Former Republican Ohio governor, ex-longtime congressman, and passionate President Donald Trump critic John Kasich is expected to speak at the virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention and endorse presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden. Just why Democrats consider this a sagacious move is a head-scratcher. Kasich’s appearance will further cement Biden’s standing as the preferred candidate of the status quo in American politics, a message the Trump campaign will undoubtedly be extremely pleased to see reinforced on a such a large national platform.
Antiquated Electioneering
The carefully packaged Biden is fortunate that his convention will not be held before a live audience. It’s almost impossible to imagine the rabid progressives that make up much of the Democrat base today cheering on this kind of stale “reaching out across the aisle” theater that amounts to nothing more than one old Swamp creature standing up for his pal from the D.C. slop trough.
A career politician from one party endorsing a cohort with a different capital letter next to his name may have been big news in 1976. In the Change Era of post-2016 America, it is as meaningful as official endorsements from daily newspapers, another creaking anachronism that Penny Whistles and Moon Pies Joe and his doily-draped campaign will no doubt be endlessly heralding in the months to come.
In October 2017, Kasich appeared with Biden for a Bridging the Divides conversation at the University of Delaware’s Biden Institute. The collegial back-slapping on display that evening should give pause to any blue partisan who sincerely believes having Kasich address a Democratic convention will harm Washington outsider Trump in even the slightest way.
“I think Joe and I were lucky,” Kasich said at the event. “I was elected to the [Ohio State] legislature when I was 26 … Joe goes to the United States Senate at 29; I went to Congress at the age of 30. Joe was there for a long time and becomes vice president. We made the NBA, Joe. All these kids, you ask them, what do you want to be? ‘I want to play in the NBA’ or ‘I want to be a soccer player.’ Well, some make it, but most don’t.”
Trump captured the White House by riding a Drain the Swamp wave that specifically targeted such career politicians. Kasich is so hopelessly out of touch with this phenomenon that he conflates the decades-long timespans that he and Biden spent sucking at the public teat as being comparable to the feats of celebrated professional athletes.
Comforts of Self-Deception
It’s hardly surprising to see Democrats fall for the same illusions of impending Trump disaster that a fat and lazy establishment media are desperately trying to make real by breathlessly reporting on their own reporting: Biden is dominating the polls; Trump is going to drop out. This was all thrown at the wall in 2016 with Hillary Clinton. None of it stuck, yet once again the ruling machinery goes tramping down the same deluded path.
The notion that Republicans are rejecting Trump is a cherished part of the daydream. Thus old, discarded names such as Kasich and Paul Ryan are dusted off and presented as somehow indicative of genuine conservatives turning away from the sitting president. The New York Times has “revealed” that Ryan is worried that key states are “presently trending against us” in the 2020 race for the White House, as if he for a single second was a part of the same Republican Party as Trump.
The elephant in the room deliberately unmentioned by Democrats and their big-box media allies is the unpalatable fact that the GOP base has firmly solidified into an America First populist constituency in the Trump Era. Ryan stepped down as House Speaker in 2019 and retired from Congress armed with the full knowledge that he had no authentic support whatsoever among the Republican grassroots ranks. Kasich ran against Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries and was decisively trounced.
A Democratic national convention featuring political catwalks from Biden’s old Swamp buddies from both sides of the aisle under the thoroughly false banner of a “united front” of divergent interests against Trump has the disastrous possibility of turning into free advertising for the president’s major campaign themes. Biden’s handlers have carefully hidden their candidate from the American people since he became the party’s presumptive nominee in March. That they can’t grasp the spectacular shortcomings of a Uniparty Convention gives further proof that they have no idea how to present Biden to the general public once he is forced to leave his basement.
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