Kasich’s Western Tuesday

#NeverKasich

Kasich’s finish on Western Tuesday would have been enough to embarrass any lesser mortal out of the race.

By Rich Lowry

This truly is a year when the rules don’t apply. If they did, John Kasich would be back in Columbus trying to figure out whether he sells his soul to Donald Trump or endorses Ted Cruz.

Instead, the Ohio governor is still out on the trail running a delusional vanity project masquerading as a presidential campaign.

Kasich was a fine chairman of the House Budget Committee and is a good governor. But there is no appetite for his pragmatic, “can’t we all get along” presidential campaign among Republican primary voters, who have made that abundantly clear to everyone but Kasich and his handful of staff and loyalists.

Kasich must hold the record for the most finishes of 4 percent or below of any candidate who has persisted in saying that he expects to be his party’s nominee. He is the Harold Stassen of primary-season futility. Kasich has limped in at roughly 4 percent or lower in Alaska (4.07 percent), Alabama (4.43 percent), Arkansas (3.71 percent), Iowa (1.86 percent), Nevada (3.6 percent), Oklahoma (3.59 percent), and Texas (4.25 percent).

The contests that he has done best in, besides his home state, are Vermont, where he finished a close second to Trump and got eight delegates, and the District of Columbia, where he finished second behind Marco Rubio and got nine delegates. This is not exactly an electoral juggernaut.

In New Hampshire, Kasich finished a very distant second at 16 percent after doing more than 100 town halls. (His modest take on getting blown out slightly less badly by Trump than everyone else in the race: “Tonight, the light overcame the darkness.”) This was less than Jon Huntsman got in New Hampshire in 2012, before appropriately dropping out a week later.

Kasich’s finish on Western Tuesday would have been enough to embarrass any lesser mortal out of the race.

In Arizona, he finished in fourth place in a three-man race, which sounds like a setup for a bad joke. Marco Rubio had won enough of the early vote that the anemic Kasich couldn’t catch him.

In Utah, Kasich bizarrely sought to keep Ted Cruz beneath 50 percent, the threshold for winning all of the state’s delegates. Instead, he succeeded only in holding Cruz below 70 percent, while he finished second — by 52 points.

Kasich has run as a manic, slightly more entertaining version of Huntsman, limiting his appeal to a slice of the party’s moderates. Kasich is a genuine man of faith, but he is prone to self-righteousness and psychobabble of the sort that you’d expect to hear from an over-talkative yoga instructor.

“We’re all made to be a part of the healing of this world,” he declared on primary night in New Hampshire, “if we would just slow down.” He also made a plea for more hugging. After his win in Ohio, he assured the nation that “our spirit is in us,” and we are “part of a giant mosaic.” Deepak Chopra might to want to volunteer to write Kasich’s Inaugural address.

For all his foggy rhetoric of uplift, Kasich’s sincerity-to-sanctimony ratio is badly out of whack. Last week, Kasich made it sound as though he had just become aware of Trump’s insulting comments about women. This is impossible to believe, if for no other reason than Kasich was on the debate stage when Megyn Kelly of Fox News famously asked Trump about some of these comments.

Kasich pronounced himself “very concerned” about the remarks. “We’ll have more to say about that,” he said. OK, when? “Today is not the day.” There’s nothing worse than a self-professed healer who lacks the courage to call out the man who represents everything he should abjure in our politics.

Of course, it’s much worse than that. Kasich might as well be a de facto member of the Trump team. The Ohio governor has been mathematically eliminated from contention for 1,237 delegates, but, after spending the early part of the primaries as an anti-Rubio spoiler, is now set to be the anti-Cruz spoiler.

Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics crunched the numbers and found that with Kasich in the race, Trump gets to 1,237 and without Kasich in the race, Trump falls short. Since Kasich’s only path is a contested convention, this makes his campaign, on top of everything else, a massive self-contradiction.

Kasich believes that an open convention would turn to him over the two top finishers, Trump and Cruz, which is certainly possible — the same way a meteor strike at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland is possible.

The delegate game at a convention would be, in part, an organizational contest, and Kasich’s organization is all but nonexistent. He’d make an electability case based on his good head-to-head poll numbers against Hillary Clinton, although they are elevated because no one has bothered to attack him.

This is all academic unless Trump is slowed. The next chance to do it is in Wisconsin, where Kasich is warming up for his biggest spoiler role yet. At the very least, Kasich will make it more difficult for Cruz to beat Trump, and perhaps he will tip the state to the mogul.

There is no excuse for Kasich, who knows a thing or two about elections, not realizing this. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that he is still in the race only because he is less realistic and, sadly, less honorable than the candidates who have dropped out before him.

John, spare us your sanctimony and your unifying patter. Take a cold-eyed look at reality, and do what’s best for your party and your cause. No hugs necessary.