By Patrick May
SAN JOSE — With his campaign teetering at the precipice of irrelevance, GOP presidential hopeful John Kasich held a town hall meeting Saturday morning at the Tech Museum of Innovation, oozing folksiness, painting front-runner Donald Trump as a buffoon, and insisting that when the dust settles in this fall’s general election, he’ll be the one on top.
“How do I win?” he asked the overflow crowd of about 300. “We’ll, I won’t win the primaries, but once we get to an open convention, I think the delegates will see that I can win in the fall.”
Kasich’s appearance was part of a three-day swing through California and Oregon to drum up support in advance of the states’ upcoming primaries. California’s June 7 primary will be a do-or-die event for both the Ohio governor and fellow candidate Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
Recent polls of Republican voters found that Trump maintains double-digit leads in both Oregon and California. But Kasich preferred to focus on the fact that in “16 recent polls, I beat Hillary (Clinton) in the fall.”
“I’ll win,” he told the crowd, “because people will say: ‘I really want someone who knows how to land the plane.'”
Kasich blamed his third-place status on two things: Trump’s often outrageous statements and the media’s obsession with putting his antics on the front page. In a characterization that wasn’t too far from the truth, he said one Bay Area paper on Saturday “had three stories about Trump on the front, with another five more inside about him, and a tiny headline that you needed a magnifying glass to read that said, ‘Kasich in San Francisco.'”
The crowd roared.
It also provided a steady laugh-track as Kasich, armed only with a bottle of water, a stool and a microphone, kept engaging young kids in the audience with a grandfatherly attention while slipping wisecracks among serious policy points.
Jeff Martin, a 52-year-old engineer who came from Aptos to see his preferred candidate, said: “I thought he expressed more humor than I’d expected. He’s run a very respectable campaign so far, and I certainly hope he wins in the general election.”
Kasich and his fellow candidates are in the Bay Area for the state’s Republican Party convention, held this weekend at the Hyatt Regency near San Francisco International Airport. Trump, who was met by protesters Friday trying to prevent him from entering the Burlingame hotel, spoke at a luncheon Friday, while Kasich spoke Friday evening. Cruz addressed delegates on Saturday.
Trump arrived in California after a sweep of Tuesday’s five East Coast primaries, but has also faced questions about his electability in November, a reality that Kasich supporters are hoping will provide their candidate with something of a tail wind.
Before Kasich stepped before the crowd — which was largely white, male and middle-aged — 20-year-old supporter Madeleine Anderson said Kasich “seems like the most moderate candidate looking in from the outside, but I wanted to come and see for myself. Trump is very smart, but I don’t know if president of the United States is the right job for him.”
As she gets ready to vote in her first national election, Anderson said she’s “looking for a leader in our next president. Like they say, ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ and our next president needs to focus on that and deal with our national debt, which is out of control.”
Kasich made headlines Friday night after telling a group in San Francisco that some people are “probably” born gay after an audience member who said he was gay pressed the governor on the issue. Asked about gay rights and same-sex marriage, Kasich said people should take a “chill pill” and try to get along with one another rather than turn to unwieldy legislation.
At Saturday’s town hall, Kasich talked a little about himself and his childhood in a small town outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He described himself as “a hybrid,” molded by the seemingly opposite traits of his mother’s toughness and his dad, who had “a twinkle in his eyes.”
For nearly 90 minutes, he fielded questions on a wide-ranging array of subjects, from how to deal with ISIS (“We need to destroy them in Iraq and Syria, and then we need to get out of there.”) to fixing the economy (“I want to do the best I can to get our economy going again.”) to the epidemic of drug abuse, especially opiates and the abuse of pain medicines: “We need to stop this scourge in our communities.”
Kasich admitted that he’d lately thought about quitting the race, “but I started thinking that I’m affecting people’s lives in a positive way and if I gave up, people wouldn’t have that choice” that his candidacy provides. “My wife said, ‘People need a choice,’ so I’ll keep going, putting one foot in front of the other, because if we do go to the convention, I’ll be the nominee.”
Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689 or follow him at Twitter.com/patmaymerc
