The conventional wisdom on this one will be that Gov. Kasich overreached — and this’ll be one of those rare moments when the CW is correct. Ohio is one of the more union-friendly states in the country, due to cultural factors as much or even more than economic ones; and it should have been obvious to Kasich from the start that such a brazen assault on public employees was going to galvanize his opponents and disturb his more moderate supporters. Public employees simply encompass too many middle class, suburbanite jobs for Republicans to credibly demonize them as lazy bums who make more for doing less. Firefighters, teachers, police; the Kasich attack ads practically write themselves.
This is a good thing, by the way. Firefighters, teachers, and police are integral parts of any community, and deserve the hard-won right to bargain for their benefits collectively. And while taking public unions out at the knees may be highly desirable from the standpoint of a Republican partisan, for most voters, it seems a curious and even venal waste of time and change of focus from the one thing they care about: jobs. In much the same way that voters saw the President’s attention to health insurance reform as a distasteful ideological detour, Kasich’s gambit simply rang false with voters; and despite his best efforts, the Ohio Governor was never able to convince his citizens that union-busting was essential towards fighting unemployment.
Kasich is arguably the most unpopular Governor in the country right now, so I suppose it’s not entirely odd to find that his post-defeat statement sounds eerily like those that would fly like a wounded bird from the George W. Bush White House before almost immediately crashing from the gravitational pull of so many people not giving a damn. Like Bush, Kasich has been reduced to yearning towards some ill-defined future point when History will judge him righteous and misunderstood:
Ohio’s problems developed over time because too many people cared more about popularity than about making the tough—and sometimes unpopular—choices Ohio needed. Folks should know by now that that’s not my way. We won’t get Ohio back on track in a day, but our lives and our work aren’t sprints, they’re marathons, and we strive for bigger rewards than the fleeting praise of the here and now.
The political equivalent of saying you were trying to be the most annoying participant in a chat thread, the appeal to History, and the myth of the unpopular but necessary choice, is the language that a politician uses when they know that their stock with anyone but the faithful has long since bottomed-out. It’s what you say to keep your troops, the people who would sooner vote for a cardboard cutout of Joe the Plumber than a Democrat, from losing hope and succumbing to apathy. It’s the language of the irrelevant; and, at this point, it’s all Kasich’s got.
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The lurkers support him in e-mail.
Could be good for job growth in neighboring Indiana.
The difference between Bush and Kasich is that Bush was right about some unpopular things, and _will_ probably look better in retrospect on those issues. Kasich was arrogant and foolish, he took a simple truth, that the unions have to be reigned in somewhat to bring the state budget problems under control, and tried to use it as an excuse to act like a union-busting macho man. He came across as arrogant, cocky, and clueless even to many conservatives, and more than a few conservatives are angry that his foolishness might have cost them Obio in November 2012.
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