Gail Collins on Yesterday’s Primary Winner: John Kasich!

Dear Commons Community,

Another series of primary elections came and went yesterday.  Hillary Clinton did very well on the Democratic side and has pretty much the nomination in hand over Bernie Sanders.  Donald Trump also did well trouncing the other candidates with the exception of John Kasich who managed to win his own state of Ohio.  Gail Collins, in her New York Times column, comments on Kasich’s victory.

“In the Republican debates, Kasich was a sort of fuzzy presence, the guy on the end who kept talking about the House budget committee in 1997. Or being positive. At times it was like a bunch of gladiators smashing into one another at the coliseum while one chipper combatant wandered around shaking his head and urging everybody to get along.

Can Kasich go all the way? Doesn’t seem likely. But then Ohio does like to call itself the Mother of Presidents. Eight came from Ohio in one way or another. True, that included Warren Harding and William Henry Harrison, who lasted for only a month. But on the plus side there’s … William McKinley.

Right now he certainly seems like the only non-appalling option the Republicans have, even though there are a lot of people in Ohio right now who are shaking their heads in stupefaction at the sight of their governor as the nation’s poster boy for moderation. He’s signed an absolute mountain of anti-abortion bills — nearly half of the clinics in the state have shut down during his tenure. His enthusiasm for giving public funding to private, for-profit schools has been scandalous. And on the economic front he has the usual conservative contempt for taxing residents according to their ability to pay.

But he doesn’t think we should ban Muslims or deport millions of immigrants. And there’s always that thing about the downtrodden. This year, it’s as good as the Republicans can hope for. And the other options [Donald Trump and Ted Cruz]  are so really, really bad.”

Tony

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