Kasich Campaign Press Release - The Boston Globe Highlight's John Kasich's Optimistic Campaign

Boston Globe, "John Kasich's Campaign of Light"


Note: "In a campaign when most of the Republican hopefuls are as grim as a team of overworked morticians, Kasich remains positive and upbeat. Indeed, his tone has become an important part of his message: America needs an experienced, positive, optimistic, collegial problem-solver."

By Scot Lehigh

LOUDON, N.H.: In a normal political year, John Kasich would be on a remarkable roll.

He has won the editorial-endorsement primary by a knockout. The newspapers recommending him include the Portsmouth Herald and Foster's Daily Democrat (a joint nod), the Concord Monitor, The Telegraph of Nashua, The Keene Sentinel, and the Valley News, in Lebanon. The Boston Globe and The New York Times have also nodded his way.

Those endorsements are all based on the same basic notion: Kasich, the former congressman from, and now governor of, Ohio, is an experienced leader with a record of accomplishment that reflects his penchant for working across the partisan aisle. Meanwhile, his team of New Hampshire backers, which incudes former US senators John Sununu and Gordon Humphrey, former US House member Chuck Douglas, and former attorney general Tom Rath, is more impressive than anything anyone else has assembled.

Here, however, is the question: In this year of antiestablishment acrimony, do those traditional political cues matter? After all, in Iowa, Ted Cruz, bête noire to the establishment, carried the day, followed by Donald Trump, whom Republican regulars see as almost anathematic. The only establishment-acceptable candidate to post a respectable Iowa showing was third-place winner Marco Rubio.

The Kasich camp thinks they do. Certainly they certify the central notion of his candidacy. And for the last week or so, while the other candidates were trying to corral Iowa caucus-goers, he's had the Granite State stage virtually to himself.

On Monday, yet another New Hampshire poll put him in second place behind Trump, and with some separation from the rest of the field.

His crowds are getting steadily better, his media contingent bigger. And yet, at around 200 for a midmorning town meeting in Greenland, and 90 or so at similar evening event in Loudon, they're more indicative of a mild current flowing his way than a wave about to break.

In a campaign when most of the Republican hopefuls are as grim as a team of overworked morticians, Kasich remains positive and upbeat. Indeed, his tone has become an important part of his message: America needs an experienced, positive, optimistic, collegial problem-solver.

Read the full story here.