Ohio Governor John Kasich campaign event

epa04991547 Ohio Governor and Republican Presidential candidate John Kasich speaks with Manchester business leaders during a town hall meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire, USA, 23 October 2015. EPA/CJ GUNTHER

(CJ GUNTHER)

John Kasich, the Ohio governor, took to the stage with his family on Tuesday, the day before the debate, and did what I once thought Chris Christie would do: He offered a bracing dose of common sense to a Republican Party that has lost its way.

Let's face it: Donald Trump and Ben Carson are circus performers, not presidents. Their sturdy popularity is getting scary. It's enough to make me pine for Ronald Reagan, something I never thought possible.

Christie has twice the political skill of Kasich, as we saw again in last week's debate. But it's style without substance. He threatens to shoot down Russian jets in Syria. He tries to blame President Obama for the murder of police officers. He flops on core issues like education.

Christie wants into the central ring of this circus, and he'd wear a clown costume and honk a funny horn to get there if that's what it took.

Kasich is a different sort of fellow. He's been a much better governor than Christie by any measure. And you get the impression he'd rather lose the race than lose his dignity.

But Kasich is a man on the edge these days, and on Tuesday he let it rip. It's worth a meaty excerpt:

"You know how crazy his election is?" he asked. "Let me tell you something: I've about had it with these people...We've got one candidate (Carson) who says he wants to abolish Medicaid and Medicare. Have you ever heard of anything so crazy as that? ... We got one person (Texas Sen. Ted Cruz) saying we ought to have a 10 percent flat tax that would drive up deficit of this country by trillions of dollars that my daughters are going to have to spend the rest of their lives paying off...Why don't we have no taxes? Just get rid of them all! And a chicken in every pot on top of it.

"We got one guy (Trump) who says we ought to take 10 or 11 million people and pick them up -- I don't know, we're going to go into their homes and apartments -- we're going to pick them up and take them to the border and scream at them to get out of our country? I mean, that is just crazy. It's just crazy."

He ended with this gut punch: "What has happened to our party? What happened to the conservative movement?"



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Since the Tea Party arrived in 2010, I've wondered the same thing. Look what happened to the party's position on climate change. In 2008, the GOP platform cited it as a pressing concern and the party's candidate for president, Arizona Sen. John McCain, pushed a cap-and-trade program. Now all that is treated like a socialist plot.

The science didn't change. The conservative movement did.

By now, this virus of magical thinking has spread to issues like taxes, immigration, and health care, as Kasich notes. The race is to be more extreme than the next guy.

Don't get me started on the lost art of compromise, and the willingness to threaten national bankruptcy as an act of political leverage.

You can't blame all this on Trump. His crazy seed was planted in fertile soil. This is about the party's angry base voters, the rowdy audience that is cheering on the most gaudy circus performers.

For thoughtful conservatives, like former Gov. Tom Kean, these are unnerving times. He heard Kasich's remarks and wanted to give him a bro-hug.

"I have the same concerns," Kean says. "It's sort of sad for me. It's disturbing."

When Christie considered running in 2012, he pitched himself as a deal-maker, a conservative in the tradition of Kean, whom he called a mentor. The establishment was drooling for him.

"Obviously, he's gone over to the right," Kean says now. "And more of a swing to the right in the last year or so. Maybe that's what he believes you have to do to get the nomination. But I wish, frankly, that he hadn't gone quite so far on certain issues."

Kean is always so polite, and I love that about him. But for those who are not fluent in that language, allow me to translate: Christie is a traitor to the moderate cause, a lap-dancer who would order an invasion of Canada if it meant base voters would slip him a dollar.

The verdict from the home team is in. Even Republicans in New Jersey don't like him anymore. Fewer than half of the GOP legislators have given him a dime. And the same holds for the 250 people he named as part of his "presidential leadership team."

These are the people who know him best, up close. And Republican voters feel the same way. A recent poll placed him sixth in the GOP field among Jersey voters, just behind Carly Fiorina. Two-thirds of New Jersey voters want him to quit this race, even though they think he's doing a rotten job as governor.

Kasich is losing the presidential race, too. But people in Ohio love him, and he will emerge from this with his dignity intact, even if he loses. He would add heft to the GOP ticket as a vice-president, a real possibility for a popular governor in a swing state. He stands for something, win or lose

Christie could have chosen that path. And I can't help believe that he secretly agrees with Kasich about the crazies.

But that misses the point for Christie now. He just wants to win. Which helps explain why he's going to lose.

Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or call (973) 836-4909. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find The Star-Ledger on Facebook.