I’m puzzled, one could even say troubled, by the fact that national media seem to be promoting Ohio Governor John Kasich.
This is from the Columbus Dispatch, during Kasich’s campaign for governor in 2010:
While John Kasich’s old boss at Fox News couldn’t legally give him $1 million directly, Rupert Murdoch now acknowledges his “friendship” with Kasich sparked a million-dollar contribution to a group running ads bashing Gov. Ted Strickland. The donation went to the Republican Governors Association, which has bought more than $1 million worth of anti-Strickland ads – more than 3,000 spots – in central Ohio alone.
Murdoch was asked last night whether the million-dollar gift to the Republican Governors Association might affect the public’s perception of Fox News, whose theme is “fair and balanced.” “It doesn’t reflect on Fox News,” he said, according to Politico, a Washington publication covering politics. “It had nothing to do with Fox News. The RGA (gift) was actually (a result of) my friendship with John Kasich.”
Don’t pundits use the phrase “earned media” to describe a candidate making the tv rounds like Governor Kasich is doing? Can someone tell me what this far-Right deeply unpopular governor has done that has earned him all this free promotional time on national television? I’m not seeing the fabulousness of this person, and apparently I’m not alone. His charm is proving…elusive. We might have to start calling him John McCain if this keeps up.
In any event, the Kasich/media campaign to repackage John Kasich and sell him to Ohioans doesn’t seem to be working:
Kasich’s approval rating registered at a paltry 35% in the latest Quinnipiac poll of Ohio voters, with 50% disapproving of the Governor’s performance. Ohio was one of the major flash points in the fight between newly elected Republican governors and public employee unions over collective bargaining rights, compensation and benefits. The Quinnipiac poll showed that 56% of Ohioans think that SB 5, the new anti-union law passed by the Ohio Legislature and signed by Kasich, should be repealed, with 32% saying it should be kept. Independent voters favor repeal 52% to 33%, and even a little more than a third of Republicans want it scrapped. State residents may have that chance this November, as pro-union forces delivered more than five times the needed amount of signatures to force a ballot referendum.
I went to a local planning session on the We Are Ohio effort to repeal SB5 last night. What’s interesting to me about this issue is that it is genuinely bipartisan, or perhaps nonpartisan is a better word.
Democrats and liberals are a political minority where I live. I am familiar with the the volunteer activists or organizers who appear at every planning meeting, for one or another Democratic or liberal cause. They’re the same people, over and over. I mean that literally: the same twenty people. This is different. There’s new local faces at these We Are Ohio planning meetings.
I know this is anecdotal and local, and may not mean much in the national scheme of things, but based on my (admittedly less that scientifically rigorous) observations, it’s true.
aimai
Kay, I love your Ohio updates. Can I ask you something? Do you think that Fox and Murdoch’s backing for Kasich could, in the right circumstances, backfire and eventually delegitimize Fox itself? I’m sort of thinking about the way the Palin selection by John McCain eventually backfired and drove more moderate Republicans away from the party. Fox’s coverage of US politics has become more and more hardline, and more and more extra-reality but their viewers have sort of slid down the slippery slope with Fox so that one more absurdity doesn’t seem any more absurd than the previous ones and they are all self reinforcing.
I’m wondering if you’ve ever thought about taking out ads against Kasich that are really aimed at Fox news? Like an Ad that shows Fox misrepresenting how popular Kasich is and a counterpoint that says something like “Who does Fox know in Ohio? Nobody I know” or “Fox: can’t be trusted to get anything right.” Those are terrible, but you see what I mean? Once trust is broken that Fox is representing something that is experience near correctly it becomes that much easier for its viewers to reject other Fox assertions.
aimai
Paul W.
“Can someone tell me what this far-Right deeply unpopular governor has done that has earned him all this free promotional time on national television?”
You already said it in the beginning of your post: “Rupert Murdoch now acknowledges his friendship with Kasich”.
What else can I help you with?
One party has a permanent political mouthpiece that shamelessly promotes anyone wearing the right colors, the other has…. blogs? Let me know when we have a media capable of reporting and not shilling for the moneyed folks.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
some times, i think the media is setting up the conditions for a take down. kasich has ties to the melting down of murdoch inc. is it too much to ask that those tentacles extend all the way into ohio? i think its possible.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Kasich is getting unpopular even in Hamilton County! I haven’t checked the matter in Warren County (even redder than my own) but this does not bode well for King John. He could end up being bad for the Fox brand, at least in my fever dreams.
Marc
Kasich is a really abrasive person, and this does not come off well to the broad middle. I really hope that Ted can run again in 2014 and wipe him out.
NonyNony
@aimai:
I don’t know. Where would you run the ads? The group of people you’re trying to target only trust Fox News.
And for those people it’s better to let Fox News destroy it’s own credibility. I’ve watched it happen with Rush Limbaugh – back in the day I was a Limbaugh listener (back in my misspent youth when I was a Republican – sigh). Then one day he started spouting off about something I actually knew something about – climate change. And everything he was saying was wrong and stupid. This was back somewhere around ’90 or ’91 and it was just rank stupidity that even I – a simple High School student who’d read a bit about the issue – could see through. And the more he got push back on it the stupider he showed himself to be about it. Then I started wondering what else he was stupid about and it didn’t take long before I turned him off (a bit longer to leave the GOP behind though – college, Newt Gingrich, and a good dose of Clinton giving the GOP everything they ever asked for and them STILL hating him did that I think).
That’s what I see going on with Fox News – the folks I know who stop watching it in disgust are the ones who know more about the story that Fox is reporting and know that Fox is lying to people. Those are the kinds of folks who would be affected by your suggested ads – and Fox is already working hard to alienate those folks just by pimping Kasich in the first place.
pamelabrown
Great post, Kay.
These republican governors have shown their toxic hands to America. Many of them are in big swing states. My criminal governor of Florida is SO unpopular that many voters are just dying to act out.
This is something not evident in the national polls, yet in the case of Kasich and his FOXPravda should be the least of his worries.
kay
Okay here’s a sad local story. We have a manufacturer here who left the GOP in 2008. He’s a big local employer, and he’s sort of on the down-low as a recovered Republican, but he’s definitely in our camp. He had some kind of major life-changing view switch that had to do with venal and corrupt businesspeople in the finance sector nationally and his fathering a late-in-life child.
Anyhow. He told us that he switches the tv in his company employee breakroom from Fox News because he thinks Fox is propaganda. He doesn’t know how he ‘didn’t see it before’ (hah!). But. The employees change it back to FOX after he’s gone.
This may take a while :)
Chris
I feel all that.
Also started out with a Republican bent, and dropped away from it for many of the same reasons. Actually listening to conservatives talk can be a great way to get turned off from conservatism.
Martin
Well, rule #1 of presidential politics is don’t nominate a candidate that can’t win their home state. Kasich is on that edge. He’s not going anywhere. Let the voters waste money on his primary coffers.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
John Kasich was Paul Ryan when Paul Ryan was still in college. I remember all kinds of fawning coverage of this principled deficit hawk way back when, during the first CLinton term, IIRC. I haven’t seen this current media tour, but it would interesting to see him on Tweety. He was one of Tweety’s original man-crushes. It seems very recent (but it must have been just before JK declared for the OH gov’ship) Tweety had Kasich on as a pundit, opposite Joan Walsh. Kasich got a good couple minutes of monologuing (cheered on more than interrupted by Tweety’s patented “you’re great!… hah!… you’re a great American!” Tourette’s). Joan Walsh hadn’t finished her first sentence, which included a reference to Kasich’s very brief highly remunerated Wall St career, which contradicted Kasich’s “Get government out of workin’ folks’ lives” schtick, when Tweety started bellowing like a mother bear who sees someone trying to pick up her cub. You couldn’t even hear Kasich trying shout down Walsh.
Culture of Truth
So little gratitude for leading the fight against thugs and pop culture. Shame, people.
kay
Such a great comment. Media nostalgia, again. They used to pine for Reagan, that got them the lunatic Gingrich, and now they’re pining for the good ‘ol Gingrich Years, when Republicans were “principled straight shooters”. And MANLY. Don’t ever forget manly. In 20 years, the GOP will be STILL FURTHER Right and they’ll be swooning over how fab Eric Cantor was, back in the day.
They have to stop being such sentimental fools. It’s clouding their judgment.
KG
couple of random thoughts, related to the post:
All politics is local. The top priority of any politician (with the exception of second term presidents and occasionally second term governors) is to get reelected. They know at some point they have to come home and answer for what they did (or did not) do.
The GOP bench is very short. Kasich didn’t have a future 10-12 years ago, and somehow that’s who the GOP nominated to be governor of a swing state. In a sane world, Kasich would still be a former congressman with a radio show who occasionally hosts a cable news show as a fill in, that no one paid much attention to. But, hey, the grownups have all died or retired and the GOP is now the political equivalent to the Lord of the Flies.
jeffreyw
Oh goddamn I get so fucking pissed at stupid shit. Goddammit rural mail carrier was delivering some stuff too big to go into the box and we was bantering about stuff and outta the blue he starts bragging on that nice man Ted Nugent. And I’m fucking off…chicken shit bastard was afraid to hunt men in the Nam but he’s death on deer. Mailman fucker was all “both sides have looney tunes” and I prob need to apologize for the spittle on his vehicle now.
jl
Off topic, but hard to resist,
Rush Limbaugh apparently trying to kill off his audience, for some reason. Probably some brilliant marketing ploy.
Denying Existence Of Record Heat Wave, Limbaugh Suggests The Heat Index Is A Government Conspiracy
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201107200019
found via Atrios.
Lolis
Kay, like you said all the coverage is not helping him in Ohio. I think there is a strong argument to make that being a media whore as a politician doesn’t boost your standing with your local constituents and probably hurts it. Unfortunately I think this may be why no Democrats are rushing out to be on the Sunday shows or cable news. They keep their heads low and focus on doing their job without pissing people off needlessly. Republicans have guys like Kasich getting their message out but it doesn’t seem to help the messengers.
Linda Featheringill
@jl:
Rush and the heat.
Now if we could only persuade Rush to go for a 5-mile walk in the middle of this imaginary heat. We could place bets on how far he would get.
Linda Featheringill
One thing Ohio has going for it is the large number of people who really don’t pay any attention to what the MSM says, other than hard news. You have some people in the state who are truly independent.
So no matter who says what on the coasts, it isn’t going to move these folks.
kay
I know I whine about this constantly, but the unfairness of national media covering a governor always bothers me. They don’t know the specifics about these states, so the politician gets away with all kinds of untruths. I watched Kasich on MTP and every single number or specific he cited was fictional. David Gregory doesn’t know that, so Kasich is permitted to repeat this nonsense. I think they’re doing some damage to truth that local or state coverage doesn’t do, because local or state media know he’s lying. Ohio was never 8 billion in the hole, that’s been shown to be untrue, but if the national media don’t know that, and they don’t, they let him repeat the lie.
Frankly, I wish they’d stick to national politicians. They’re doing more harm than good.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@kay:
Thank you kay for pointing that out. That, in essence,is the real, dangerous problem with King John’s media pals – they let him lie because of their own ignorance.
HyperIon
So, Kay, have you had very many conversations with your new friends? I’m curious to know what they say. That is, how they explain why they are becoming involved.
Martin
Won’t change a thing. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
Rick Massimo
Actually, in this case, your local knowledge is more accurate, because it’s about local conditions. What’s inaccurate is the “national” media perspective that Kasich is wildly popular, which is based on the fact that he’s a raging conservative and they’re always popular because, yo know, because.
Emerald
Kay #21:
Sure David Gregory knows it’s a lie. The esteemed Mr. Gregory is not neutral.
NonyNony
@Emerald:
Yeah but the esteemed Mr. Gregory is also an unreflective twit. So I make it a 75% chance that he doesn’t know it’s a lie and, what’s more, that it would never occur to him to check to see whether it was a lie or not.
Nutella
Speaking of fictional numbers, I had been hearing that News Corp is 40% owned by the Murdoch family so that’s why they run the place. But according to the Guardian,
So they’re mostly throwing around other people’s money which makes it the duty of the non-Murdochs on the board of directors to make changes to protect the stockholders. I wonder if they will?
Canuckistani Tom
Anyone else read that and have a Futurama moment?
“…And Murdoch’s good friend, John Kasich”
Emerald
NonyNony #27:
Hmmm. You have a point there.
debbie
@ Kay:
Janus Daniels
“Can someone tell me what this far-Right deeply unpopular governor has done that has earned him all this free promotional time on national television?”
You mean, as if your question didn’t answer itself?