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John Kasich considers his next act - CNNPolitics - CNN.com
www.cnn.com/2017/06/12/politics/john-kasich-considers-his-next-act/index.html
John Kasich considers his next act
Updated 4:25 PM ET, Mon June 12, 2017
New York (CNN)It's just before 8 a.m., and John Kasich is in a crowded New York City green room.
He's
waiting to go on "CBS This Morning," and the room feels especially
cramped at the moment because there are two minor entourages here. One
is his, and another is for Spencer Rascoff, the CEO of online real
estate company Zillow, who will also be a guest on the show. There's a
curved teal couch and a coffee table with two Emmy Awards and the day's
newspapers on it, all with front-page stories about the terrorist attack
at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.
Kasich's here to talk about his new book, "Two Paths: America Divided or United,"
and the news of the day. There's President Donald Trump's proposed
budget (it "isn't going to pass," he says) and the opioid epidemic
(Ohio's No. 3 for opioid deaths, according to a graphic on the screen,
and drugs are "destroying the culture of our country," he says), but he
also wants to talk about Manchester. He has two 17-year-old daughters,
twins and music fans, and just this past weekend he was at Rock on the
Range, a three-day festival in Columbus, he says.
Kasich's
a big concert-goer and he likes talking about music, something that
came up every so often during the campaign. He recently went to a Maroon
5 concert with his wife and was surprised to realize just how many hits
they have. He'll soon see fellow Ohioans, Twenty One Pilots, who went
to Worthington Christian, the same school his daughters now go to, and
who he was rooting for a year before they released a No. 1 album. In
2014, speaking about the musicians that the Ohio State Fair books, he
said they need acts that are "on the way up," according to the Columbus
Dispatch. "We ought to book Twenty One Pilots. My daughters love them;
they're from here."
Kasich asks the
assembled green room if they've heard of Tricky. Tricky's a British
rapper in his late 40s, whose highest-charting song on the UK charts was
a reworked version of "Milk" by the band Garbage that he was featured
on. It peaked at No. 10 in 1996. Madonna once asked him to produce one
of her albums, but he turned her down, he told the Guardian last year.
Tricky
did a song with Hawkman, Kasich says, have you heard about Hawkman?
What about Live? One of the guys from Live is on Tricky's "Evolution
Revolution." Doug, can you pull the song up. Doug, a member of Kasich's
entourage, pulls out a phone and plays it.
In
addition to music, Kasich also likes talking about jobs, especially
whenever he has an audience with a job maker, such as the CEO of an
online real estate company, as he does now. Does Zillow employ anyone in
Ohio, he asks? "Why not?"
A
member of Rascoff's entourage reminds him they do; they bought a
Cincinnati start-up back in 2015 called DotLoop that does online real
estate document paperwork and had 124 employees. "We need to have more
of your people out there," Kasich says. "You want to be in the Midwest."
Kasich pulls out his phone, a flip phone, and calls a guy named Wayne and hands the phone to Rascoff.
"We want to have something like Zillow in Ohio," Kasich says in the car
after his CBS hit. "It's consistent with what's happening in the
state." If they have a job they need to fill, "I will get it filled."
Speaking
of jobs, Kasich has called his current gig -- being the governor of the
great state of Ohio -- the second-best in the world, after president of
the United States. The job of president, of course, he applied and was
one of the finalists for -- the fourth-place Republican primary finisher
-- but he ultimately wasn't hired. And the job of governor he won't be
able to keep forever, because of term limits. In 20 months, he'll find
himself unemployed.
It's an unusual
time to be a Republican looking for work. In Washington, the party is
in power, but weighed down by dysfunction and controversy. Trump's 2016
victory caught many by surprise, forcing politicians who assumed they'd
have the option of running against a President Hillary Clinton in four
years to reconsider their options. No one seems sure of what exactly to
expect, with each new twist, turn, and congressional testimony bringing
greater uncertainty.
The
2016 election caught many off-guard, including Republican politicians
who assumed they'd have the option to run for president in four years,
against Clinton. Trump's surprise victory complicated those plans,
leaving potential 2020 Republicans to contemplate their options.
Kasich's
resume includes the Ohio state legislature at age 26, the US House of
Representative at 32, and chairman of the House Budget Committee at 43.
He worked for Lehman Brothers, "Two Paths" is his fourth book, and from
2002 to 2007, he hosted his own show on Fox News, "From The Heartland
with John Kasich," filmed in Columbus, Ohio. He's obviously talented and
ambitious, and will have plenty of options when his successor, the 70th
governor of the great state of Ohio, whoever it is, is sworn into
office in January 2019. But the two jobs he says are the best, both in a
field he's been working in since his 20s, aren't available to him. What
does a politician do when he's done with politics?
Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the green room at "The View"
Kasich
isn't really a talk-radio-and-Fox-News Republican, which is ironic
considering he filled in for Bill O'Reilly on occasion in the 2000s. But
he is a Wall-Street-Journal-and-"The-View" Republican, quite literally
in fact. Both are on the schedule today, a sit-down with the Journal's
editorial board and co-hosting duties on "The View." It's a rare
combination to find a politician who feels as comfortable discussing pop
culture as he does policy.
"I stay
very much in touch with pop culture," he says in the car on the way to
"The View." "I know that Katy Perry is fighting with Taylor Swift."
He
refuses to take a side in the great pop beef of our time. And it's not
just because he doesn't want to get in the middle of such a divisive
issue. Back in 2016, speaking about the Republican National Convention,
he said it would "probably be less Kardashians, more who's going to be
president," before politely adding, "not that I have anything against
the Kardashians." He's true to his agreeable and positive political
brand even when he's talking about reality TV families or rifts between
two of music's top titans.
Kasich,
not a Trump fan (he said he wrote in "John McCain" when he voted in
November), ended up skipping the RNC, despite it being held in his
state, but still managed to do so relatively affably. "That's not where I
think I need to be in terms of what I have stood for throughout the
presidential campaign," he told the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce at
the time.
As a co-host on "The
View," Kasich must join a pre-show meeting to go over a list of topics
they could possibly discuss. Also on the show today will be 2 Chainz,
the rapper and would-be mayor of College Park, Georgia. Kasich got to
meet him beforehand. He was "somber," Kasich says, before thinking it
over again. "Maybe 'quiet' is a better word," he says. "I kept trying to
talk to him about Tricky."
"The
View" begins at 11 a.m. The Katy Perry-Taylor Swift feud is the first
topic Whoopi Goldberg brings up. "Can you explain what the hell is going
on with Taylor Swift and Katy Perry?" she asks Kasich.
"It's shocking everybody," he says. "You know what the thing is, don't ever steal anybody's dancers."
Taylor
kind of went into hiding, he says, but she has a new sound coming. "She
put out the song 'I Don't Want to Live Forever' with Zayn, who who's a
One Direction guy," he says. "Then she wrote the song with Calvin Harris
-- who's a big DJ, you all know that -- and that was a song called
'Lightning'" Rihanna recorded.
The Calvin Harris-Rihanna song is actually called "This Is What You Came For,"
but no one appeared to know that to correct him. In his defense, the
word "lightning" does appear five times in the song, and the artwork for
the single features a lightning bolt, a lightning bolt that also
appeared on a jacket Taylor wore on Instagram 12 days before Calvin
tweeted it as the single's artwork, so it's not exactly the worst gaffe
he could make. Other than that, he sounds like a dedicated, attentive
Swiftie.
Sometimes,
people think Kasich only knows his stuff because of his daughters, but
he says otherwise. "I know a few things they don't know."
When
2 Chainz comes out, Joy Behar asks him about his desire to run for his
hometown's mayor. He makes the I'm-looking-at-you motion to Kasich with
his fingers and Kasich offers a word of advice: "Just make sure you drop
the 'yo,' though." It's not exactly clear what he means by that, but
Whoopi immediately looks straight to camera with an expression that
suggests she's not amused. It's a moment Fader will call "extremely
awkward," Spin will say was "completely bizarre," and Noisey will
describe as "a Shakespeare drama."
Kasich
says stuff like "The View" is what he really has fun doing. "People
have a hard time visualizing people in politics having fun," he says.
But back home, the reaction when people found out he'd be on the show
was how cool it was. "It's obviously a popular show." Later in the day,
he'll joke that he's hoping to get a "permanent job" co-hosting.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich poses for a photo after grabbing an ice cream cone outside Radio City Music Hall.
During
the campaign, Kasich compared himself to generic soda. "There's Coke,
there's Pepsi, and there's Kasich," he said once on "Morning Joe." "I'm
trying to get brand now." The month he announced his candidacy, in July
2015, only 35% of Republicans had an opinion of him, according to
Gallup, the lowest in the field.
Twenty-two
months and more than 4.1 million Republican primary votes later, I ask
him if he's found his brand yet, and what it is. "Agreeable and
positive," he says.
Kasich was the
last moderate standing in the wild 2016 Republican primary, his
Midwestern nice persona an anomaly in an otherwise ugly campaign.
Politics used to be less nasty, nearly 40 years ago when he was first
elected to public office. "People could get along better," he says. But,
"as people started getting more persnickety with each other, the
leaders didn't tell them to stop," he said. A few hours later, Greg
Gianforte, the Republican House candidate in Montana, will be charged
with assaulting a reporter after the reporter asked him a question about
healthcare. Less than three weeks later, Gianforte will plead guilty to
assault, be fined $300 and sentenced to 40 hours community service the
same day, Kasich will be speaking at the University of Miami,
encouraging students to "help others when you can and chase your
dreams."
The weather's good and the
traffic's bad, and Kasich spends the afternoon walking to his remaining
media hits, sans jacket. He's recognized in a crosswalk and asked to
take a selfie. Later, in Central Park, there's a Minnesota family that
gets their own photo with him ("Senator Kasich," the dad calls him), and
a man walks up to him and asks whether Trump's reached impeachment
territory. "I'm not a reporter," the stranger adds, as if hoping to
elicit a more off-the-record response. Kasich says he wants the truth to
come out, and notes there's already a reporter with him anyway.
Whatever
Kasich ultimately does do when time as governor of Ohio comes up,
there's one question in particular he's been thinking about: "How does
one keep a voice out there?"
"We think about it," he says. "Maybe it's not meant to be."
It's
just before 2 p.m. and sitting in the Wall Street Journal newsroom
before his meeting with the editorial board interview, I ask him if
there are any former politicians who've done a good job keeping their
voice when they're no longer in office. He lists Al Gore, George Schultz
and Condoleezza Rice.
"They had
different positions," though, he says. "They were in the stratosphere," a
vice president, and a pair of secretaries of state, for Ronald Reagan
and George W. Bush, respectively.
How
do you keep a voice when you're not in the stratosphere? When you're a
governor of Ohio, a fourth-place 2016 Republican primary finisher -- by
no means small feats, but not all the way up there -- how do you remain a
voice? A Tricky in a world of Taylors and Katys and Twenty One Pilots.
For Kasich, that answer lies in his Christian faith, he says.
The Lord will determine if he has a voice or not, he says: "It's a higher power that shines a light on you."
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