One more piece of evidence that John Kasich is the Establishment backup to Bush, and that they’re getting closer to hitting the eject button on the Jebster.
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
John Kasich is the GOP’s Dukakis – put him in a tank, please…
I don’t agree, and I think few Ohio Democrats would. He would be a dangerous candidate.
Kasich/Fiorina would be terrifying. I don’t know enough about either to know if they could get along, but god help us if they do.
I think you’re right. I’d worry about Kasich more than any of them.
He comes across as a goober – that may play in Ohio but national GOP primary voters reward strength.
How he’ll play in the primaries I don’t know, because thank God I don’t understand the bizarre mentality of GOP primary voters. But as a general election candidate he’s the only one who wouldn’t be a hapless clown. And he would probably win Ohio. If the big money coalesces behind him, be afraid.
The geographical base is a solid argument. It’s what made Rick Perry and Jeb! “viable” to some pundits. It was Ronald Reagan’s main advantage; he came in with a huge electoral vote base if he won his home state.
It is precisely what Bernie does not have and what Clinton in 1992 had to overcome, which is why Hillary now has New York as a base, which is part of her lustre pf “inevitability”.
Every Democrat can claim New York, or said differently, if a Democrat loses New York then there’s no need in looking anywhere else on the map because the game is over.
According to Jerry Brown (the ultimate political warrior of our age) it wasn’t the tank … it was the headpiece.
Yes, combine that helmet with his ethnic nose and chubby cheeks, and he looked like a deranged chipmunk. Swap out to bareheaded (or severely Nordic features) and it would have left a much different impression.
He still would have lost, though.
Kasich is the scariest of Republicans this time around. I see him as what Huntsman might have been in 2012, the guy who could appeal to Independents and conservative-leaning Democrats. That said, he’d still likely lose to a moderate Democrat like Clinton. Then the pressure for a Trump or someone like him would continue to build.
Perhaps the powers that be in the Republican party will decide to allow this to be the year of the crazy. Perhaps a Goldwater is necessary once every 50 years or so. If not in year 48, perhaps in year 52.
He reminds me very much of Huntsman, in that Democrats worry about him but Republicans hate him.
I imagine there are Republicans out there, worried that we’ll choose Jim Webb.
I think you nailed it. I do remember GOP fans in 2004 worried that Lieberman would get the Democratic nomination for the same reason.
For Kasich to get the nomination they’d have to follow the same path of the last two primaries – have one establishment candidate getting the plurality and many more-crazy-than-each-other alternates splitting the remaining vote. Then counting on the base to sigh and hold their nose and vote for the establishment guy in the main election.
And honestly, I think that was the plan this time around, although the establishment went in severely split as to who the establishment guy was. However Trump has – so far – wiped out that whole process.
This country would be far better off if we made citizens of all of the illegal immigrants. Then we deported all of the GOP members.The GOP could show the world they are true Patriots by willingly leaving the US.
Along those lines I’d love to be able to try an experiment whereby every wingnut was put into their own world somewhere and see how that worked out, then the non-wingnuts were put into a different world for comparison.
Not possible of course. But there was an experiment a few years ago when they had a world simulation that had been battled tested over the years, and one time they intentionally (and secretly) selected only participants who scored high on the Right Wing Authoritarian scale and the next simulation selected only people who score low on the same. The RWAs destroy the world very quickly and generally refused to cooperate and operated openly on greed. The non-RWAs got the best results in the history of the simulation.
I’m not immune to interest in the clown car, and certainly Jeb! is weak..weaker.
But every time I watch 5 minutes of any Rep candidate I’m reminded that if the MSM defaulted to listening to the Dems instead we’d all be talking issues. I fully expect to see one in the Rep lineup start blowing bubbles in their bubble gum while waiting for a question and then Twitter blowing up. Sanders could come up with a way to dethrone Putin and we’d have to listen to a panel talk about Fiorina’s face before the news broke.
Jeb’s not a good bet for this race but I’m not looking forward to the long drawn out panel after panel discussion of why & how the Rep $ dumps him while the earth burns.
Kasich has a really bad record on jobs. He has given large tax brakes to corporations. They never create more jobs. They use the tax break to finance moving the jobs off shore or just use the money to buy back stock. On education, the Ohio supreme court has decided all assets purchased by charter schools with state tax dollars belongs to the charter school. I’m talking about books, desks, etc. If the charter fails and leaves the local school district must buy that stuff form the charter co. to reopen the public school. Oh, and don’t try to vote if you live in an urban city.
It’s that last item that makes Kasich so attractive to the GOP in the general election
Here are some media summaries of the debate:
CNN
“Donald Trump finally took some punches, Carly Fiorina grabbed control, Jeb Bush woke up and Marco Rubio and Chris Christie elbowed their way into the fray on a crowded stage. Everyone else just tried to crash the party”
IOW, win Fiorina.
MSNBCs website is currently dominate by images of Fiorina.
ABCnews. Only above fold article is trump vs. Fiorina.
NYTimes. top Election 2016 article is Fiorina helping GOPs outreach to woman. Second article is Trump.
Foxnews.com – Fiorina seizes spotlight, carries debate.
I said weeks ago that Fiorina was plan B, we’re now seeing that plan put into motion. Kasioh has not dynamism.
I watched most of the debate and watched closely. Fiorina did do well. She landed the first real punch on Trump, which the establishment has wanted. Other than that, she mostly went after Clinton, as though she were the presumptive leader, and defended her record at HP. I don’t think the case for the ladder is strong, but arguing it gets into the weeds, and no one there wanted to do that. They are not yet seeing Fiorina as the one to beat. My guess is Trump hits her next time as a business incompetent. He’s a little hobbled because he began by attacking her appearance, but one thing Trump is not is inhibited.
“case for the ladder” – “case for the latter” gotta’ learn to proofread.
Another card Fiorina can and will play: attacking her business record is attacking the first woman CEO of a Fortune top-20 company. She will attempt to make specific criticisms seem like generic sexism. This would play better in the general than the primary, but she is already acting like she is running in the general, and, if Trump implodes as so many expect, I think she may well be. She neutralizes an advantage of Clinton, and could actually pull centrist woman from Sanders. Even women I know who are working for Sanders express regret that they are siding with the white guy over the woman. Woman closer to the center or less engaged with the political substance, rather than symbolism, may not make that choice.
Covered by Bloomberg in May
Some of the most disgusting anti-feminists are the first to scream sexism when they come under fire for dreadful to mediocre job performance. They are also often the beneficiaries of affirmative action in promotions, but they do tend to have slightly better self-promotion skills.
The truth at HP will destroy that bitch Fiorina.
Doesn’t stick to her as firmly as it would to a leftie Democratic woman or man.
She keeps acing interviews with well heeled backers for an ever higher level job regardless of her track record of failures. After HP I would have expected that she would be “Carly who?” Expected the same after losing her losing Senate race. Yet, here we are and she’s publicly far nuttier than she was in 2010.
How does she qualify as an ‘outsider’? I get it she’s never held political office but she’s the Nurse Ratched of the supply-side, strangle-it-in-the-tub elite whom hold democracy, the citizenry and common good in thinly veiled contempt. Good gravy, only Mitt could be a bigger poster child for wealth, indifference and privilege. Could they call her a ‘job creator’ without tongues bursting into flame?
Maybe that explains her having such a big fuss over imaginary foetuses; misdirection.
My fervent hope is that, after the GOP loses to Hillary, BADLY, they follow the same stratagery that they used after losing to Obama in 2008, and put Carly in charge of the GOP.
Then she can do to the GOP party organization what she did to HP.
The results will be EPIC.
Didn’t mean to suggest she had never played the card before. But it has new salience now, because she just became a player in this race.
Fiorina is Mad Crazy Demon Sheep Lady. It’s not the Mad, Crazy, and Demon Sheep that’s the killer; it’s the Lady. GOP isn’t going to nominate a candidate with Lady parts for the presidency in 2016.
If the base could’ve had Palin at the top of the ticket in ’08, they would have gone for it in a second. If Bachman had not been so obviously stupid and deranged, they would have gone for her. By the standards of Silicon Valley CEOs, Fiorina is an idiot, but by the standards of Republican Presidential Candidates, she is quite bright. She’s not Bachman or Palin.
She managed to plant her impassioned standard among the least defensible aspects of the Planned Parenthood nonsense; an unforced error that speaks to some unresolved emotional issue. Why did she do that?
Also her defence of her performance at Lucent and HP seemed more style than substance. Both of these issues will come back to haunt her. I found her flawed and unconvincing, even by the low standards set for her among the punditry. I’m not sure her act is going to play as well in the cheap seats; we’ll see where her polling goes.
Like I said, I’m expecting Trump to hit her on her business record. He is the only one with the standing to do so, she just punched him good, and he is a brawler – he will hit back. And, on the merits, no,I don’t think his record stands up. There have been some mea culpas, e.g. from one of the people who fired her, as she said. Personally, I think that’s because her performance at HP is water under the bridge now, so people who support her politically will say whatever to help her. But here we are getting into something complicated and ambiguous, which is to say a discussion that is not going to influence the election in its substance.
Trump already has the tag line to go after her: “You’re fired!” He’s going to use some variant of that to make hay of the fact that she was fired, and present it as a “and that’s that” point. And that punch will land, because going into any further goes into the weeds.
As for Planned Parenthood, I’m not seeing any anti-PP position as a liability in the Repub primary, given the current atmosphere.
It seems she chose to make a big fuss over a video segment that is not even among the loathsome Planned Parenthood propaganda set. This strike me as bold, short-term and flawed expediency; much like what caused all the trouble at Lucent and HP.
And don’t underestimate how long the entire IT community has held her personally responsible for a tenure at HP universally derided as an industry-wide low-water mark.
Here’s why what Trump said about Fiorina is more damaging than what he said about Kelly. What he said was, essentially, that Kelly is “on the rag”. This is something some men often say, not usually in the company of women, but women are aware they say it. They may not like it, but it is not unusual. It’s not going to be enough to make a Trump supporter change their vote.
When the media acts like it is, though, this backfires. People are tired of the media telling them how to react, so when told that they will be sufficiently offended by something to change their vote, if said thing is not sufficiently offensive, there is likely to be a counter-reaction.
What Trump did to Fiorina was publicly call a woman ugly. This is an extremely rare occurrence, outside of maybe TV comedy. There are many woman who feel, rightly or wrongly, that they are unattractive, but they would be horrified to have someone say this about them on television. Even woman secure in their looks are aware that looks degrade over time.
Trump muffed his Fiorina thought like his comment on Kelly. I don’t think he intended to suggest that Kelly is “on the rag.” He was likening her to one of those comic book villains spewing darts out of their eyes and pores. He got all tangled up in it because like most of us, he’s not good at describing images.
WRT Fiorina, he was directing others to notice all the cosmetic surgery that she’s had. That’s one of those things that many celebrities and politicians purchase and except for Dolly Parton, always deny having done so. And the rest of us are supposed not to notice that facial lines have spontaneously disappeared.
My spidey sense. Fiorina vs. Hillary in the general election looks like Mitt vs. Obama.
Fiorina has the same propensity to lie all the time that the Mittens did. It seems to come with and MBA and a CEO.
While one should always be careful in phrasing projections in absolute terms, I can only imagine one scenario in which GOP would allow this woman to become their presidential nominee — that would be that they’ve made a calculated decision to take a dive on the election. It’s really not in their DNA to do that.
If they want to take a dive, it won’t be Fiorina, it will be someone the base loves who is unacceptable to the elite: probably Trump. They wouldn’t dream of taking a dive though, till it is certain Bernie is out of the picture. And i agree with you that I don’t think they would anyway, at least not now.
No evidence that the GOP has ever in recent times taken a calculated dive. Goldwater was an accidental dive that in the subsequent decades benefited them enormously. However, the stakes are higher in open seat elections and therefore, that isn’t a good time to take a calculated dive. However, I’m not as confident that the Democratic Party hasn’t taken many dives to shift what it stands for away from the New Deal party.
While a case could be made for the GOP to take a dive in 2016 that would set them up for major gains in the next two electoral cycles, Fiorina at the top of the ticket would be a really dumb move. And not much better at the bottom of the ticket. Yet in all honesty, can’t see how to construct an effective dive ticket out of their candidate roster.
I don’t think the GOP elite has had as much conflict with its base in recent times. It’s like the Democratic elite with McGovern, which was a dive in the sense that the candidate was undermined by his own party. But we’re not disagreeing. The GOP is not going to take a dive with control of three branches at stake. And taking a dive is not their style anyway.
Yes, we agree, it’s not their style.
However, the GOP elites aren’t at all happy with the level of care and feeding their RWNJ base has been demanding of late. Seemingly more and more with each election cycle as RWNJs have been performing at better than 50% in local, state, and congressional elections. Would have been better for the GOP elites to have given the RWNJs more in 2012 and let them lose with 43-45% of the vote instead of 47%. That would have made them behave better in 2016 as the accepted a GOP elite standard issue ticket.
But it seems the base is having a Thelma and Louise cycle.
That’s the opinion of one pundit; not really evidence.
A few months ago, I too thought that Kasich might be the GOP fallback establishment guy, but they’ve done nothing to spiffy up his appearance and delivery. Last night he looked almost like he’d rolled out of bed and put on a regulation boring suit before getting onto the stage. Whereas, Jeb? has had his double chin removed, a few facial lines erased, dropped a couple of stone, and gotten a tidy and neat haircut. No way is this 2006 face the same one as this 2007 face (both professional photographs). Even the poodle head, cleaned up his act for the debate last night (possibly donning his shorter hair toupee to match his trimmed up remaining locks).
I suppose they can roll out a new and younger looking Kasich a few months from now because ordinary Americans still seem to buy that politicians lose ten years in their face and body from a two week, relaxing vacation.
This is one pundit. And I don’t know how good or bad they might be. But assume that his words come straight from GOD: I’m afraid I still don’t understand.
For 2 weeks I’ve seen hysteria (maybe overstated but for crying out loud even AG was crying in his beer) about how Trump was going to energize the Base and untold millions of others while simultaneously lulling Hispanics, Blacks, Women, liberals and progressives into not voting.
Now, Trump is 30% ceilinged out loser who is going to not so quietly implode and shower Kasich with the nomination vis-à-vis what we used to call THE MAN (hippie speak for the Establishment).
How is Kasich different from Romney? Are urban women going to forget the past 30 years of the war on women? Are black people going to shuffle off and forget Ferguson allowing Republicans to run freely thru PA? Are Hispanics going to say “bueno, es Kasich. Él está bien. No tenemos que preocuparnos.”
Ya know, they STILL have to win a shit pot load more than they have in the past 8 years. And THIS time they don’t have the black bogey man to run against.
(also, don’t blame me for the Spanish … its Yahoo!s fault)
Pundits have to fill column inches and it is easier to telephone it in by writing about the horse race than issues.
Well look, even if you take a long serious look at issues then what? You go over what the situation is, what the candidate says, then what? Nothing changes until the election. Do you just rerun the same column? Horse race stuff is fresh.
GOP base has no more reason to vote for Kasich than they do Bush. The GOP base is in no mood to have another Romney shoved down their throats, a guy they only accepted after all the alternatives flamed out.
And Kasich is running at ~3% national support, ~5% below the guy he is supposed to replace.
Why did I misread the last word in this paragraph?
Bai is right that this is an election that guages how powerful the establishment still is after a decade and a half of measured catastrophes.
All the makings of a GOP faction fight are present. Last time Romney was able to stave it off due to the vote split of the Conservative insurgents. This time Trump seems to be their rallying point.
It’s not helping the Establishment and Corporate Wings of the GOP that they managed to find a candidate that sucks even worse than Romney. A feat I believed impossible.
In spite of more obvious demagoguery Trump clearly and substantially dealt with Jeb; arguably his most important target. Several times they faced off in alpha-male confrontation ending each time with a Bush fade; even his big applause line of “He kept us safe.” was a crouching, defensive play.
Presume deer dead.
Jeb??? Alpha Male? I don’t think he can spell Alpha.
There must be a misunderstanding. Surely he meant Jeb was an Alfalfa Male.
It may have been defensive, but it was effective. A quality counterpunch to Donald — provided jeb? wasn’t called out on it. And Donald obliged with some meek comment about not feeling safe today, easily rebutted (from the GOP pov) by invoking Obama.
A bad exchange for Trump. jeb? scored big off him. Which is why it’s a bit of a puzzle why pundits ignore or downplay it today. That exchange helped change the image of jeb? into something other than a low-energy punching bag. Or should have, his campaign is betting.
That’s definitely a valid interpretation. It seems to me that even though Trump may have drawn or lost that exchange on points “He kept us safe” is now sitting like a tee-ball for anyone to have a swing at now or later. Jeb firmly established as a George W apologist. I’m not sure that’s a strategic win for Jeb. And Trump arguably pressed him into taking that public position.
I think it’s kryptonite for Bush; any mention, notion or discussion of Iraq or W. We’ll see.
I’m not sure it’s a strategic loss for jeb? either, at least in the nomination process. Goopers agree with it, conveniently forgetting Junior was at the helm for 8 months prior to 911, or else they blame it on Bill Clinton. In the GOP reality, the Repub president is never to blame.
jeb? having to defend the notion in a general matchup, that’s another matter. But then, how many prominent Dems have publicly, forcefully called out Shrub for his spectacular indifference about the pre-attack intel? Very few I can recall. It usually gets soft-pedaled, carefully qualified, talked around by Dem pols. The striking point gets lost.
To date, isn’t Donald the only one on the stage who’s strongly, in no uncertain terms criticized the George W admin as a disaster? If so, jeb? is unlikely to encounter problems running with the Kept Us Safe position provided no other prominent GOP contender speaks the truth.
The Republican Guard has been pushing Fiorina for some time today, but she’s little more substantial than the rest of them. All of these clowns are equally scary — but I’ll believe Trump has been knocked from his roost once the polls show that actually happens.
I’ll believe Trump is out when he totally leaves the field.
Today Trump ran up against the reality of his supporters at a rally where one supporter asked the Pam Geller Muslim question. It was every bit as terrible as anything she’s put out and Trump didn’t respond like McCain and call the guy out, he nodded and agreed.
So then the posit becomes that the Birthers are his base. And today, when he cut the rally short after the question you could see on his face that he realized just who his followers were.
What’s unnerving is the assumption that the Rep crazy base has been set at an even 20% for some years. But what Trump’s run has demonstrated is that it’s closer to 30%. And now, after today, the Rep pundits have to face the fact that real lunacy is their base. The only bright light is that without Trump they may go back to their hidey holes…of course Trump’s burned every other voting block that isn’t rich and white so today’s Trump rally will make the Party want to dump him just as fast as they can.
With any luck Trump’s followers will camp out in front of Trump Tower so they can cuddle and commiserate.
Here’s a link
Who ever said that the Base was 20%? Most numbers I’ve seen range from 27% (the mode) to 32%.
And please remember that this is 27% OF VOTING REPUBLICANS … not the population.
Portfolio’s Worst American CEOs of All Time
Fiorina is #19. Based solely on her tenure as HP CEO. While not CEO, she was also a disaster at Lucent.
I would say that no one wants another Bush in the White House.
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