Conservatives Need to Redefine Themselves as More Caring, John Kasich Says

DERRY, N.H. – It was the last question at Gov. John R. Kasich’s town-hall-style meeting here on Wednesday, and it also was perhaps the bluntest.

“Governor Kasich, how do you feel about amnesty for the illegals?” asked a voter near the back of a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall here.

Mr. Kasich, an Ohio Republican, started off sounding like a border hawk, saying he wanted to “finish the wall” along the border with Mexico.

But when he answered the question at hand, he sounded a far more pragmatic note. “If they’ve been law-abiding, then I think they should stay,” he said, referring to immigrants in this country illegally.

Mr. Kasich then seemed to say that the mass deportation of immigrants was not a viable option — “it is not practical nor is it I think desirable,” he began to say when the questioner interjected.

Won’t letting illegal immigrants stay in the country, the voter asked, mean that they will “end up on the system like everybody else?”

At this, Mr. Kasich let slip a dose of his trademark bluntness.

“No, I think that a lot of these people who are here are some of the hardest-working, God-fearing, family-oriented people you can ever meet,” he shot back, winning scattered applause.

At that, he brought the event to an end. “O.K., listen I think we’re done because they’re telling me I got to go,” he said.

But in a brief conversation with reporters afterward, Mr. Kasich became exercised talking policy once again.

Asked how he may appeal to Republicans who like him but are uneasy about his support for a pathway to legal status for illegal immigrants, support for the Common Core education standards and his expansion of Medicaid in Ohio with money from the Affordable Care Act, he defended himself on each issue. And then he uncorked an impassioned argument about his party’s need to redefine conservatism.

How is it, he said, that by “saying that if we care about people who are down and out and we want to give them a chance to succeed that somehow that’s not conservative?” he demanded.

In an echo of the religious-based defense he has made of his Medicaid expansion, an argument that irritates many small-government conservatives, Mr. Kasich said, “I think conservatism is about giving everybody a chance, demanding personal responsibility, but allowing people to pursue their God-given purpose.”

Even more striking, he added: “Hopefully in the course of all this, I’ll be able to change some of the thinking about what it means to be a conservative.”

With that, he was, once again, finished.

“And I’m done, thank you all very much,” he said, turning to find the exit.