Tag Archives: John Kasich

Hey, remember when the world ended?

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It wasn’t that long ago.

Our nation’s media went on high alert. Republicans fell all over themselves trying to spread politically-harvestable panic and blaming President Obama for endangering our nation. In Vermont, all eyes turned to the curious story of a homeless guy who called himself a doctor. Yup, remember Peter Italia?

It was the fall of 2014, and the cause of the imminent apocalypse was the Ebola virus.

Well, we’re still here. And look at this notice from the Vermont Department of Health:

In a Health Advisory on October 31, 2014, the Health Department issued Ebola preparedness guidance for health care settings. The guidance included an Ebola-specific patient advisory sign that could be used to help identify patients with Ebola virus disease. Use of this sign may now be discontinued. 

Widespread transmission of Ebola in West Africa has been controlled, although additional cases may continue to occur sporadically. The CDC has changed its country classification for Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea to “countries with former widespread transmission and current, established control measures.” As a result, the Health Department has discontinued active monitoring for individuals who have returned from travel to these countries.

(Bold type used by the Health Department.) How about that. Quite impressive, really. I remember when it was thought impossible to control a new virus in a place as dark, untamed, and backward as the stereotype of Africa we have in our minds. The best we could do was to wall ourselves off.

Of course, we moved on from that apocalypse long ago, so you might be forgiven for not remembering the brief Ebola Panic that infected far more people than the Ebola virus itself ever did. Fortunately, the only health effects of Ebola Panic are transitory elevations in blood pressure and a compulsion to watch cable news.

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A closer look at the “reasonable” Republican candidate

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Ohio Governor John Kasich is offering himself to the good people of New Hampshire as a pragmatic, optimistic, kinda-centrist manager: a guy who can Get Things Done and Work With Others. His campaign schtick even convinced MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who called him “real and reasonable-seeming and relatable-seeming.” And:

If some voters up here are looking for authenticity in their candidate, well, just as a political consumer, a political observer who’s been up to New Hampshire for a lot of primaries and seen a lot of these events, I can see how New Hampshire voters see authenticity in John Kasich.

Yeah, well, not so fast. John Kasich is a veteran politician. He is presenting himself as relatable and reasonable, but his actual record in Ohio tells a very different story. His administration has been nearly as hard-right dogmatic as those of Michigan’s Rick Snyder or Kansas’ Sam Brownback. And just about as successful, too. When you open the attic of Kasich’s Ohio, there’s an awful lot of spiders up there.

“Out-of-state media are oblivious to the disgrace at the Ohio Department of Education.”

Those words are from the keyboard of Toledo Blade columnist Marilou Johanek. She’s writing about Kasich’s scandal-plagued education reform effort, which centers on that favored right-wing nostrum, school choice. His (ahem, former) school choice director, David Hansen,

… engaged in a fraudulent scheme to boost the evaluations of some charters. Mr. Hansen, whose wife worked as the governor’s chief of staff until she left to manage his presidential campaign, admitted scrubbing data on failing online and dropout recovery-charters to improve their standing in the state.

Wonderful. If charter schools aren’t working, then cook the books!

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Prepare to kneel before our benevolent overlord

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Soja hear the news?

Donald Trump is comin’ to town. Next Thursday, Flynn Center, free tix already gone. (According to one commenter on the Freeploid website, many a liberal signed up for tickets with no intention whatsoever of actually showing up — hoping for an embarrassingly low turnout. Which would be great, but I’m sure there will be plenty of the Great Unwashed on hand to welcome their reality-show wet dream of a candidate.)

Can’t say I’m outraged or particularly concerned. I found it amusing that the Vermont Republican Party immediately sought to distance itself from the proceedings. Executive Director Jeff Bartley doing his best Sergeant Schultz:

We learned late today through media reports that Donald Trump will be making a brief campaign stop in Vermont The Vermont Republican Party did not invite Mr. Trump and has no role in his event.

Although Bartley did everything short of dunking himself in Purell, he did end his brief statement with a note of praise for the GOP’s “very diverse group of candidates.”

And there’s the rub. Trump is the loudest and most effective carnival barker of the bunch, but the Republican field really doesn’t offer much to the serious voter. Certainly no real diversity in thought or policy.

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Cautionary notes on the Phil Scott inevitability, part 2: Bad candidates

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So I forced myself to watch the Republican presidential debate last week. Overall impressions?

Ben Carson excepted, these guys are articulate spokespeople for a worldview completely at odds with reality. Also, whoever gets the nomination is going to be an albatross around Phil Scott’s neck.

I mentioned this in my previous post, but the point deserves further attention.

In a relatively serious, issue-oriented debate, the Republicans presented an array of positions that made George W. Bush look like a liberal. And we all know how popular George W. was in Vermont — the only state he never visited as President. (Dick Cheney made one stop, a quick in-and-out at the Burlington Airport.)

To put it another way, the Republican presidential nominee will not help Phil Scott or his party-broadening project. Not the least tiny little bit.

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Tweeting past the graveyard

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Gee, what’s on my Twitter feed this morning? Ah, a fresh bit of puffery from VTGOP Chair David Sunderland!

Fact-checking time!

RealClearPolitics’ average of the top national polls: John Kasich in 10th place with a measly 2.5%.

If that’s a surge, he must have started from negative 10.

Now, if Sunderland is talking New Hampshire specifically, he’s got a bit more ground to stand on. In RCP’s average of NH polls, Kasich is in third place with 10.3%. And he has legitimately “surged” in the Granite State; two months ago, he was down in bottom-feeder territory.

That’s a creditable figure. And a testament to the relatively clear-thinking nature of the NH Republican electorate, which is more interested in frugal, responsible government (and less interested in fact-free, over-the-top rhetoric) than Republicans nationwide.

In short, Sunderland got it right if he meant a very localized surge. But nationally? Kasich’s going nowhere.

Nobody’s figured out how to make this economy work

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Vermont Republicans are fond of slamming the Shumlin Economy, cherrypicking statistics that make the Governor’s record look bad. They criticize his policies as crippling to economic growth and middle-class prosperity. (And now that Bernie Sanders is running for President, they try to blame all the ills of the last three decades on him, even though he hasn’t been running the place and would clearly have adopted very different policies if he had been. Protip to Republicans: correlation is not causation.)

And yes, in spite of very low unemployment, it’s inarguable that the recovery has been slow and spotty for most Vermonters. Their purchasing power has remained stagnant. But this isn’t just a Vermont phenomenon, and if you look at other states with conservative governments, they’re failing at least as badly as we are.

Last Friday, Talking Points Memo posted a piece about how four Republican governors are seeing their presidential aspirations undercut by severe budget problems back home — problems attributable to the failure of their policies to hotwire their economies.

The basic concept is as cartoonish as when it was first sketched on a napkin by Arthur Laffer: cut taxes and the economy will flourish. Revenues will rise, as government takes a smaller slice of a growing pie. Business, freed of its public-sector shackles, will lead us into a prosperous future.

Trouble is, it doesn’t work. In Louisiana, WIsconsin, Ohio and New Jersey, Republican tax-cutting policies have failed: all four states have sluggish economies and huge budget shortfalls. It’s worse on both sides than anything Peter Shumlin has inflicted on the state of Vermont.

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