John Kasich Embodies Joe Biden’s Worst Instincts

Despite his reputation, Kasich isn’t ‘nice’ — or moderate — and his relationship with Biden validates progressives’ worst fears. If it were possible to gather all of Joe Biden’s worst instincts together into one person, you’d wind up with John Kasich.

Kasich, the former governor of Ohio, is Biden’s Republican daemon — the avatar of the “reasonable conservative” that Biden, who sees himself as a reasonable centrist, keeps pledging to accommodate when he’s in the White House. Kasich gained prominence in 2016, during his own failed presidential bid, as the face of anti-Trump conservatives; he condemned Trump’s crude manner and aggressive tactics, and publicly declined the offer to be Trump’s VP.

His quaint personal style — a polite, mild-mannered, paternal type who was so shocked by cuss words that he tried to get Fargo banned from his local Blockbuster — led outlets like Vox and FiveThirtyEight to deem him “the anti-Trump.” There were rumors that he would mount his own independent presidential run in 2020.

That never happened. Instead, John Kasich joined forces with Biden, and has been a mild-mannered, sweater-wearing barnacle on the side of the Democratic Party ever since. Kasich spoke at the Democratic National Convention, symbolically placed between two forking roads. He served as a surrogate for Biden throughout the general election. While Kasich was out campaigning for Biden, Politico was reporting that Biden was considering him for a cabinet slot.

In the wake of Biden’s win, Kasich has been the loudest voice pushing for moderation and compromise, by which he means moving to eliminate the progressive elements of the Democratic Party: “Now is the time for Democrats… to begin to listen to what the other half of the country has to say,” he said on Sunday. “The Democrats have to make it clear to the far left that they almost cost [Biden] this election.” The next day, appearing on The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, he once again blamed the left for Trump’s success, warning that “[Trump] appealed to people who were very worried about this rhetoric of defunding the police, this issue of socialism.”

Kasich knows very little about what it takes for Democrats to win elections.

There is a certain symbiosis at work; in Biden, Kasich receives a vehicle for his continued ambitions, and in Kasich, Biden receives validation that critics of his bipartisan approach are wrong, that conservatives are reachable, and that he is uniquely positioned to make them cooperate with his agenda. That Biden seemingly continues to believe this, not just after seeing the relentless GOP obstructionism aimed at Barack Obama but also after watching the Republican Party veer toward open fascism and deny the legitimacy of his win altogether, is frankly horrifying. Biden clings to the ideal of bipartisan government despite receiving very clear evidence that his opposition plans to destroy him. The last time Democrats underestimated Republicans’ ruthlessness, we wound up with a strongman reality TV host in the Oval Office.

Biden overestimates John Kasich. For one thing, Kasich knows very little about what it takes for Democrats to win elections: The state he was likely meant to deliver, Ohio, went to Trump, and though exit polls show Biden gaining some ground with college-educated whites, the white Republican vote as a whole largely stayed Republican. Moreover, Kasich is far from the “moderate” he’s branded himself as in recent years. He’s a union buster, who signed legislation that curbs collective bargaining and bans strikes, and once publicly vowed to “break the back” of Ohio teachers’ unions.

He told a voter concerned about Social Security cuts to “get over it.” In 2016, he was the single most anti-choice candidate in a field that included Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and Trump himself. He publicly argued that the poisoning of children in Flint, Michigan, was less objectionable than Hillary Clinton’s private email server. When it comes to LGBT+ people, he tends to say the right things and do the wrong things: He attended a gay wedding, but did nothing to overturn Ohio’s ban on gay marriage. He clucked his tongue at businesses discriminating against LGBT+ customers in Mississippi, while allowing the same discrimination to remain legal in Ohio.

John Kasich’s one claim to being better than your average Republican is that he’s nice, and even that might not be true. I’m from Columbus. John Kasich used to live across the street from my grandma. People in Ohio actively despise the guy. Local outlets refer to him as “blunt” and “abrasive.” He’s feuded with everyone from teachers (when they objected to all the union busting, he “joked” about outlawing their break rooms so they couldn’t organize) to traffic cops. (After getting a ticket, he gave a near-Trumpian speech ranting about the “idiot” responsible — “you just can’t act that way!”) He condescends to women; famously, when a young woman tried to ask him a question at a town hall meeting, he responded by saying, “I don’t have any tickets for Taylor Swift.” Within days of taking office as governor, he gave a luncheon at which he warned the assembled crowd, “If you’re not on the bus, we will run over you with the bus. And I’m not kidding.”

It’s a long fall from Mr. Rogers to vehicular manslaughter, but it’s not shocking. Kasich is an old-fashioned, Bush-style “compassionate conservative,” a culture warrior who can publicly perform a certain white, Midwestern, Christian respectability while still pushing policies that are brutal and punitive to working and marginalized people. That combination of affable persona and cruel policy shouldn’t be new to anyone who’s studied, for example, Ronald Reagan. It’s not a departure from the Republican playbook. It is the Republican playbook. It was Trump — with his bluster and bad language, his open racism and sexism, his embrace of fascism and excuses for Nazis — who was the exception.

Biden’s entire campaign to date has been premised on a “return to normal,” and what many people fear is that he means the bad parts of normal, too — that, at worst, Biden wants to drag the party right, and at best, he values a version of politics that is long out of date, one where collegiality among powerful white men took precedence over real ideological disagreements or the urgent needs of the American people. Working with Kasich will only confirm those perceptions. It signals that Biden is more concerned with routing the insurgents within his own party than he is with undoing the damage accrued under Trump. It will mean that he chooses to value the appearance of “niceness,” or a cordial relationship with Republicans, over the lives of his marginalized constituents or his duty to serve them.

Most importantly — and most dangerously — it would mean that Biden doesn’t understand what he’s up against. Putting nicer conservatives in power doesn’t fight Trumpism. It re-entrenches it, making it harder to fight because it has smoother branding and a less objectionable public front. Rather than the immediate, urgent crisis of Trump — which was so extraordinary people felt called to oppose him — we will experience a steady, silent creep toward right-wing extremism. In some ways, Democrats’ embrace of Kasich is the ultimate proof of the damage Trump has inflicted: He’s shifted the Overton window so far right that now all a Republican has to do to seem “moderate” is to avoid being a Nazi, and all a Democrat has to do is be a moderate Republican. Democrats have been calling on each other to #Resist for four years now, but if John Kasich is the future of the Democrats, then the war is over. Biden got elected, but Trump is the one who won.

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