Meet the new John Kasich, Mr. Goodwrench

Did you happen to see NBC's Chuck Todd  interview of Gov Kasich on  Meet the Press on Sunday.  If not, you can witness it on-line.

Has Kasich undergone a personality change as he gears up a team for a presidential candidacy?  Yep.  Full of rubbery smiles, collegial good natured talk, and cheerfully  boasting that he has more experience than anybody else in the GOP's expanding field.  In case Todd didn't catch that part of it, the governor repeated it authoritatively as though he were warning all of the others to pack up and leave.

Not quite an official announcement of his own yearning options that are still on the table,  he said, a handy cliche.    But....''I can a see the future," he assured doubters, even though prospective voters have yet to see him in the national polls.

 Oh,  will he make  his faithful trust in the Lord one of his enduring  conceits, as in forever explaining to impatient reporters that he's waiting for God to tell him what to do?
 As Plunderbund noted, he once told the New York Times that God advised him to run for governor.

Those references, not only by Kasich but other presidential wannabes have a way of cheapening one's reliance on personal faith for guidance to the pick of  the litter.
We prefer Aaron Rodgers mature response when the Green Bay Packers star quarterback qas asked whether God had played a role in the Packers' victory.

"I don't think God cares who wins a game," he replied.

McCain: It's a question of answers

AS A college freshman,  I was terribly challenged by my first essay exam in a history course.  The professor, a tall distinguished man who wrote the book for the course, passed out blank 16-page  booklets for our responses to his questions.  I filled up the pages, turned it in and walked out of the room confident that I had nailed the test.  Several days later it came back to me with a big "F" on the cover.   I was shocked and met the professor at his desk.  "I clearly wrote 16 pages and you gave me an F!  How could you do that to me?"    With obvious experience in such student complaints, he raised his long arm and replied:  "Indeed, you did write 16 pages.  But I think you wrote that much in hopes that the right answer would be in there somewhere.  And I'm not confident that you still know what the correct answer is."

It might explain my reaction to Tom Brokaw's interview with John McCain on Meet the Press this morning.  To each question, McCain went on and on, zigging and zagging,  hoping to convince his  doubters that he knew the answer even if  it spun off from the original question.  

Fully conditioned by my old history professor, I had no choice but to give McCain an F.