Run again? Only if duty calls him, Kasich says
John Kasich knows that many will speculate about whether his new book is an effort to further his political career. “That isn’t true,” he insists. So is the lame-duck Ohio governor and 2016
presidential candidate through with politics?
That drew a much different response during a Dispatch interview Monday.
“I don’t really have any plans for public office, but it’s no different than people who sometimes see their duty and they perform it. If I saw something I needed to do, and it was a duty I felt I needed to do, I would consider and probably do it,” he acknowledged.
“But I don’t know what that means. I’m not setting my sights on running for anything.”
The only thing he ruled out was running for the U.S. Senate “and the school board.”
Kasich’s interview came amid a whirlwind of media appearances — “Fox and Friends,” “The Daily Show,” “Morning Joe,” “Face the Nation,” “Anderson Cooper,” “The View,” etc. — coinciding with today’s release of his new book: “Two Paths: America Divided or United.”
It’s true, as he emphasizes, that the book is about more than Donald Trump. But aside from Kasich himself, the president clearly is a central figure. Even in a chapter on his faith, Kasich called Trump’s stunning victory not so much a sign of political or social upheaval in America but evidence of the decline of a nation that has lost its moral compass.
“I saw Trump’s reckless entreaties as a weakening of our shared American values — even more so, a
of our shared American values,” Kasich wrote a little less than halfway into the 293-page book.
“It troubled me that a strong plurality of Republican voters didn’t seem to care that the candidate they supported was ... a man who would do or say anything to get attention, even incite a crowd to violence,” the Ohio governor lamented.
“He was dominating the discussion, the coverage, and the voting — all in a way that could only signal that this type of behavior was being ratified by the American people. Most alarmingly, to me, it signaled a spiritual disconnect at play in this election cycle.”
In Monday’s interview, Kasich said, “There’s a tendency when societies mature to take God off the throne and put man up on the throne, which creates confusion in a culture and a society.”
The book, Kasich’s fourth, rambles at times like some of his speeches. It contains several new nuggets of information from the campaign trail but nothing close to a shocking revelation.
In a letter to his 17-yearold twin daughters that concludes the book, he says he wrote “Two Paths” as “an opportunity to lead, to heal, to offer a message of hope to a country that’s been divided by the most bitter, most contentious, most polarizing election in American history.”
He doesn’t universally condemn Trump.
As a candidate, Trump “gave millions of disenfranchised voters a voice,” Kasich acknowledged.
“What the voters were telling us in this election was that they were angry, that they were feeling that their lives were out of control, that there was a sense of helplessness and hopelessness in the heartland,” he said.
“We must listen to the word of the people and draw upon the lessons of this election cycle so that we might grow as a nation. Democracy has spoken.”
He recounts Donald Trump Jr.’s offer to the governor’s top campaign strategist, John Weaver, to make Kasich the GOP running mate — who as vice president would take charge of both foreign and domestic policy while Trump was “making America great again.”
Kasich says the younger Trump denied the conversation took place; however, Trump Jr. confirmed the talk, if not its entire contents, with The Dispatch before the November election.
“I could never have worked with Donald Trump,” the governor said.
“I could not condone how he seemed to treat women and immigrants and minorities, or the way he looked at the world,” Kasich said.
“I was embarrassed by what (Kasich’s family members) were seeing on television. There was no decency. There was hatefulness and disrespect. There was no humility. There was only solipsism and self-aggrandizement.
“It was a blight on this great country, the way some of these candidates were behaving, and it left me feeling that we should all have been ashamed of ourselves. As I exited the presidential stage, it was unthinkable to me that I could ever endorse Donald Trump, who I believed had set the ugly tone for the campaign.”
He gives no hint of another presidential run in 2020. At the very end of the book, he expresses the hope to his daughters that “when you fill out your first presidential ballots, you can vote for a candidate who inspires you, who challenges you, who encourages all Americans to think freely and to dream bigly and to celebrate our differences.”
Monday, Kasich said, “I didn’t write that with me in mind.”