Kasich says he doesn't know if his 'purpose is to be president,' so why's he running?

John Kasich is, ostensibly, running for President. He's never had any chance of winning, but the pretense is that he's trying to achieve the highest office of the land. We've discussed the fact that he's barely a candidate and has no business being on the debate main stage but, at every opportunity, he and his staff have assured the American people that he's been in it to win. Except, now it seems that John Kasich doesn't really know if that's true. He freely admits that, whatever he's doing, it may not really be "running for President."

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As the Columbus dispatch reports:

“I don’t know if my purpose is to be president. My purpose is to be out here, doing what I think I need to be doing,” he said. “We’ll see where it ends up. If it’s not this crusade, then it will be another one. Maybe it will be a really small one somewhere in my kid’s school. Who knows?”

Well, that's ...something. If you're asking yourself why Kasich is staying in the race when he doesn't even know if he should be running it, it's because he's hoping for a miracle.

“In the era of the 24 (hour) news cycle, I’m just not going to go out there and do something to just grab attention,” he said. “You’ve got to get on the phone and call people. Because you know what, miracles do happen.”

This is a little like buying lottery tickets as a retirement plan. A lot of people are speculating that Kasich is angling for a VP slot. The idea being that Kasich could provide an "in" with Ohio voters. The problem is that the current frontrunner, Donal Trump, is crushing Kasich in his own state. That makes it tough to see how much he really offers as a running mate. More importantly, if you have no path to the nomination and you can't even be sure you should be running, shouldn't you get out of the way?

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