John Kasich, the most consistent and principled opponent of drug use in the Republican field, is also the author of several books, including Stand for Something and Every Other Monday. I found them charming, full of mid-2000s period flavor, and very revealing about the man who won second place in the New Hampshire Primary. Here are 10 things I learned:
1. Unlike the current Republican frontrunner, Kasich abhors foul language.
In Stand for Something, he decries profanity on television:
The comedian George Carlin used to do a routine about the seven dirty words you couldn’t say on television, and I won’t stoop to repeat them here, but I will state that I’ve since heard most of them on prime-time network shows. And the ones I haven’t heard have been hinted at.
2. He was not a big fan of Desperate Housewives.
Here is what he wrote in Stand for Something about a promo for the ABC series featuring Nicolette Sheridan in a bath towel that ran during an NFL broadcast:
Enough’s enough, don't you think? I mean, network television executive ought to know better than to put this kind of provocative imagery on its prime-time airwaves, at the front end of a broadcast when millions of adolescent boys are sitting down to watch the game with their fathers, and yet somehow it passes muster with enough suits and knee-jerk executives that it winds up in our homes—and this is what I find so unacceptable.
3. Nor was he a fan of The Osbournes—instead he felt bad for Ozzy.
"[The show] is enough to make you cringe, isn’t it?" he wrote in 2006. "Anyway, it does me, and try as MTV might, I will never be able to snicker at Ozzy Osbourne's years of excessive and reckless behavior—an inside joke that I guess is over my head."
4. He bought a Roots album once and was not impressed.
"I bought the new Roots CD, for example, because I try to stay on top of things, and because I was determined to give hip-hop a fair shake," he wrote in Stand for Something:
I like to think I have an open mind, but I’ve got to tell you I couldn’t open it wide enough to accept such as this, and as I listened to the CD I kept coming back to the language. I wont’t repeat any of it here, but it was so unrelentingly foul and offensive, almost gratuitously so, that I caught myself feeling angry at myself for even listening … And then I caught myself thinking, What if my wife got in the car and the album happened to still be in my CD changer? How could I ever explain what I was doing buying this stuff? Or, even worse, what if my daughters chanced to hear it? How could I ever explain to them why Daddy was listening to such filth?
5. He’s not big on most video games.
"Top-selling titles like Grand Theft Auto are brutally graphic," he wrote, "with no redeeming social value, and I can't for the life of me understand how any parent could allow such trash in his household. More than that, I can't understand how the publishers of these games—most of whom are parents themselves—can look themselves in the mirror or find peace enough to sleep at night after marketing that kind of filth to children."
6. His nickname as a child was "Pope."
"I used to tell Dave [a childhood friend who became a judge] he was too fat to be an altar boy, that they didn’t have a cassock big enough to fit him," he wrote in Every Other Monday. "That’s how boys are at that age. Dave, for his part, used to call me Pope. Everybody used to call me Pope. Some kid pinned it on me at the playground one day, and it stuck. I spent so much time at church they all thought I’d be pope someday. Even the priests at Mother of Sorrows took to calling me Pope after a while."
7. He found Randy Moss’s Vikings-era end-zone celebrations "vulgar" and "boorish."
8. But he is a big fan of Bill Belichick.
"I look at a guy like Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots of the NFL, and wonder where we might find a couple dozen more just like him," he wrote in Stand for Something:
You don't see his players strutting in the end zone, doing these vulgar or taunting dances, or spiking the ball like children. There's none of that arrogant posturing you see around the league. His players just get it done without calling attention to the doing, and it's a striking thing to see.
9. He’s not worried about politics on college campuses.
"The rap on higher education in some circles is that our campuses lean a little bit to the left—and there's some truth to that, even though I don't see a whole lot of harm," he wrote in Stand for Something. "Yes, college professors tend to be a bit more liberal than conservative—maybe not in our schools of engineering, but certainly in the social sciences—but I don't think that this is anything to get all that worked up about."
10. But he is concerned about the clothing children wear at school.
In Stand for Something, he excoriates "clothing designers and fashion magazine editors who convince our impressionable young children that it's okay to go to school with their belly buttons exposed, or their underwear showing from their low-hanging jeans, or their noses pierced and connected to their ears with a sterling chain."