John Kasich in Memphis – Memphis Flyer

Kasich in the round at Holiday Inn

Governor John Kasich, the Governor of Ohio and one of five contestants left standing in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, came to Memphis on Friday night — a day before the presumed GOP frontrunner, Donald Trump, two days before Dr. Ben Carson, pretty much an also-ran at this point, and four days before Tennessee and a dozen other states vote on Super Tuesday.

After arriving roughly an hour past his 6 p.m. start time due to a flight delay and being introduced by local Republican eminence Brad Martin, Kasich spoke before a crowd of some 700 packed into the ballroom of the Holiday Inn on Central Avenue and then indulged the gathered media with an availability in a nearby private room of the hotel.

The Kasich who spoke to the ballroom multitude was essentially a more sustained dose of the same Kasich who has become a familiar presence in the series of GOP debates on TV — straightforward, friendly, experienced, non-abrasive, and logical, with just the right degree of tongue-in-cheek attitude and ingratiating manner.

There was a wink in his voice when he spoke of having just experienced a “demolition derby” (presumably the rowdy WWE-style debate on CNN Thursday night in which candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz ganged up on Trump) and of “how great it was” to remain “an adult in the room.”

The crowd rewarded that with applause, and Kasich continued: “You know, the way I think you win an election is, you talk about who you are, what you’ve accomplished, and what your mission is. I don’t think it’s about getting down and wrestling in the mud.”

Whereupon the Governor dilated a little bit on who he was and what his mission was.

This Kasich can run through the political check-list in such a way as to leave the party conservatives in the room happy while suggesting to the independents and Democrats he’s their kind of guy, too.

As an example, when, during a Q and A Kasich was asked by an audience member to dilate on “Obamacare” (a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act), his answer conformed to the standard Republican catechism — the Act had raised rates and deductibles too high and needed to be replaced — but he said so without any of the usual accusatory fuming and bombast favored by his primary opponents.

Kasich duly, and with evident sincerity, vowed that no citizen should be left without medical care. And when he spoke of his alternative — a system of exchanges to vend insurance alternatives for most people and Medicaid for the poor — he made it all sound remarkably like… Obamacare.

And, asked about the Second Amendment, he endorsed it without bluster and segued neatly into a compassionate plea for dealing systematically with the mental illness he saw as being common to the perpetrators of gun violence.

He spoke of his “dirt-poor” childhood in a blue-collar Pittsburgh suburb and of his mailman father who would celebrate the successes of the people on his route and cry with them over their sorrows and who, with his mother, would be killed by a drunk driver. He related all this to the anxieties of people in today’s world but leavened the sad tales and Norman Rockwell tableaus with spunky stuff like the story of how, as a college freshman at Ohio State, he hustled his way into, first, an audience with the president of the University, and then, remarkably, with the then-serving President of the U.S., Richard Nixon.

“For the young people here, keep pushing until somebody tells you no. That’s what life is,” Kasich advised, going on to lament that, after 18 years in Congress, he’d peaked out on his time in the Oval Office with those 20 minutes he got back then.

Besides being extraordinary in its own right, that story (which was illustrated in a recent TV bio-clip which, indeed, showed the gawky young teen being greeted by Nixon) has a parallel of sorts in the long-odds challenge Kasich faces in his current endeavor to get into the Oval Office on his own.

Despite Kasich’s high-water finish of second place to Trump in the New Hampshire primary, most pundits look at his single- and low-double-digit standing in other polls and primaries and couple him with the beatifically irrelevant Ben Carson as mere adjuncts to the three-man slugfest featuring Trump and the battling Mambo brothers, Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.

But, as his artful courtship of the Holiday Inn crowd Thursday night indicated, with his chameleon-like way of hitting the ideological middle on subjects ranging from drug treatment to educational enhancement to job programs, and with a still-boyish charm that easily co-exists with a professional manner and convincing résumé of gubernatorial achievement, Kasich has managed to make the case for himself as an alternative to the ego-trippers and slicks and bully boys of this presidential race.

This Kasich can and does (and did) kiss babies. But there is another Kasich, too, a scratchier one that the media got to see in the post-event availability.

It should be noted, for what it’s worth, that the Governor is among those candidates (Trump is another) who will pause, during his remarks to a crowd, to sweep his arm — accusingly? boastfully? or both? — in the direction of the attendant media folks on their riser, usually in the rear of the venue, as if to say (and sometimes to actually say), ‘There they are!’ (The rascals!) Hello, Dr. Heisenberg.

In any case, right away during his availability, Kassich was probed at some length for a response to the sensation of the day, an endorsement of Trump by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who was forced out of the race after a poor showing in New Hampshire but still presumably maintains some cred.

Kasich allowed as how yes, he was disappointed and, yes, he had hoped that he, not Trump would get the nod from Christie, and that yes, he had even asked his fellow governor for it. But he developed something of an edge as questioning of that sort went on and nearly lost it when a reporter asked too insistently that he reveal the name of a forthcoming luminary that he’d hinted would be endorsing his own candidacy. (See video clip at bottom of page.)

(On Saturday, the Kasich campaign would announce endorsements from former G.W. Bush-era Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman. Could that have been who? Really? Cue Miss Peggy Lee.)

The last question at the media availability, which pre-supposed that the punditocracy was correct in presuming that the jig was up for his chances, got a little further under his skin and scarcely improved Kasich’s mood. But in his curt response to that, the Governor made it clear that, to his mind, he had just begun to fight and that he would, for example, pick up a handsome passel of votes in the winner-take-all primary in Ohio, two weeks hence. Count on it.

Maybe, as some present must have thought, this was just a man going through the denial phase of coping with oncoming misfortune. But maybe, too, this harder edge that was now showing through (and banishing any residual hint of Eddie Haskell courtiership) was a sign that, if and when Kasich does get to be the last obstacle for, say, a Trump or Rubio to overcome, he won’t be found wanting for the fight.

Meanwhile, The Donald himself will be here on Friday, in Millington. The show goes on, and there are rumors of a mystery guest.

Kasich, Kicking Off a Candidate Weekend Here, Hits the Ideological Middle

Come next Tuesday, March 1st, or “Super Tuesday,” as it is known in the political lexicon, the next president of the United States might well be sped unstoppably on his — or her — way to victory. Or the current indecisive muddle could continue a mite longer.

It all depends on what happens in the 13 states where presidential primaries or presidential-preference caucuses are being held by one or both of the two major parties. Up until now, voting has been relatively piecemeal, beginning with the Iowa caucuses of February 1st and continuing with voting in New Hampshire on February 8th and in Nevada and South Carolina last week. But now a sizeable hunk of the nation — including Tennessee — gets to express its opinions all at once.

And that could establish trend lines that will hold the rest of the way until the party conventions this summer.

Although other, more populous states will play a major role in next Tuesday’s voting — Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Texas, for example — what happens in Tennessee will be significant, too, both because the Volunteer State has appreciable voting blocs of various kinds, and because the state has traditionally played a bellwether role in national elections.

It may be, as Tennessee Senator Bob Corker pronounced on a visit to Memphis last weekend, that Tennessee’s identity as a “red state” (i.e., Republican state) is “a given,” but its Democratic and Republican voting populations could each shift the direction of the political consensus for the primary contests in both parties.

As for Memphis, one sign of the city’s perceived importance was a much-ballyhooed speaking visit to Whitehaven High School two weeks ago by former President Bill Clinton on behalf of his wife, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The visit — on February 11th — was two days after candidate Clinton had taken a shellacking from Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary. (She has since rebounded with a victory in the weekend’s Nevada caucuses.)

Another sign will be the visit here on Friday of Republican presidential hopeful John Kasich, the governor of Ohio who scored a strong second in New Hampshire’s GOP primary and is looking for another bounce to keep his candidacy alive. Kasich will hold a town hall event at the Holiday Inn at the University of Memphis, beginning at 6 p.m.

Yet another Republican candidate made a fund-raising stop in Memphis last month. This was Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whom many observers now see as the Republican establishment’s favored candidate against GOP front-runner Donald Trump, the Manhattan real-estate billionaire and reality-TV host whose bizarro tactics and populist appeal have upended advance expectations and made him the Republican candidate to beat.

According to Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, honorary chairman of the Trump campaign locally, candidate Trump will hold a rally at 6 p.m. on Saturday in Millington at the Regional Jetport. Roland says a large crowd is anticipated.

On Sunday, fading contender Ben Carson will attend services at Highpoint Church in Memphis, according to an announcement on the church’s Facebook page.

Local backers of various candidates are busy setting the stage for next week’s crucial vote. Within days of each other recently, large crowds showed up for the local headquarters openings of, respectively, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Clinton. Get-Out-the-Vote efforts of various kinds were proceeding in earnest on behalf of those two candidates and several of the Republican candidates as well.

• As it happened, two influential Republicans — Corker and Senatorial colleague Lamar Alexander — were appearing on the platform of the Shelby County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day dinner at the Holiday Inn on Central Avenue Saturday night, in the immediate wake of Trump’s primary victory in South Carolina.

In a joint encounter with reporters, and later, on the stage of the event, both Senators avoided making any direct comment on Trump’s victory, which, among other things, chased out of the race former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a symbol of the national Republican establishment, and opened the way to a serious claim on the GOP’s nomination by Trump himself, an outlier’s outlier and the surprise front-runner among Republicans this year.

“My experience is that Tennesseans didn’t elect me to tell them how to vote,” Alexander said in the meeting with reporters. The state’s senior senator stressed the importance of nominating an acceptable conservative so as to ensure that a GOP president, not a Democrat, has the choice of filling the Supreme Court vacancy left vacant by the death of Antonin Scalia.

To win the presidency, a Republican nominee has “got to get a few Democrats and independents” to vote for him, Alexander said.

And he, like Corker, made a point of pooh-poohing early contests — Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as South Carolina — as guides to the matter of who should be nominated. Alexander likened the nomination contest to an NFL season, in which the decision comes down to a final two teams after a long winnowing-out process.

Corker used a a similar metaphor in the meeting with reporters, comparing the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary — and, by implication, South Carolina — to “preseason games” but suggesting that the forthcoming multiple primaries, including Tennessee’s, on Super Tuesday, amounted to a real “Showtime.”

“The citizens of our state have the tremendous opportunity of seeing so much and taking it in, and now we have to decide,” said Corker, who, unlike Alexander, hinted broadly that he would be making his preference public in a matter of days.

Acknowledging that “we’ll be getting some calls tomorrow” from various candidates’ camps — and perhaps from party dignitaries — Corker said he would “have to decide first who I’m going to support,” either by Monday, the last day for early voting in the primary, or by Tuesday, March 1st, itself.

Repeating that formulation to attendees at the Lincoln Day banquet, Corker said the ideal Republican candidate whom he might support would have to demonstrate prowess in three specific ways: a determination to deal with fiscal issues, a plan for dealing with “a growing wealth gap” between rich and poor, and an ability “to lead the world.” As it happened, Monday came and went without any statement of support for a candidate by the senator.

Rubio, who made an appearance in Nashville over the weekend, and who stands to inherit some of the establishment support from dropout candidate Jeb Bush, and Cruz, who has made a systematic effort to organize the state through developing a base among Christian evangelicals, are given some chance of doing well in Tennessee. But Republican lieutenant governor, state Senator Ron Ramsey of Blountville, while maintaining neutrality, is on record as saying that Trump will likely win both the Republican nomination and the presidency.

• Super Tuesday voters in Shelby County will see a ballot that asks them to vote by presidential candidate for one of 14 Republican candidates or for one of three Democratic candidates (the names of numerous Republican dropouts will appear on the ballot, as will that of dropout Democrat Martin O’Malley.) Voters will have to choose which primary to vote in, of course.

Beyond that, the ballot allows voters in the Republican primary to choose among several local citizens running as would-be Republican delegates, most committed to specific candidates, some not.

And there is one other matter to be decided. Democratic primary voters must choose between two candidates for General Sessions Court Clerk — incumbent Clerk Ed Stanton Jr., or his opponent, William Stovall. Republican Richard Morton is unopposed on the Republican primary ballot.