figure.) Chasing the anger in the primary, Rubio loudly denounced President Obama’s decision to visit a Baltimore mosque, and tied himself in knots trying to reverse his moderate stance on immigration, positions that contradicted the qualities that most distinguished him, his empathy and his universalism. “I ask the American people,” Rubio said with great feeling last night, in abandoning his candidacy, “do not give into the fear.” But, of course, he himself already had.
And so the more conventional parts of the Republican Party are left with a single candidate, Kasich—the son of a mailman, possessor of a debt clock, stump-speech summoner of nostalgia for the warm American feelings that accompanied the moon landing and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The irony is that, in what are likely to be its final efforts to defeat Trump, the Party’s remnant center is turning to a figure who regularly declines to explain why his own ideas are better. “Of course I’m not a moderate,” he told an audience at the University of Virginia, last month. “But here’s the thing. I do have a heart for people who live in the shadows. I do think that when you have economic gain, you shouldn’t leave anybody behind.” Kasich continued, “I have a nice tone. . . . I care about people—the mentally ill, the drug-addicted, the working poor, the developmentally disabled, friends in the minority community.” This is the line that Republicans have been left with, to mark the territory between themselves and the Trump faction: not a line of ideology but of manners. There is a decency there, as there is in Kasich. It is a good fight. It probably isn’t a winning one.
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