John Kasich says he'd be winning if only the media would 'drool' over him like they do Donald Trump

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is the Republican presidential candidate with the most government experience, and so he's especially irked that people with none — Donald Trump and Ben Carson — are crushing him in the polls, he told USA Today on Wednesday. He blamed the news media. "Well, look, when the media just constantly drools over him and when he's — if I were on television as much as he was, I'd probably have 50 percent of the vote," Kasich said. "He's on television all the time. You can't help but see him there, and a big part of national polls or whatever relate to the issue of celebrity."

But he also said he thinks Trump doesn't have all that much staying power, despite consistently leading the GOP field since the summer. "I think there's a degree that people are, like, saying, you know, 'I'm frustrated,'" He said. "'I lost a lot of my wealth. I may have lost my job or my kid can't get a job and I'm really mad.' And sometimes they find a vehicle with which to, at least for a moment, express deep dissatisfaction, maybe in some ways even anger. But I don't think it lasts. That's not who we are as a country." He added a caveat, however: "Unless everything I've known in my political career and adult life is false."

That's a lot to hang the future of a country on. Read more about Kasich's views on Trump, and his plan to defeat the Islamic State, at USA Today.