John Kasich needs a coffee, already

Ohio Gov. John Kasich toured New Hampshire this past week. (Photo: Charles Krupa/AP)

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — If any one of the dozens of questioners who quizzed Ohio Gov. John Kasich in town hall meetings this week was going to cause Kasich to blow up, it was the young woman who stood and asked him about carbon emissions and his coal-miner grandfather.

“If we continue on the road that we’re going on … that will be really catastrophic,” she warned, launching into a question that was also a short speech.

“You said your grandfather was a coal miner,” she said. “I totally respect that.”

She didn’t intend to be dismissive, but it would have been very easy to interpret her that way. She went on: “People need to work for their families. But at the same time, we need to cut carbon and keep 80 percent of fossil fuels in the ground.”

Her breezy mention of the governor’s ancestor had me looking at Kasich, the legendarily volatile Midwesterner who on Tuesday became the 16th Republican to launch a presidential campaign, for signs of an eruption.

Kasich sounded like he couldn’t wait for the young women to stop talking. He jumped in as soon as she finished her question asking him to “commit” to reducing carbon emissions “for my future.”

“First of all, give — that’s a really smart young woman, isn’t it? Give her a great round of applause,” he said. The audience of about 150, predominantly white and older, clapped.

Kasich then repeated what he had told another environmental activist who had asked him a similar question a few minutes earlier. “I think I already told you,” he said, “that I think it’s a balance.” He ran through his record in Ohio. And then he again addressed the young woman who had asked him the question.

“And let me say one thing to you: You know how you are a believer in this, and you’re idealistic? So am I. Don’t ever become cynical or lost. Fight for the things you believe in, be respectful and stay involved. You’re the next leader, OK?” Kasich said.

The environmentalist knew she was being dismissed, killed with kindness. She tried to nail Kasich down, asking him a second time to “commit to cut carbon.” Kasich swatted her question away. “I gave you the best answer I can give you.” He then walked over to the young man recording his answer on a small video camera, called him out, leaned into the young man’s video camera and said with a smile that he’d balance the economy and the environment.


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Kasich drew applause during a town hall-style meeting in Greenland, N.H. (Photo: Charles Krupa/AP)

The crowd loved it. The environmentalist didn’t. She looked frustrated. But everyone else in the crowd ate it up.

Kasich, 63, is in his element in public settings like this. He is an experienced, charismatic politician who can read a room and emote with the best of them.

And he was showing discipline, something he is not known for. It takes a certain amount of self-control and political savvy to hear a 20-something activist dismiss the work of your coal-miner grandfather — and then issue compliments in return. He will need every ounce of whatever discipline he has in him to have any chance of contending for the Republican nomination, because there is no testing ground in politics like the campaign trail.

For good and for ill, Kasich just sounds different than many politicians. So much so that a 6-year-old boy, Gibson Griffith, asked his father to bring him to Kasich’s event in Portsmouth simply because he liked Kasich’s TV commercial.

Gibson’s father, Adam, 45, a registered nurse, said that Gibson liked the way Kasich talked. “It’s his tone. It’s conversational,” Adam Griffith said.

But unfortunately for Kasich, he announced his candidacy during the height of the phenomenon that will be remembered in years hence as Trump-mania, circa July 2015. Donald Trump, the real estate mogul and reality TV star, in less than two weeks rocketed from 6 percent in the Real Clear Politics polling average to leading the field with 18 percent.

A super-PAC supporting Kasich has spent around $1 million on TV commercials in New England to raise the governor’s profile. But it’s hard to be noticed above the din of Trump’s moment in the sun. Trump’s rise has been fueled by a mixture of anti-immigration fervor and disgust with the political establishment and news media. And for the moment, it is depriving nascent campaigns like Kasich’s of badly needed exposure, especially ahead of the first televised debate on Aug. 6, in Cleveland, Kasich’s backyard.

Kasich is one of a handful in the swollen Republican field of candidates who have the résumé, the background, the political talent and access to money to rise from the back of the pack and join the frontrunners, or displace some of the current ones. But as is always the case, external events are often determinative when it comes to the fate of dark horse, second-tier candidates.


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Kasich posed for photographs in New Hampshire, but the media spotlight has been elsewhere this week. (Photo: Charles Krupa/AP)

Kasich feigned indifference to Trump’s dominance of the spotlight.

“I don’t worry about anybody else,” he told reporters after his event here. A second reporter asked another question about Trump, and Kasich tried to cut him off, before hearing that the question was about Trump’s insult of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

“I don’t think about any — I don’t think — I’ve already said — I like John McCain. He’s a great war hero,” Kasich said.

Yet, it’s not just Trump that might hold Kasich back. He has real political talent, no question. But his shtick, while unquestionably entertaining, veers close to abrasive at times.

While he easily evaded any specifics with the environmentalist, he also was a little condescending to her. And it wasn’t the only time that he talked down to voters.

Kasich is a contrarian within his own party. He seems to take pride in challenging conservatives to reconsider their view of people on food stamps, or immigrants, but it can come across as vaguely sanctimonious. A woman named Marie Lemieux asked Kasich what he would do about people on food stamps “who just stand there with their hands out.”

Kasich said there were about 130,000 Ohioans on food stamps. “That’s a lot of people, but 130,000 people out of 11.5 million creates a little perspective,” he said. He went on for a few minutes, talking about what Ohio has done to try to help people get jobs. One program, he said, helped single moms who had full- or part-time jobs take courses at their own pace to acquire specialized skills, and guaranteed them interviews for jobs requiring those skills.

And then he returned to trying to convince his audience that not all people receiving government assistance are deadweights.

“Most of ’em don’t stay on it that long. I don’t even know where they go. They go into the underground economy somewhere,” he said. “So it’s complicated, isn’t it? I’ve given you a big, long number of things to think about. But it’s not simple. It’s not a simple answer.”

Unlike Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who aggressively challenges hardcore conservatives about their views of immigrants but is a master of disarming them with humor and charm, Kasich’s approach to disagreement is more hard-nosed. He tries to soften it with humor, but he’s less folksy than Graham, and more emotional than Jeb Bush, who also doesn’t back down from disagreeing with the base but does so in a more dispassionate manner.

After his event in Portsmouth, Kasich traveled to Center Harbor, in between Lake Winnipesaukee and Squam Lake. In response to the inevitable question about his views on immigration, Kasich recited the usual bromides about securing the border but then praised the virtues of the majority of immigrants.


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If Kasich cannot make it into the early Republican presidential primary debates, it will be harder for him to gain support. (Photo: Charles Krupa/AP)

“They’re good people. How many of you know these folks that are here? They’re hard-working, God-fearing, they’re pro-family. How is it possible for Republicans to get on the other side of God-fearing, hard-working, common-sense [people]?” he said.

His questioner, a bald, solid-looking 50-something man who would identify himself afterward only as Paul, pursed his lips and nodded politely. He was clearly not impressed with Kasich’s answer.

“I thought he was a little soft on [immigration],” Paul told Yahoo News. He said he had been to a Trump rally the previous week in New Hampshire but that he had been troubled by Trump’s comment that McCain — who was a POW during the Vietnam War — was not a “hero.”

“What [Trump] said was absurd. It was insulting,” Paul said. “But I haven’t ruled him out.”

Kasich has the trappings of a first-tier campaign. At an event in North Conway on Thursday, I estimated his entourage at around 14 or 15. There were seven aides with earpieces doing various jobs to make sure the event ran smoothly, all of them very serious looking and intense, with close-cropped black haircuts to a man. There were: a personal aide who looked to be no older than 15; spokesman Chris Schrimpf; a young aide taking pictures; at least three plainclothes Ohio state troopers serving as security guards; national consultant John Weaver, who managed former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman’s campaign in 2012; and Kasich’s Ohio-based adviser, Doug Preisse.

Kasich has run a state for five years and was reelected last year with 26 percent of the African-American vote. If he gets to the next round of the Republican primary, that record will be litigated. But for now, whether Kasich proceeds from this early round to the second will depend also on whether voters see him in person and decide he is presidential. He has the energy to entertain and even light up a room. But does he have the temperament to be a commander in chief?

It’s sometimes unclear whether Kasich is doing politics or standup comedy. He relishes delivering the punch lines to the stories that he tells at every stop. And to the person hearing the stories for the first time, the jokes and Kasich’s skill in telling them are laugh-out-loud funny. But by the second and the third telling, it begins to look exhausting to be John Kasich. All that sincerity. All that emotion. Over and over.

It was only his third day as a presidential candidate, and already Kasich was desperately signaling an aide to bring him a cup of coffee after giving his opening remarks in North Conway, a town on the southeastern edge of White Mountain National Forest, about an hour north of the state’s lakes region.

Toward the end of the hourlong event, a man in the audience recommended a local restaurant because he said it served an outstanding pilsner, the tangential connection being that Kasich had said he was descended from Czech ancestors (and Croatian).

Kasich took the man’s tangent and ran with it, telling him to sit down and wait to ask a serious question until after Kasich indulged in a little storytelling. The tale began with a trip he took to Prague with his wife, but quickly meandered over to something that happened in Paris on another leg of the same trip.

“Why am I telling this story?” Kasich said. “But it’s really funny.”

Outside, talking to reporters again, Kasich bragged that his town hall meetings over three days had been a huge success.

“I’m shocked at the size of these things,” Kasich said.

Then he dished a little bit on how his lunch had gone with 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney earlier in the day in Wolfeboro, about an hour south of North Conway.

“[Romney] said that when he first started he had to get half the people who were Mormons to show up so they could get another 50 to make the room look good,” Kasich said of Romney, who is a devout Mormon. “I mean, I think he was teasing me. But I think we’ve done really, really well. And I think people are having fun. … I’m enjoying this. I’m actually having fun. Can you tell?”