When it comes to hitting the campaign trail, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) has an extraordinary amount of experience as a candidate. He’s run for the state legislature; he won nine congressional races; he won two gubernatorial races in one of the nation’s largest states; and he was even briefly a presidential candidate.
Ohio governor and Republican presidential candidate John Kasich on Tuesday attempted to explain his experience balancing his state’s budget by asking a woman if she has ever dieted.During a town hall event in Dubuque, Iowa, an audience member asked Kasich about the influence of lobbyists in government and his views on corruption. The governor said he knew how to “cut taxes” and “balance a budget,” but acknowledged that it was difficult to maintain a stable economy.
Kasich turned to a woman in the audience and asked, unprompted, “Have you ever been on a diet?” When she said she had, the governor replied, “OK, you’re the perfect example,” and continued on with his analogy.
In September, Kasich tried to praise Latino voters, but ended up conflating Latinos, service-industry workers, and his hotel room’s maid. In October, a college student tried to ask Kasich a question about undocumented immigrants, but when the young woman raised her hand at a forum, the governor told her, “I don’t have any tickets for, you know, for Taylor Swift or anything.”
According to the report from the college newspaper, the Republican presidential candidate told another young woman at the event, “I’m sure you get invited to all of the parties.”
As we discussed a few weeks ago, incidents like these probably won’t make or break the Ohio governor’s national candidacy, but they are a reminder that Kasich is occasionally his own worst enemy.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."