One tradition during presidential campaigns is for the press to single out each prominent candidate every once in a while and start kicking the hell out of them. It’s a living. We’ve read about Hillary Clinton’s personal email server, Marco Rubio’s credit card use, Donald Trump’s sham university, and Ted Cruz’s unreported loans. (The New York Times led the way on most of these, and they were solid stories.) So, with a bit of a lull between big primary days, and last night turning out mostly as expected, with Trump grabbing all the delegates in Arizona and Cruz grabbing all the delegates in Utah, maybe it’s time to rough up … John Kasich. Yes, Kasich—he forgot to make himself look busy.

As luck would have it, The New York Times Magazine took its shot earlier this week, running an article by Robert Draper explaining why so many Republicans can’t stand the Ohio governor. As attacks go, it was gentle—more of an overview of Republican sentiment than anything fresh or damaging. But it was a start. More important, it was a reminder that Kasich is not especially beloved and that he won’t leave. So let’s take a moment to join in and pummel the man, with any luck becoming wiser in the process, or maybe not.

From my research into the matter, I can say that Republicans dislike John Kasich for many reasons, but let’s start with policy. Trump and Cruz sympathizers, who tend to favor higher trade barriers, less immigration, and more aggressive counterattacks in the culture war, see in Kasich a continuation of current trade policy, immigration amnesty, and only modest resistance to sweeping social change. Rand Paul Republicans, who prefer less foreign intervention, see in Kasich more foreign intervention. Republicans who hate Obamacare and want to see states resist it see in Kasich a governor who went contrary to the wishes of his Republican legislature and expanded Medicaid. In sum, Republicans have different reasons for hating Kasich’s policies, but they seem united in hating something about them, and hating it rather a lot.

Such sins might be forgiven—perhaps even grudgingly acknowledged as strengths in the general election—were it not for his aggressive layer of sanctimony. Kasich wants to be a good guy, but, even more than that, he wants you to recognize he’s a good guy who’s possibly better than you. He likes to cite “Mathew 25,” in which Jesus speaks of doing unto “the least of these,” citing it confrontationally to people who question his policies. “You know what I tell them?” Kasich said about his critics in one interview. “There’s a book. It’s got a new part and an old part. They put it together. It’s a remarkable book. If you don’t have one, I’ll buy you one. And it talks about how we treat the poor.” This does not endear him to Christians who believe that Mathew 25 applies to their lives but not that it “directly translates into, say, Medicaid expansion,” as reporter Byron York has put it. Others have explained his smugness less courteously.

Another problem: Kasich blows up at people, and this makes the self-righteousness even harder to take. (Many Ohioans are amused by Kasich playing a calm and avuncular role in the current presidential race.) No less an authority than John McCain has said Kasich has a “hair-trigger temper,” which is like John Boehner describing someone as weepy. “I don’t know about you, lady,” Kasich once burst out to a donor who complained about his decision to expand Medicaid. “But when I get to the pearly gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I've done for the poor.” Kasich’s rage has unpredictable targets, including the local Blockbuster that carried copies of the Coen brothers movie Fargo, which Kasich and his wife rented in the 1990s. “It was graphic, and brutal, and completely unnecessary, and it rubbed us in so many wrong ways we had to shut the thing off right there in the middle,” Kasich recalled in his 2006 book. “Next morning, I got on the phone to Blockbuster and demanded that they take the movie off their shelves.” Perfectly normal behavior.