John McCain’s abrupt decision to scrub events on Wednesday and Thursday and instead, fly to Columbus, has Taegan Goddard speculating that the presumptive GOP nominee is going to try upstaging Barack Obama’s Berlin speech to announce that an Ohioan will be his running mate. Goddard speculates that it could be Rob Portman or John Kasich.
If McCain is coming to Columbus to announce a Veep, it’s likelier that the person will be John Kasich. Portman is from the Cincinnati area and, believe me I know, having lived in his congressional district for seventeen years, viewed in something like heroic terms there. It’s unlikely that McCain would pass up the adulation with which a Portman vice presidential run would be greeted in Cincinnati. (I also once lived in the congressional district in which Kasich served, but not while he was in Congress.)
Both Kasich and Portman have been preparing for a gubernatorial run in 2010. I talked about that here last March.
Each candidate would bring a major asset to the McCain campaign: an infusion of campaign cash. Portman’s Cincy friends have played a major part in bankrolling Bush family campaigns, particularly Bush the Younger’s ’00 and ’04 runs. Kasich could undoubtedly attract Gingrich-related campaign monies and lots of rank-and-file conservatives’ contributions from his Fox News Network affiliation.
Politically, neither of these potential Veeps do much for McCain. I don’t even think that they help him appreciably in Ohio because neither of them are known well statewide, except among party activists. Kasich is undoubtedly slightly more well known by virtue of his regular appearances on Fox.
Gubernatorial ambitions may be the prime motivation for either potential candidate to team up with McCain at this point. One still must count the GOP candidate’s prospects of winning as dim, although better than one might have projected earlier in the year. Portman and Kasich stand to gain strong name recognition in Ohio even from a November loss.
On the stump, you can expect Portman to be the more polished of the two. But Kasich’s aw shucks appeal, combined with his grasp of budgets and taxes, have proven politically potent through the years. Both men can be fairly described as policy wonks.
It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, McCain has up his sleeve today.
[This has been crossposted at Better Living: Thoughts from Mark Daniels.]
[UPDATE: See here.]