The Insane Campaign of John KasichThe GOP primary is a battle between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. This has been fairly obvious since at least Super Tuesday, and it is overwhelmingly obvious today.
The campaign of John Kasich is a joke, and not a particularly funny one, unless you like humor at the expense of the GOP and conservatism. Yet the media and GOP establishment has largely failed to call Kasich out. But with his embarrassing losses in Utah and Arizona yesterday (incredibly, it appears he lost the latter even to Rubio, who has been out of the race for a week now),
it is long past time to throw Kasich’s campaign into the ash heap of history. The media plays up Kasich’s candidacy for two reasons: First, Kasich has taken more-liberal positions during the campaign, and has criticized the tone and substance of more-conservative candidates. And the media love Republicans who criticize other Republicans from the left. Second, the media know that, as Mitt Romney recently said, “
A vote for Kasich is a vote for Trump.” The liberal media would love to have Trump as the nominee because he embodies their caricatures of Republicans, because he is entertaining copy, and, most important, because he will almost certainly deliver a victory to their preferred candidate, Hillary Clinton.
While Cruz and Clinton are roughly in a dead heat in RealClearPolitics polling averages, Trump trails Clinton by a whopping ten points. While it is certainly possible that any GOP candidate could beat someone with Clinton’s obvious weaknesses, it seems far more likely that Trump would send the GOP down to an ignominious Mondale-style defeat which, when combined with Trump’s dissents from traditional GOP positions on a host of issues, will leave the party adrift and decimated. For the liberal media, this is a dream scenario: Great copy and a catastrophic Republican defeat that will ripple down the ballot to Congress and the state elections. But if the media’s motivations for promoting Kasich’s Potemkin campaign are obvious, it is harder to intuit the motivations of the GOP establishment other than to assume that their visceral distaste for Cruz has completely overwhelmed their ability to think rationally about their own interests or that of their party. They may have good reason to loathe Cruz, but it should be overwhelmingly clear to them that, if they care about conservatism or appealing to emerging demographics, or simply if they put any belief in polls, Cruz is infinitely preferable to Trump as a nominee and the continuation of Kasich’s campaign helps Trump. Of course, more-liberal or establishment-oriented GOP voters are certainly entitled to prefer Kasich to Trump or Cruz and vote accordingly. But they must own the fact that they are not simply casting a symbolic protest vote a la Ron Paul voters in 2008 or 2012. The practical consequences of their choice will make Trump the nominee. Not for nothing did National Review’s own Rich Lowry recently say that “Kasich is playing a selfish and delusional role.”
Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433127/john-kasich-campaign-helps-donald-trump-insane
