Jun 20, 2015 4 min read

Amid the ever-expanding throng of Republican presidential candidates, there’s a prospect who hails from a crucial swing state, has roots in a neighboring light-blue state, won a landslide re-election victory while hardly breaking a sweat, has foreign-policy credentials as a former member of Congress, a folksy, off-the-cuff demeanor and proven crossover appeal to Democrats.

This would seem to be the candidate that could make Hillary Clinton wake with a start at 3 a.m. and end the chatter that Democrats have a firm, perhaps unshakeable, grip on the Electoral College. And yet this candidate has barely edged over the 1 percent mark in many polls, and has been outpaced by rivals like Ben Carson, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, who are seemingly running for little more than a boost in book sales and speaking fees. Even the boorishness and crass buffoonery of Donald Trump has cast a longer shadow.

If the probable presidential candidacy of Ohio Gov. John Kasich ends up a smoldering wreckage in the snows of New Hampshire next February, as many observers believe it will, its failure will be one of the enduring mysteries of the 2016 presidential selection process. More than other first-tier GOP contenders like Scott Walker, the Reagan-fixated governor of Wisconsin, or Marco Rubio, the 44-year-old Florida senator who looks a day or two removed from being a fraternity pledge, Kasich has the seasoning that would make him a plausible president, and an ability to win over voters in the vast middle of the spectrum who aren’t ideological combatants and merely want their elected officials to identify problems and solve them.

But that moderation, and the fact that Kasich, a McKees Rocks native, has been willing to buck his party on several issues, might well make him unacceptable to large swatches of the GOP electorate. To cite a couple of examples, he recently tried unsuccessfully to get Ohio to increase its regulation of the oil and gas industry and increase its severance tax, saying the current amount being levied is “a total rip-off to the people of (Ohio),” and that out-of-state drillers “take our stuff and they go back and they cut their taxes, and they have our wealth in their state and they don’t pay for it. We need to stop this.”

Perhaps an even greater apostasy was his acceptance of the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act; in addition, he even offered up a defense of the law while campaigning for re-election last year, saying that a full repeal of Obamacare would never happen, and that “the opposition to it was really either political or ideological. I don’t think that holds water against real flesh and blood, and real improvements in people’s lives.”

Furthermore, he has suggested, “because people are poor doesn’t mean they don’t work hard.

Because people are poor doesn’t mean that – it sometimes means they couldn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps at some point in time. The most important thing for (lawmakers) to think about: put yourself in somebody else’s shoes.”

Some politicians have talked about “compassionate conservatism,” but this looks like the real thing.

While Kasich has been a budget-cutter throughout his career, he has also pushed initiatives in Ohio that would boost funding for less-well heeled school districts. And while he was in the U.S. House of Representatives, he was an aggressive advocate for cuts to corporate welfare and the elimination of wasteful Pentagon programs and weapons systems. Kasich has been open to the idea of immigration reform, and supports the Common Core educational standards, both of which are deal-killers to many on the hard right.

Kasich has hired John Weaver, who previously managed the maverick presidential campaigns of Sen. John McCain and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, for his 2016 effort. That is surely a sign that Kasich wants to run a campaign that will run afoul of current Republican orthodoxy. And he probably won’t win the nomination. But if he makes any headway in steering his party toward a more moderate path, Kasich’s campaign will have to be considered a success.