This is yet another baffling example that makes you wonder just who the American punditry punditizes for. There is exactly one demographic in the entire nation that would swoon for a Democratic candidate pairing up with a Republican seeking to undo all the things the first candidate stands for, and that demographic is people who have their own op-ed columns. People who don't give a flying damn what the policies that govern the nation might be, providing we all can all still agree that we need to help poor, sick and retired people less and help rich people a whole lot more, but who would rather put a pneumatic nail gun to their head and pull the trigger than write down any suggestion that one of the two parties may be considerably more to blame for American politics running off the rails of late than the other.

Why John Kasich, though? Why not Marco Rubio, another Republican hard-right dreamboat candidate who has all the regular-voter momentum of a tuna sandwich? Why not dig up the bones of Rick Perry or good old Jeb!, and present them as the sensible hard-right running mates who will temper Hillary Clinton with a little down-home conservative put-her-in-her-place? That boneyard is full of failed pundit dream candidates who the stupid voters stupidly failed to recognize the genius of. Perhaps the pundit class can bite the bullet and form their own third party featuring every last one of them, all nestled snugly in nests of warm, admiring newspaper columns. Surely, no voter could resist.

It never seems to work the other way, though. You never hear that maybe the Republican Party should temper their batshit insanity by, say, having Trump run alongside Elizabeth Warren. No calls for the Republican leader to embrace Bernie Sanders, if Bernie Sanders loses the Democratic race, in order to run a fine, compromising Republican platform of giving all rich people massive tax cuts and then raising those taxes right back up again.

You have to wonder whether our pundits even inhabit the same dimension as the rest of us. Who knows if any of them have been outside in the last three decades, much less talked to anyone not presently holding a champagne glass. At least in theory, our political system is designed so that all the candidates get to declare what their proposals for governance are, then the voters pick which they like best. But we’ve got a whole political analyst subculture that loathes the idea of there being substantive policy differences between candidates at all, and is constantly demanding the parties and candidates knock that off in order to do whatever the beltway’s ruling class has already decided.