John Kasich, the former governor of Ohio, became the newest GOP presidential candidate earlier this week. He’s number 16 now — the 16th GOP presidential candidate.  I didn’t comment on it on this blog because… well, because he’s number 16 now.

And he seems reasonable by comparison to the others, except… not so much.  Let’s let Kasich himself recount the story, as told in his 2006 book:

I was in my local video store looking for a movie to watch with my wife, Karen, during one of our few quiet evenings together at home. The clerk in the store recommended Fargo, a perversely dark crime story that had played to generally enthusiastic reviews. The movie even earned a Best Actress Oscar for Frances McDormand for her role as a pregnant Midwestern sheriff, and the guy behind the counter at Blockbuster assured me it was a great movie and that I should probably rent it.

So I did. Walked right over to that shelf where they had their general titles, grabbed a copy and took it home, and when Karen and I got to the part where they chop up a guy in a grinder we looked at each other and thought, What the heck are we watching here? It was billed as a comedy, but it wasn’t funny. It was graphic, and brutal, and completely unnecessary, and it rubbed us in so many wrong ways we had to shut the thing off right there in the middle… Next morning, I got on the phone to Blockbuster and demanded that they take the movie off their shelves.

Kasich writes that while he was “a fairly prominent local customer,” he didn’t demand any special treatment — “I was personally offended, and it had nothing to do with any kind of political stand.” He says someone in charge at the local Blockbuster agreed to label movies with graphic content more clearly, but he heard from friends that they didn’t actually change very much. So he called again:

I couldn’t say firsthand whether the situation had gotten any better, because I had taken my business elsewhere, but from all accounts not much had changed, so I called the store again to remind them of our deal, and it got to where Karen had to tell me to back off because I was driving everyone crazy. I’d made my point, she said, and it was time to move on, so I did, but not before the columnist George Will picked up on the story.

“On reflection,” Kasich wrote, he wasn’t “entirely sure that [this story] paints me in the best light,” and admitted, “In fact, it’s possible to look on my actions as the rantings of a wild man.”

Indeed.