Saturday, March 26, 2016

P. J. O'Rourke was more right about John Kasich than he knows

According to careful vote counting by FiveThirtyEight, "Kasich could lay off winner-take-all states where only Cruz has a chance to beat Trump: Wisconsin, Indiana, Nebraska, Montana and South Dakota" in a last ditch strategy with Cruz to divide and conquer Donald Trump's march to 1,237. "Kasich and Cruz’s choice is simple: wage war on Trump on two separate fronts, or lose."

But Kasich is having none of it, in keeping with his previous refusal to work with Marco Rubio in Rubio's quest to keep Florida out of Donald Trump's column. John Kasich is "all in" to the convention, convinced he's the party's savior from the so-called outsiders Trump and Cruz. Kasich already has four events planned in Wisconsin between now and April 1 leading up to the primary there on April 5.

The reason? He is convinced he's a better candidate everywhere than is Cruz, but especially in the Midwest, insisting he wants the presidency and is not interested in "a parlor game of who gets this or who gets that". And as Rush Limbaugh has observed, John Kasich takes himself way too seriously. The man is delusional.

"We don't want to work with those people [Democrats]. We want to defeat them politically, and here comes Kasich! It's all about him. That whole thing, saying that he would be way open to choosing a Democrat? Kasich is taking the occasion here to try to sell himself as something unique and special."

Of course Kasich's not unique and special. The party's problem is that it's given us such Republicans too many times before, candidates whose vision of politics is nothing more than white flag bipartisanship. John McCain was infamous for it in 2008, and his lackey Lindsey Graham also puked out that line this time around, before ignominiously crashing and burning.

It's conventional wisdom out there that Donald Trump is destroying the Republican Party as we know it. But the truth is closer to what P. J. observed last fall, that it has simply killed itself.

John Kasich is just the Republicans' two word suicide note.