It's easy to forget that the Republican race for president still has three candidates on the track.
And though John Kasich is running a distant third behind celebrity businessman Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for the party's nomination, the Ohio governor is using his time in the attempting to guide his party away from self-destruction.
In an interview with the Washington Post Wednesday, Kasich lamented the course the Republican primary race has taken. That includes GOP voters' embrace of Trump's negative energy and its rejection of not just the party establishment but anything resembling a logical policy platform.
"If you don't have ideas, you got nothing, and frankly my Republican Party doesn't like ideas," Kasich said. "They want to be negative against things."
"We had [former President Ronald] Reagan, okay? Saint Ron. We had [conservative icon Jack] Kemp, he was an idea guy," Kasich said. "I'd say Paul Ryan is driven mostly by ideas. He likes ideas. But you talk about most of them, the party is knee-jerk 'against.' Maybe that's how they were created."
In the fight for the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination, Kasich has just 148 delegates, trailing not only Trump's 845 and Cruz's 559 but the 172 delegates Florida Sen. Marco Rubio collected before dropping out of the race mid-March.
But even as his campaign has failed to catch fire, Kasich has adopted an elder-statesman role not dissimilar to the one House Speaker Paul Ryan has tried to assume.
The governor has made no effort to hide his disdain for the sophomoric and often vulgar rhetoric that at times has consumed the GOP primary, claiming to be the "only adult in the room" compared to his rivals, with the executive and legislative experience to back it up.
Kasich's waning hope for the nomination – one that seems increasingly less likely as Cruz takes advantage of Trump's campaign inexperience – is that party elites will block both of them from the nomination, effectively staging a coup against its own voters at an open Republican National Convention in July.
Trump, the GOP front-runner, has predicted riots should the party use the rulebook to snatch the nomination away, even if he comes into Cleveland with a substantial lead in both delegates and the popular vote. Polls show Republican voters agree he should win if he gets close to 1,237.
But Kasich says getting close doesn't count, and Trump should not assume he will be awarded the nomination if he doesn't get to Cleveland with the required number of delegates in his column.
"One time I made an 83 on my math test, and I did better than everybody else, and I asked the teacher: How come I don't have an A?" Kasich said. "The teacher said, 'an A is 90.' I said, 'Oh, I get it.' Say [Trump] gets in there with 1,100 — go get the rest of them."
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-04-21/kasich-the-gop-primarys-third-man-says-his-party-hates-ideas?int=a14709
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