Stephen Colbert welcomed 2016 GOP candidate John Kasich to last night's "Late Show."
Citing Rubio's soaringly positive third-place speech in Iowa and Kasich's proud second-place finish in New Hampshire, Colbert asked the Ohio governor, "How is losing winning?"
"New Hampshire is a place where you can kind of get on a rocket ship and become known," Kasich said. "And that's really happened."
In order to get Kasich to answer his questions more candidly, Colbert plowed through a bulleted list of the candidate's positions, forwarded to him from Kasich's campaign manager.
"Now I've said all that, you can't," Colbert said. "You have to answer my questions now."
Asked the logicality of running a positive campaign when candidates Trump and Cruz have seen such success in primaries running explicitly negative ones, Kasich said, "I think people want to know what the solutions are."
"I think they're nervous about their jobs," Kasich added. "They're worried about their kids not having a decent life and the ability to have the kind of life that they had."
Colbert then brought up the often circus-like GOP debates, which Kasich compared to a demolition derby.
"The debates are the dumbest thing going," Kasich said with a conviction often lacking in his debate performances. "It's sort of like, 'Explain your life story in thirty seconds.'"
The tone became decidedly more combative once Colbert brought up the debate over whether President Obama should, during his last year in office, nominate a replacement to fill the late Justice Scalia's vacancy in the Supreme Court.
Kasich began to say Obama ought to "withhold" his nomination until after the election before Colbert interrupted to say, "We already had an election. We had an election in 2012."
"Was I finished?" Kasich rebutted. "All I'm saying is it's an opportunity for people to ... vote for president and also have a say in who's gonna be on the Supreme Court."
Watch Colbert and Kasich's honeymoon phase expire in real time below:
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