Mother Jones
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It was half a day before New Hampshire voters would start voting in the year’s first presidential primary, and John Kasich was talking about slowing down—how everyone should slow down. As a snowstorm struck, he was in the Searles Chapel in Windham speaking to about 100 people, a fifth of whom were college students from North Carolina, and the Ohio governor, who according to the latest poll was essentially in a four-way tie for second in the GOP race, began his talk by saying he was “trying to get the right pitch.” By that, he meant tone. And then it got strange. He meandered for a couple of minutes, discussing his failed presidential campaign of 16 years ago and griping that even in the Granite State campaigning has become less intimate. Then he talked for a bit about his parents’ death in a 1987 car crash, noting this “nightmare” made him “so much more sensitive to problems people have.” He then segued into a long, contemplative riff about modern-day society. “Speed,” he said. “Our lives are being lived so fast. We’re constantly on the device. The Apple TV…Have to get the new Apple phone.” He held up an iPhone, as he continued: “We have to slow our lives down and listen to people’s hurts and victories.” He repeated this call to de-accelerate: “When we do…it’s a more beautiful world.” Members of the audience were listening attentively but several looked puzzled. And Kasich gazed toward the stained glass at the back of the chapel and said with a sigh, “So why don’t we slow down and listen and help one another?”
This was hardly the conventional way to rouse a crowd the day prior to an election. And this moment demonstrated that Kasich is the oddest of the elected officials in the Republican contest. A former chair of the House budget committee when he was a congressman, Kasich has long been known as a policy wonk and champion of Reaganomics. But on the campaign trail, he has become an elegiac prophet, lamenting the detachment of modern life. At a town hall meeting the day before at Concord High School, Kasich offered a similar take: “I think many of us just feel lonely. We don’t know where to go. There’s nobody around to celebrate some of our victories. Sometimes there’s nobody around to sit and cry with us. Don’t we want that back in our country again?…Everybody on this Earth is connected. We’re just a part of a mosaic in a moment of time. And when people are broken, it hurts all of us.”
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