CT Blue

I’m a deeply disappointed guy. Today, the New London Day endorsed John Kasich for the Connecticut Republican primary, as I expected it would. I’m not disappointed by that, it was inevitable. What I am disappointed by is the Day’s failure to apply the term “moderate” to Kasich. When I saw they’d endorsed him, I figured I could write something fairly clever about the plasticity of the English language, using the ever shifting meaning of moderate as a point of departure. But the Day failed me. Rather than call him a moderate, they settled for implying that he was one, by engaging in cherry picking and historical revisionism, actions that have become the media norm when writing or talking about Kasich. You see, it is impossible for them to shed their religious faith that the Republican Party must contain some reasonable people, and if that means redefining the term “reasonable” then— well, we’re all reasonable people here, aren’t we, and allowances must be made. So the Day preferred to whitewash Kasich’s record, carefully avoiding the extreme right wing positions he has taken. I won’t go into great detail. All you need do is Google (or, as I do, “Duck-Duck-Go”) “John Kasich is not a moderate” and get all the details you like. The first hits on Duck-Duck-Go were here and here, and they pretty much cover the field. Anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-public education, anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-gay, pro guns, and pro discrimination disguised as religious freedom. What more could a right winger want?

If you put a gun to my head and made me choose among the three remaining Republican contestants, I’m not sure I’d pick Kasich, though it’s the conventional wisdom that he’s the more “moderate” of the three. Kasich has a track record. We know for certain that if he were elected, he would be the extreme right winger that he has been in Ohio. We can suspect, with reason, that on the national stage he would be even more extreme, since Ohio is not Mississippi, and there are forces which keep him from being too extreme. The only reason to prefer Kasich is that he couches his positions in language designed to appeal to people who are desperately seeking Republican “moderates”. That doesn’t make him one. Such people are on the road to extinction, even in their native habitat here in New England.