Former Ohio Governor John Kasich is the only Republican presidential candidate still standing who’s actually qualified to be president. This isn’t to say that I agree with him about very much; I don’t. But his opponents are all pretty much nuts, including the apparent desperation choice of the GOP establishment, freshman Florida Senator Marco Rubio. (More about Rubio in another post.)

Though Kasich is well behind in the polls, he still attracts enough attention that someone created a selectively edited video in which Kasich talks about women coming “out of their kitchens” to work for him. It’s obvious what impression this is intended to create. But Kasich was actually describing one of his first campaigns almost 40 years ago, and what he said was this:

How did I get elected? I didn’t have anybody for me. We just got an army of people who — and many women who left their kitchens to go out and go door to door and to put yard signs up for me all the way back when you know when things were different. Now you call homes and everybody is out working, but at that time, early days it was really an army of the women that really helped me to get elected.

That is, he’s saying that when he first got elected a lot of his volunteers were in fact stay-at-home wives and mothers. “Out of the kitchen” (as opposed to, say, “their homes”) is still a clumsy and inelegant way of putting it, and Kasich later apologized for that wording. But it’s not fair to distort what he said to imply he was suggesting that women belong in the kitchen or are generally to be found there.

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