Apparently John Kasich and Ted Cruz are most attractive when no one is paying attention to them, which, conveniently, is most of the time.
After Cruz won wimpy Wisconsin last month—only the fourth election he’s won—voters decided to take a second look at him. But two seconds after people said, “OK, let’s give him a chance,” he collapsed. You could say a little Ted Cruz goes a long way. Voters hate Cruz more than they hate his Senate colleagues.
Listening to Cruz always makes me feel like I have Asperger’s. He speaks so slowly that my mind wanders between words. As Trump said, there’s a 10-second pause between sentences. I want to order Cruz’s speeches as Amazon Audibles so I can speed them up and see what he’s saying.
The guy went to Harvard Law School, so I keep waiting for flashes of genius, but they never come. Cruz is completely incapable of improvised wit.
Now that Cruz has been mathematically eliminated, he adds Carly Fiorina to the list. She is not his “vice presidential running mate,” but his “lame running mate.” It’s an all-around lemon-eating contest.
Voters quickly rejected Cruz and tried Kasich. But he turned out to be a carbon copy of a homeless man. He has a hunched torso, facial tics, and a strange way of bobbing his head and looking around that makes you want to cross the street to avoid him. He looks like he cuts his own hair, and his suits are Ralph Nader rejects. He devours food like a street person, has a quick temper, and rants about religion in a way only he can understand.
Kasich has consistently proclaimed that illegal immigrants are “made in the image of God” and has condemned the idea of enforcing federal immigration laws, saying, “I don’t think it’s right; I don’t think it’s humane.”
Asked about the decision to expand Medicaid under Obamacare — which was estimated to cost federal taxpayers $50 billion in the first decade — he said: “Now when you die and you get to, you get to, uh, meet St. Peter … he’s going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”
He lectured a crowd of fiscal conservatives about his Obamacare expansion, saying, “Now I don’t know if you’ve ever read Matthew 25, but I commend the end of it to you, about whether you feed the homeless and clothe the poor.” He also attributed the law to Chief Justice John Roberts and said, “It’s my money, OK?”
Voters thought they would see a less attractive version of Mitt Romney with Kasich, but instead they got a more televangelist version of Ted Cruz.
They also get a less sultry and cordial version of Hillary Clinton. Last week, Kasich attacked a reporter who asked a perfectly appropriate question, going from lifeless campaign cliché to infuriating bullying in a split second. As much as I enjoy watching reporters get told off, this was crazy.
Kasich: Look, at the end of the day, I think the Republican Party wants to elect somebody who can actually win in the fall.
Reporter: What if you only won in Ohio?
Kasich: “Can I finish?”
Reporter: “If you answer the question…”
Kasich: “I’m answering the question the way I want to answer it. Do you want to answer?” (He snatches the recorder from the reporter’s hand.) “Come on, let me ask you. What do you think about that?
During a speech to Ohio EPA employees a few years ago, Kasich suddenly went off topic and began shouting about a police officer who had issued him a ticket three years earlier. “Have you ever been stopped by a police officer who was an idiot?” he began. Then he told EPA administrators a fascinating story about his own traffic violation, shouting, “That idiot! … He’s an IDIOT!”
Judging by the dashcam footage immediately released by police, Kasich was wrong, and the cop – you know, “IDIOT” – was very polite about it.
With Trump, it’s the exact opposite. The more people see him, the more they like him. The typical pattern is: Trump says something that makes perfect sense, the media lies about it, and then voters learn the truth and like him more and the media like him less.
Ironically, it was Kasich who complained the loudest about the supposed billions of dollars of “free media” Trump receives. It turns out that the lack of a “free media” was a godsend for Kasich and Cruz.
