It's tough out there for a Republican governor like Ohio's John Kasich, wanting to make himself look good by touting his state's economic growth and job gains, but also wanting to leave room for his party's presidential nominee to blame President Obama for a bad economy. That is, after all, 95 percent of Mitt Romney's campaign. So when Romney and Kasich campaigned together in Ohio recently, it was a little awkward that Kasich was
touting good news for Ohio job-seekers, leading reporters to follow up with Kasich as seen in this video.
Normally in a transcription, one leaves out the initial false starts, recognizing that few of us are glib enough to always launch directly into exactly the right wording. But in this case, the amount of time it took Kasich to get on track speaks directly to the conflict between his message and the Romney campaign's message that he had been asked to address:
Well, I've, I've told R—well, first of all we are creating a lot of jobs and the numbers, and I told, I told Romney, I was on a couple interviews yesterday. We still have too high of unemployment and I feel that the uncertainty that comes from the administration on Obamacare, and possible taxes, and over-regulation, puts wind in our face. So my message to him is, we're doing what all of us thought would work and it's working in Ohio and we'd love you to do the same thing in Washington. But, you know, presidential campaigns are behemoths, you know, and I can't straighten all that out, but they'll understand it, they'll get to it.
He's on the Romney message for a few seconds in the middle, saying that as well as Ohio is doing (thanks to his own efforts), it would be doing better if it weren't for Obama's policies and in fact Obama's
possible policies. But his loyalty to Meh Romney isn't quite deep enough to go straight to Romney's message at the beginning, or to end with it rather than with a vague expression of frustration with his own inability to "straighten out" Romney's message to leave a little more room for good news in Ohio.
