WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS—John Kasich brought his Paul on the Road to Damascus traveling show to Worcester this past Saturday. He stayed just long enough to spread his gospel of a "life lived bigger than ourselves" before returning home to sign legislation that stops Planned Parenthood from providing HIV and cancer screenings, sexual health education programs, and infant mortality prevention to all the little selves. By last night he was in Virginia, apologizing for accurately remembering that it was an army of women who "left their kitchens"—with their buns presumably still snug in their ovens—to power his victorious first run for the Ohio Senate in 1978.

But Saturday afternoon, comestibles had yet to become combustible. "I love being here," declared Kasich, who'd swapped Mutt's BBQ for local favorite George's Coney Island dogs (he had three, with a pickle). "You know why? Because when I'm in Worcester, Mass. It's like I'm back home in McKees Rocks, PA."

Maybe, if you tilt your head and squint just right, you can see that borough of just over 6,000 people, bumped hard against the south bank of the Ohio River. Easier, though, to see Ohio. Akron, maybe, or Cleveland. In fact, deep underneath the patchwork layers of asphalt shingles, plywood and tin that shroud what is now the Hibernian Cultural Centre, host to Saturday afternoon's Kasich "town hall," is the once-grand home of Tobias Boland, who for one brief shinning moment made Worcester an inland seaport forty-five miles away from the nearest seawater. In 1828, the Blackstone Canal opened a direct trade route from Worcester to Providence, Rhode Island. And, not unlike the Ohio and Erie canals that connected Akron and Cuyahoga River with Lake Erie in Cleveland, it is now a half-buried sinkhole of trashed dreams and expectations.

Kasich made a hurried, if calculated, exit from South Carolina to concentrate on a few March 1 Super Tuesday "Rational Republican" states, while still showing the flag in states like Georgia and Tennessee that have natural sub-constituencies. Strong showings in a couple of the RR states—Massachusetts, Vermont, and Virginia—could tee Kasich up for a perceived win in Michigan on March 8, where his newly-announced "leadership team" includes former Congressman Pete Hoekstra, State Senate Majority Leader Arlan Meekh, and his finance chair, Wayne State University Board of Governors member David Nicholson. March 15 primaries in Illinois and Ohio promise another perceived—as well as an actual—win. And while Pennsylvania's primary isn't until April 26, Kasich just picked up a new endorser and co-chair, former Pennsylvania governor and Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge. A couple of billionaire sugar daddies, financier Stanley F. Druckenmiller and Kenneth G. Langone, co-founder of Home Depot, are providing some much needed fuel. If Kasich can keep moving through those locks he could find himself back in Cleveland in July, this time with a strong hand to play when the RNC gathers at the Quicken Loans Arena.

Worcester is Kasich's first foray into Massachusetts, and there's a certain kind of logic to it. It was not Worcester, but that central strip of the state running straight through it, that in 2014 provided the slimmest of margins that allowed a pale-blue-tie-wearing, white Republican to succeed a black Democratic governor, beating a tough as nails woman in the process. Campaign workers estimate seven hundred people are jammed in what once might have been Mr. Boland's parlor, with a couple hundred more left in the spring-like melt outside. The count seems a little high, but there's no disputing that one dropped match—and Worcester is the kind of city that keeps R.J. Reynolds in business—and it's the Coconut Grove all over again.

Kasich honed his folksy stump ramble through more than a hundred so-called town halls. This time it follows a pretty predicable pattern: How tough were the kids from McKees Rocks? So tough if you beat their football team they broke all the windows on your bus. It gets an anticipated laugh (but one has to wonder: hasn't kinder and gentler Kasich ever once reflected on the poor bus driver, who had to clean up all the glass and explain it to his boss? Or on the kids of McKees Rocks, who in Kasich's telling are a bunch of sore losers who find revenge not on the playing fields but in the parking lots?) And the tale—told with much self-deprecating humor—of how an 18-year-old Kasich, a first semester Ohio State University student, doggedly worked his way up the power chain to grab 20 minutes in the Oval Office, never fails to inspire. "Anything is possible," is Kasich's takeaway message.

But facts are not all there is to truth. It is fact that in the fall of 1970, new man on campus Johnny Kasich wanted some answers about why regulations prohibited students from opening their dorm windows. (Probably to keep the tear gas out, but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves here.) And it is a fact that, as a newly elected student government rep, young Kasich kept pestering the university president's secretary until she finally got him a few minutes with the big guy. And it is fact that the improbably named Novice Fawcett, the only major university president to endorse Richard Nixon in 1968, was on his way to Washington to meet with the president, and while he declined to take Kasich with him, he did agree to hand-deliver a letter from Johnny.

Fawcett—undoubtedly relieved and impressed that Kasich distinguished himself from his peers by his failure to heave a brick through the a window of the administration building—made good on his promise. Contrary to what legend implies, however, Kasich's letter did not offer any substantive insight or particular critique of the nation's ills. After a stroke for the "brilliant" Fawcett, Kasich wrote, "I think that you, as far as I can judge, are not only a great President but an even greater person. I say an even greater person because you sacrifice your political future for the good of the country."

Time would prove Kasich's assessment half-right, but Nixon—who was at this point more than midway on his journey from crazy-like-a-fox to just plain crazy—pounced on the opportunity. He invited the young man to pay him a call on December 22, 1970. It was seven months and 24 days after the Ohio National Guard, armed with tear gas and tanks, was called out at OSU to shut down student protests, seven months and 19 days after the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State University demonstrators, killing four students and wounded nine others, seven months and 14 days after Nixon retreated to Camp David and the military was called out to protect the administration from 100,000 anti-war protesters gathered in Washington, and just one day after Nixon met with Elvis Presley in the Oval Office to discuss the King's desire to be appointed a "Federal Agent-at-Large" in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. One can forgive a very young man for his failure to grasp the bigger picture. One can understand a much older man's reluctance to acknowledge that his younger self was played. But sometimes a man just has to stop bending reality, and face the messy facts of history. Not everything is possible.

And yet, reality is also bending Kasich.

It is not only a fact, but is true, that people in pain seem drawn to Kasich, wanting to share, and that fact has changed him. In Worcester, a woman and her developmentally challenged son, and a vet whose scarred skull is witness to his traumatic brain injury, bring their stories to Kasich. It's all in a day's work for the candidate, but work he's come to understand as sacred work. Which is why he was so uncomfortable last night when a chipper Megyn Kelly—all juiced up on the idea of a Rubio/Kasich ticket—asked him to react to his super-PAC's latest TV spot.

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Earlier this month, a young man showed up at a Kasich rally at Clemson University. Not unusual for a Kasich event, the kid unspooled a painful story of suicide, divorce, and job loss. "I was in a pretty dark place for a long time," University of Georgia college student Brett Smith explained. "I was pretty depressed but I found hope in the Lord, my friends and now I've found it in my presidential candidate that I support. I'd really appreciate one of the hugs you've been talking about." And like he's done a hundred times before, Kasich beckoned the kid close and clenched him a bear hug. But this time the whole thing was caught by C-SPAN, and the clip went viral. And now Super PAC New Day for America has spun the whole thing into a 30-second spot entitled "Quiet." With a voiceover supplied by drug dealer-turned-police informant-turned-TV sitcom star Tim Allen, the ad represents a six-figure buy in Michigan, Vermont, and Massachusetts. It also represents an incursion into the private public space Kasich feels he's established with voters.

"I'm not comfortable with that," a visibly unsettled Kasich said on Fox News' The Kelly File after viewing the ad. "If I can be able to touch people and have them safe to come and talk about things they care about, that's great," he continued. "But I don't know, something strikes me wrong about it."

But these are the facts, and the truth, of the election of 2016: There are no safe spaces, no exploitation-free zones. And yes, John Kasich, there is something very wrong about that. The trick is figuring out how to make it right.

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