Hullabaloo: Competing for the crazy

In 2010, Kasich ran for Governor of Ohio as a Tea Party conservative and won. And, in keeping with his Tea Party promises, the first thing he did was decimate the public employees’ unions. Unlike Scott Walker, he didn’t just go after the kindergarten teachers (whom we can all agree are a grave threat to everything Americans hold dear); he also targeted the mostly male professions of police and firefighters. The unions then took it to the ballot and the people voted against Kasich’s law, big time.

That failure seemed to lead him to the decision that it was long past time to let his freak flag fly in public. But his freak flag doesn’t look like any other GOP governor’s freak flag. Where executives like Sam Brownback turned their states into a “petrie dish” [sic] for supply side economics and fundamentalist theocracy, and pretty much destroyed its economy, Kasich came out for the expansion of Medicaid, saying that it was important for poor people to have medical care:

Meanwhile, the rest of his party was clutching their pearls over the “47 percent,” and calling anyone who might need assistance “moochers” and “parasites.” By contrast, Kasich might as well have declared that his greatest influence was Karl Marx. Mainstream Republicans and Tea Partiers alike went mad. And the more they tried to obstruct him, the more he resisted. His flinty temperament engaged, he decided to take unilateral actions and fought the Tea Party, the Kochs and his own political allies all the way to the state Supreme Court and won. Then he handily won re-election, setting himself up for this presidential run as a moderate GOP iconoclast in a sea of doctrinaire conservatives.

“Have you ever been stopped by a police officer that’s an idiot,” Kasich asked the seated audience, pausing his speech as he moved around the room. “I had this idiot pull me over on 315. Listen to this story. He says to me, he say, uh, he says you passed this emergency vehicle on the side of the road and you didn’t yield.”

“I said, officer I, are you kidding, I didn’t, I didn’t see any, I didn’t even see any, where the heck was it?” a stammering Kasich recalls. “The last thing I would ever do would be to pass an emergency, are you kidding me?”

“He says, ‘Well I understand that. Give me your license,’” Kasich continues. “He goes back to the car, comes back, gives me a ticket and says you must report to court, if you don’t report to court we’re putting a warrant out for your arrest.”

Then Kasich stills himself and bellows, “He’s an idiot! We just can’t act that way. What people resent are people who are in the government who don’t treat the client with respect.”

Republicans don’t tend to like that sort of talk. And I’m going to guess that his African American constituents aren’t too sympathetic to his plight.

To his credit Kasich later signed an executive order calling for statewide standards for law enforcement in the wake of the Tamir Rice shooting in Cleveland. But that was only after he had said to the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus, when they’d asked him to diversify his lily-white, mostly-male cabinet, “I don’t need your people.” His freak flag flies in all directions.

Then there’s the matter of his 2012 State of the State speech, a legendary address that included some of the following bullet points (collated by Business Insider):

- A reference to his “hot wife”
- Imitating someone with Parkinson’s disease
- Warning two recipients of the the Governor’s Courage Awards not to sell their medals on eBay.
- Calling Californians “a bunch of wackadoodles.”
- Referring to ethnic communities as “the ethnics,” and to God as a “lobbyist” for the “mentally ill, the disabled, the poor.”
- Giving a “shout-out” to virtually every person in the room — and multiple shout-outs to Ohio State President Gordon Gee
- Telling the people of Ohio that he wanted to “touch them.”
- Mentioning Galileo, Soviet gulags, John Adams and “Navy SEAL” — all in one breath.
- Crying