Republican presidential candidate and Ohio Gov. John Kasich criticized the current political dynamic at a town hall event on Friday evening in Syracuse, saying that the next United States president will need to be a bipartisan leader.

“Before we’re Republicans and Democrats, we’re Americans,” he said. “I don’t know how we forgot that.”

A few hundred people packed into Le Moyne College’s Henninger Athletic Center for Kasich’s latest campaign stop, which came 11 days before the April 19 New York state presidential primary, to watch him lay out his policy views and tout his past political accomplishments working with members of both parties.

The governor, who predicted Friday that he will secure the nomination at an open convention in July, also criticized the proposals that rival Republican candidates Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and business mogul Donald Trump have put forth, respectively, to monitor Muslim neighborhoods and keep Muslims from entering the U.S.

In making his pitch to Syracuse voters, Kasich brought up his experience in the U.S. House of Representatives working with both Democrats and Republicans to pass legislation such as welfare reform and the Balanced Budget Act of 1997.

“I know that’s hard to believe,” he said. “It sounds like a fiction book, but we all worked together.”

Kasich, who served as chairman of the House Budget Committee from 1995 -2001, emphasized the “common-sense” regulations — an often-used phrase throughout his campaign — that he implemented in passing the Balanced Budget Act and balancing Ohio’s budget as governor.

He’d do the same, he said, if he gets elected to the White House.

Currently, though, Kasich is trailing in delegates to both Cruz and Trump in the race to the nomination.

Those two candidates have grabbed headlines during the campaign season for their plans to combat terrorism by groups such as the Islamic State. Trump has said he would prevent Muslims from entering the country until “we figure out what’s going on,” and Cruz recently said he would have police patrol Muslim neighborhoods.

Kasich called the positions “absurd.”

“Our friends in the Arab world have to work with us,” he said. “… If you want to find out what’s going on in a Muslim neighborhood, who do you think you ought to ask? People in the neighborhood! What’s wrong with you?”

Kasich only briefly touched on the subject of college tuition costs, calling it a “problem” that will need to be dealt with.

Throughout his speech and during a Q&A session with those in attendance, Kasich faced a scoreboard that showed a time of 20:16, as in the year 2016. It also showed “John” and “Kasich” as the two team names, each with 45 underneath, as in the 45th president of the country.

But Kasich has currently won only 143 delegates, which puts him in fourth place in the Republican race, trailing behind not only Cruz and Trump, but also Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who suspended his campaign last month. Kasich does not have a path to the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the nomination, so his only hope to become the nominee is to win an open convention at the Republican National Convention in July.

He said Friday that he expects there will be a brokered convention, which would require that no candidate reach 1,237 delegates.

Republicans, he said, will then need to consider which candidate has the best chance to not only win the general election but also keep the party from “getting obliterated” in the other fall elections.

Polls show Kasich defeating Democratic front-runner and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a general election by an average of 6.6 percentage points, according to Real Clear Politics average polling data. But polls also show Kasich losing to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is competing with Clinton for the Democratic nomination, by an average of 2.7 percentage points, according to RCP.

Both Cruz and Trump are trailing both Democratic nominee-hopefuls in average polling, according to RCP.

Said Kasich: “I believe I’ll be the Republican nominee for president, and then I’ll come back here and see you again.”

Published on April 8, 2016 at 11:23 pm

Contact Michael: mdburk01@syr.edu