By John Harwood
New York Times
The most valuable currency in politics is emotion. And the coin of the 2016 Republican presidential race has been anger and fear.
“I’m very angry,” declares Donald Trump, who has won three straight contests. The victor in Iowa, Sen. Ted Cruz, warns in hushed tones that the United States faces “the abyss.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, stoking conservative anger by accusing President Barack Obama of deliberately damaging the nation, tells voters, “There may be no turning back.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Gov. John R. Kasich remains a pauper in the Republican campaign. Alone among major contenders, the second-term Ohio governor doesn’t employ applause lines about the evils of Obama or apocalyptic portraits of American decline. He laughed in an interview at the language employed by his rivals.
“I don’t think people want to live in the dark,” Kasich said. “If that’s where the market is, then they’re probably not buying me. But I don’t think that’s where the market is.”
With poor results in Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada, he has only a surprise second-place finish in New Hampshire as evidence. There, he staged a blitz of town hall appearances that emphasized pragmatic problem-solving, drawing on his record as a budget-balancing congressman and governor who has presided over an economic revival in a critical Midwestern battleground.
Now, with the least campaign cash of any contender, he is hoping to survive the 11-state set of Super Tuesday primaries next week and keep his candidacy alive until he can reach neighboring Michigan on March 8 and his home state’s winner-take-all primary on March 15.
All the while, he’ll face pressure to abandon the race from mainstream party leaders who loathe Trump and Cruz and believe Rubio is their best bet.
It’s not Kasich’s policies that distinguish him from the field. He’s an anti-abortion social conservative who signed a law this week in Ohio barring state contracts with Planned Parenthood.
Like his rivals, he has proposed deep tax cuts to stimulate the economy. His plan to lower the current top rate of 39.6 percent to 28 percent, the same figure President Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1986, matches a proposal advanced by the onetime front-runner Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida.
Bush’s departure from the race makes Kasich the only candidate to have served as a governor. In past campaigns, Jimmy Carter, Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush used executive experience at the state level as a valuable credential when seeking the Oval Office.
That matters less in 2016. For all the numbers Kasich reels off about adding jobs and turning Ohio’s deficit into a surplus, governing experience represents a liability for the many Republican voters who blame politicians for their uncertain economic future.
Kasich’s more potent distinction, his strategists believe, is his optimism. Where rivals paint scathing black-and-white contrasts with Obama, Kasich speaks in practical terms about how presidents must compromise.
His tempered portrait more closely matches the reality of a country in which unemployment and budget deficits have sharply declined, even though middle-class incomes remain stagnant. Instead of foreboding, he conveys empathy.
Kasich defends his decision to expand Medicaid under Obama’s health law, apostasy to Republican rivals, as a hand up to the drug-addicted and mentally ill that saves money. He hugs troubled voters and, at times, sheds a tear with them.
“I think my candidacy represents hope to people,” he said. “If we don’t have solutions to these problems, and if we dwell on the negatives and not on the positives, how are we going to get out of this? How are we going to change things?”
The slender hope for Kasich’s candidacy rests on his ability to rapidly leverage that brand into a much larger share of the Republican audience. All available signs cast doubt. One month into the contest, Kasich has the market for optimism all to himself.
© 2016 The New York Times Company
