Posted on November 9, 2015

Who Is Running John Kasich’s Campaign?

Jonathan Olson, American Renaissance, November 9, 2015

I live in New Hampshire, which will hold the first presidential primaries in February 2016–and I just got a call from the Kasich campaign. The caller’s black accent was so thick I had to ask her several times to repeat herself. I finally asked to speak with someone who spoke clearer English, and she eventually hung up on me. I wanted to complain about being hung up on and to urge the campaign to take measures not to alienate potential voters, so I went to Mr. Kasich’s website to look for contact information.

Who in the world designed this website? For a target audience of Republican primary voters, this has to be among the least appealing approaches I have ever seen. On the homepage there are two pictures of scenery, two of the candidate, and two of (presumably) Kasich supporters.

Advertising is supposed to create a “bandwagon effect,” that is, to get you to believe that people just like you support this guy. On Mr. Kasich’s web site, besides the candidate, there are images of exactly 14 people. Eleven are women and 13 are minorities. All are teenagers or in their early 20s. How is this supposed to create a bandwagon effect for tax-paying adult Republican voters in states like New Hampshire and Iowa? And how is that Ebonics-speaking telephone representative supposed to resonate with a New Hampshire electorate that is 91 percent white?

The Kasich approach is even worse than that laughable video from Jon Huntsman’s campaign kickoff four years ago in which the candidate spent the entire video riding a motorcycle across the southern Utah desert (which might as well have been Mars to us New Englanders), while a narrator told us that Huntsman speaks Chinese and Hokkien (whatever that is).

Look at the people featured at the Kasich website. Do I care what these selfie-snapping narcissists think about national policy? What do you suppose their combined tax burden was last year, compared to your own? What could possibly have possessed someone seeking the Republican nomination for president to represent himself this way?

The only explanation is that Mr. Kasich has hired an idiot for a campaign manager, who thinks Mr. Kasich can win the New Hampshire primary by pretending to be Barack Obama (who lost the New Hampshire primary in 2008). I wasn’t likely to vote for the man to begin with, but if his ability to run a campaign reflects his ability to run a nation, this guy is off the list.

I didn’t try to reach anyone at the campaign, after all. These people are beyond advice. They’re hopeless.