No one will ever hire me as a political consultant. My brief stint in politics as a press secretary was marked by literary weirdness: I was reading All the King’s Men for my dissertation at LSU, and since the governor’s candidate I worked for was running for the same office Huey Long once held, in the same state, I modeled the one speech the campaign asked me to write on Huey Long’s old tirades, as improved by Robert Penn Warren: What I turned in was grandiose, biblical—and completely unusable. Wait, I take that back. I was told that it did find a use: It put the candidate and the rest of his team in stitches. When they hit rough patches in the race, they would dig it out and read it aloud, to raise their spirits. So Mike Foster won that year, but I really can’t take the credit.

But I’ve learned a few things since 1995. And this is a really weird political year. So I’m hanging out my shingle anyway, and offering strategic advice to the leading GOP candidates. If any of them takes it and wins, they know where to send the check — care of The Stream. The suggestions I offer here are sincere, but none of them should be taken as an endorsement of a candidate.

John Kasich: Prove That YOU’RE the Real Donald Trump

I’ll be honest with you John. You’re not my cup of tea. I have publicly compared your debate performances to Youtube videos of screaming goats.

So I’m not sure you’ll listen. But think of me as one of the unconvinced GOP voters you need to win over, in what is still a long-shot run for the White House. You are really the moderate Republican in the race, running on a platform that succeeded for you in a crucial swing state, Ohio. But Donald Trump is eating your lunch, herding all the voters who would normally go for a candidate that flouts Republican orthodoxy and questions conservative talking points. So he’s the man you need to attack. Take full advantage of your second-place finish in New Hampshire, and act like you’re the number two man in the race. Take shots at Ted Cruz for being so far to the right that GOP senators cross the street when they see him coming. Ignore Bush and Rubio for now; if you’re still standing after South Carolina, you can revisit that question.

Go after Trump, hammer and tongs — and not in the way that other candidates have. Cruz and Bush have attacked him for not really being conservative. Now Trump is taking that as a bragging point, condemning the conservative movements itself for being a “failure.” You seem to think that too, but you have some real advantages over Trump that you can use. You have run a big Rust Belt state and balanced its budgets, growing its economy and adding hundreds of thousands of jobs. Donald Trump has bankrupted four companies and managed to lose money on a casino. How does “the house” lose money? He has pandered and flattered and paid people to pretend that they’re his friends. You have told harsh truths and resisted party pressure to govern successfully in a bipartisan environment. You really are the pragmatic, truth-telling realist — inured to the siren song of political principles — that voters think they are getting with Donald Trump. He brands himself as a “winner” who will “make America great again.” You need to tell the story that he’s a reckless gambler, who will make America into one big Atlantic City. It just might work.