Is there anything good about being "conservative?"

Dude, seriously. Good faith and bad faith are extremely important and that means it’s important to point out when someone is posting in bad faith (gman) and it’s also important NOT to incorrectly accuse someone of posting in bad faith.

Timex has a very long track record of good faith posting and even though I often disagree with him, he is VERY far from a bad faith poster.

I don’t fully agree with Timex’s view of Kasich as a “true conservative” but he’s not posting in bad faith.

I believe your accusation is an overreach.

I don’t understand the point of this question. Wouldn’t you expect a progressive to vote . . . Progressively?

Not if I was claiming - as @Timex is - that Kasich is the sole conservative, or one of the few, in the GOP. In that case, I’d expect to see some difference between his votes and those of his colleagues. Otherwise how could I make the claim? On what basis?

So this, Dave, illustrates my point. Caring about the national debt at all often seems to be a notion of what would traditionally be considered fiscal conservatism.

Again though, is is not too be confused with the actual actions of the GOP in recent years.

But… You understand that economic and fiscal policy is kind of a big deal, right? Actually trying to balance a budget, vs. merely saying that you care about the dent and then dramatically increasing it, is a non trivial difference.

You may think that both positions are bad, but you must acknowledge that they are different.

He’s not, although i totally agree that he has done his part to placate the GOP with things like the tax cuts… But again, i do not believe the GOP to be conservative any longer.

Aspects of trump which contrast with my view of what conservatism is would be:
Overt authoritarian tendencies
Economic isolationism
Xenophobic scapegoating

Those are things that, to me, growing up with s guy like Reagan, i see as the antithesis of what he stood for. Which isn’t too day that he never did anything against them, like stupid tariffs on Japanese bikes, but for the most part, Reagan argued for things like free trade, and fought against authoritarianism.

The GOP under Trump doesn’t seem to care about authoritarianism at all, and makes only mealy mouthed half hearted complaints about his terrible trade policies which are almost certainly going to tank the economy.

Yes, seriously. @Timex claims that Kasich’s embrace of the Medicaid expansion was nearly unique among his colleagues. I presented him with two articles that refuted that claim. His response was to ignore the first, more direct one, and dismiss the second on no basis other than the publication date. Yet he was wrong on the point, and he knows he was wrong on the point, and rather than admit the error he simply ignores it. That is bad faith. You don’t have to agree with me on that, but you don’t get a vote on what i think about it.

I do. I’m asking you affirm that, in your view, it is the sole definition of true conservatism. At least that’s what I glean from your argument, e.g. that Kasich is a lonely conservative in the GOP, and the only difference between him and his colleagues is his fiscal responsibility. Is that your view of conservatism, that it is entirely about fiscal thrift?

As to Trump, history is too recent to forget that the Bush administration was an authoritarian one, one that argued for the extreme reach of executive power. If secretly torturing people and then defending it on the grounds of national security and the primacy of the executive in such matters isn’t authoritarian, then nothing is. If defying the law and waging a secret war against Nicaragua, as Reagan did, isn’t authoritarian, then nothing is. The Republican Party is an authoritarian party, and has been since Nixon, whether you think it is conservative or not.

You are absolutely correct, Kasich was not unique in terms of accepting the Medicaid expansion. However, again, i point out that the second article is from this year, where many GOP governor’s eventually got on the trolley after it became apparent that the ACA was not going away.

I believe when Kasich expanded Medicaid, only a handful of other GOP governors did so. Maybe 3?

The fight against expanding Medicaid was a major thing for the GOP, because failing to do so created a gap where you had poor people who didn’t get subsidies but also couldn’t really afford exchange plans. This then let the GOP say, “see! Obamacare is screwing you!” And for this reason, the GOP in Congress and the far right in general, constantly attacked the GOP governor’s who did it.

You are correct though, he was not unique in doing this.

But certainly you acknowledge that his actions were not in lone with the GOP’s overall national strategy, and he was in fact criticized by the right wing for don’t it.

Also, scottagibson, adopting a Soviet icon is not necessarily doing you any favors in establishing objective credibility.

Some people will recognize it as the logo / promotional poster for the late lamented Shenandoah Studios’ Drive on Moscow game, which I got from them for helping with play testing. It isn’t a political statement.

Eleven governors did. I have already provided another reference for that.

Oh, no, not at all.

It’s half of the coin, where the other half is social conservatism.

Bear in mind here, i never much cared for the social aspect of conservatism, so my focus just happens to be on the fiscal aspect.

For socially conservative principles, I would say that Kasich is very much in line with the standard GOP platform, which is at least superficially a traditional conservative position. The only difference in this is, as i suggested previously, that the larger GOP had become absurdly hypocritical in this regard. Kasich nerves the same things that the GOP at Large says they believe, but they don’t seem to ACTUALLY care about those things like family values etc.

Christian Evangelical voters are perhaps the most obvious here, where they abandoned everything they said they believed in in terms of morality and ethics to support Trump.

But that was in 2018, right?

No. Do your homework.

That would be like adopting an SS icon from a Steel Panthers or other WWII game and claiming it’s not a political statement. Some things are political statements regardless of origin or intent, with an exception for truly not knowing, but clearly you do know.

I repudiate the Soviet Union and all its works. Can I now infer from your avatar that you’re twelve years old? I don’t infer that, just offer it as a counterexample.

One could infer he’s a robot blowing things up, except we thankfully know that’s not a thing in this world (yet). On the other hand, we have indeed had a Soviet Union in fairly recent history, and currently have some people who advocate for its spiritual successor.

There’s no universal law of conservation of inferences. If you choose to infer the worst of someone with basically no justification, that’s on you.

I’m trying really hard to just play it cool here, but you are being unnecessarily antagonistic. I do not believe I am doing anything to merit such behavior, so I would ask you to consider that I am not your enemy and I am not trying to harm you in some way. I bear you no ill will, at all.

To address the point, I apologize for not seeing your NPR article, I honestly did not see you post it. I was referring to your previous post which had an article from 2018 where many GOP governors have NOW accepted it.

However, even your second article is from 2017. Again, the acceptance of the medicaid expansion is something which was slowly adopted over the years by republicans, but even in your article there, it highlights that even as late as 2017, you had 19 states which refused the expansion due to opposition by the GOP.

I’m trying to find data about exactly what things looked like when Ohio expanded medicaid.

Ohio accepted federal funding to expand Medicaid, and about 700,000 residents have gained coverage under the new eligibility rules. Ohio Governor John Kasich is not a fan of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), but he was one of the few Republican Governors who supported Medicaid expansion early in the process. Kasich has remained steadfastly supportive of Medicaid expansion, including during his presidential campaign in 2015/2016.

In your own article, it straight up has a whole section titled “Unpopular position with Republicans”. He actually had to go around his own state’s legislature, which was controlled by his own party, in order to do it.

Here’s a whole piece in the WaPo about Kasich’s break with the GOP on this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/01/05/deciderskasich/?noredirect=on

And here is a piece from when it actually happened, that talks about the fight Kasich actually had with his own legislature.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ohio-will-expand-medicaid-after-months-long-battle-between-governor-and-legislature/2013/10/21/5829c166-3a6e-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_story.html?utm_term=.830151090e1b

I think that perhaps this last piece best illustrates the actual point here, which is that your statement that expanding medicaid was “easy” for Kasich is extremely mistaken. Can we at least agree on that? It looks like, when it happened, Ohio was the 8th state with a GOP governor to do it, but that’s also after he had to fight for a whole year, and eventually just did an end-around with the legislature.

This should help. Scroll down and you’ll see a state-by-state recap of acceptance, with date and circumstances.

Beyond that: Governors have different motivations than do Senators or Congressmen, motivations which often trump ideology. That’s why Kasich expanded Medicaid, and why a good many of his peers did. Kasich answers to the voters of Ohio, not those of South Carolina, and it was an easy decision for him to make. That’s doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard to convince the state party to go along, but it does mean it wasn’t any kind of principle unique to Kasich.

It seems to me that is a meaningful distinction between Governor Kasich and the Congressional GOP. Specifically, the concept of motivation trumping ideology. That is IMO why Kasich is not a cookie cutter clone of the Congressional GOP. He is a conservative, but not a hard right zealot, IMO.