When John Kasich beat the Moron in Ohio he performed the most valuable service of his political career. If Trump had won Ohio, after edging Cruz out in Missouri, he would have looked unstoppable.
Kasich couldn’t win Ohio unless he told the voters there that he was in it to win the whole thing, and Ohio would be the beginning of his path to the nomination. He may have even believed it. And once he did win, he was committed to keep going. He’d given his word. So he’s still in it.
Tellingly, he’s been in Utah exclusively, a state where Cruz is guaranteed an overwhelming win. Just south is Arizona, where a few votes one way or the other could make a difference. Every vote Kasich would get by campaigning in Arizona would be a vote from Cruz, the last guy with a chance of taking down the Moron. He hasn’t set foot in the state, where I know he has plenty of contacts. Phoenix is where I saw Kasich at a legislative strategy session for the Article V BBA. Biddulph sent me down to check the guy out. Kasich went out to dinner with some money people the night before I saw him.
He’s down to $1.5 million, and money has got to be hard to raise. I think Kasich knows what’s happening, and it’s going to be Cruz. He’s going to man up and do the right thing, as he may have intended all along. I’ll give him that.
The funny thing is, Kasich didn’t like me. At this strategy session at the Capitol in Phoenix they’re all trying to figure out how to get around the Senate President, Andy Biggs. So they all talk about it for a while, and finally I say, Do you people have something called a discharge petition? Well, it turns out they did, but nobody ever used it. I said, well, in this case, since we’re dealing with the impending bankruptcy of the United States, maybe they should consider it. They seemed reluctant to pursue the subject, and I knew what I was dealing with. These people had no balls. Most legislators don’t. Most politicians don’t.
I was never cut out to be a lobbyist. I tried it for the BBA Task Force, because they had no one else to do it, except Bill Fruth, and he couldn’t be everywhere. Anyway, those days are behind me, and the guys at the Task Force sent me a little award they had printed, naming me a Defender of the Constitution. Thank you, gentlemen. You’re an amazing group of people. And I think you get to 35 next year, and quickly.
I never did get to Pierre, in South Dakota. A lot of people live a pretty hard life in South Dakota. I met a lot of them in the summer of 1971, right before I started law school
Back in May, Babbie and I were going hot and heavy, but then she said she had to go to South America for six weeks on a ski trip with one of her girl friends. She’d just graduated from Cal, and they had been planning this thing for a year. It was too late to cancel, she had to go. But she promised me she’d be back, and we could take up again, but I had my doubts.
So I went back to work on the Pettyjohn family ranch, on the White River, about ten miles south of Kadoka, South Dakota. The Frying Pan Ranch, where my father and most of his eight siblings were born. I was there about three weeks when Babbie called. They’d only gotten as far south as the airport in Quito, Ecuador, where they both had a raging case of Montezuma’s Revenge. They kissed the ground when they got back to SFO.
She wanted me to come back to the Bay Area, but I said I couldn’t, I’d just gotten to work, and I told these people, my relatives, that I was going to work for them for a while. Well, she thought about it for a while, and she said what if I flew back there? And I told her all about my wonderful relatives, who would love to meet her, and she said she’d do it. And she did.
When she got off that plane I knew I was going to make it in this world.
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