The Huffington Post has a terrific interview package with the campaign managers of three of the Republicans Trump vanquished: Jeff Roe (Ted Cruz), Danny Diaz (Jeb!), and Alex Conant (Marco Rubio’s communications director). It’s an entertaining piece and a revealing one. For one thing, the campaigners seem to be in agreement that the media gave Trump a free pass—in the endless pursuit of clicks and/or ratings and/or global domination—but don’t really ever acknowledge that their campaigns also largely did the same.
But the best part of the package, hands down, is Roe discussing the strategic benefits of John Kasich’s (disgusting) eating habits, which swallowed up air time that Cruz badly needed:
Two things we measure all the time are media share and small-dollar fundraising. That’s what I spent ungodly amounts of hours on that I’ll never get back. But the pie and the eating and all that, that actually got him media share. He would get a half-day or he would get a quarter-to-a-half-day on that.
If Kasich had just started eating everything in sight earlier, he just might have won this thing.