|
Columbus
Dispatch...
Kasich’s Beginning:
An adventurous, divisive 100 days
By Joe Vardon
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Catch your breath, Ohio. The John Kasich administration turns 100 days
old today.
Through 99 days with the GOP’s Kasich in charge and a
Republican-dominated legislature, state government has embarked on a
transformative journey stunning for its breakneck pace and for the
opposition it’s stirred.
The same could be said for the 58-year-old Kasich, who continues to
doggedly pursue his agenda despite low polling numbers and organized
protests targeting him throughout Ohio, including outbursts during his
State of the State speech.
“He strikes me as a very impatient person, and I know that sounds like
a criticism but it’s not,” Republican state Rep. Randy Gardner said.
“Ohio doesn’t need a patient governor right now. What he wants to do, a
lot of it is bold, and that occasionally creates anxiety on both sides.”
Democratic House Minority Leader Armond Budish called Kasich’s first
100 days “destructive.”
“At a time when we need to come together across the state, the governor
is tearing us apart,” Budish said. “His policies are extremely
divisive, and purposefully so.”
Kasich will hold a news conference at 9:45 this morning to review his
time in office. In a fundraising letter sent yesterday to supporters
inviting them to follow the 100th-day event on the Internet, Kasich
highlighted what he considers some of his early achievements:
• Signing Senate Bill 5, which takes away public employees’ rights to
bargain for benefits, to strike or to seek binding arbitration.
Kasich routinely insists Senate Bill 5 is a tool for local governments
to control costs. The measure will almost surely face a voter
referendum this fall.
• Privatizing economic development through the creation of JobsOhio. He
was sued in the Ohio Supreme Court yesterday over that act.
• Proposing a two-year, $55.5billion budget that addressed an $8billion
deficit without raising taxes. The budget also includes the sale of
five prisons, privatizing liquor sales, large-scale changes to
education and Medicaid and more than $1billion in cuts to schools and
local governments.
Kasich also created a path for Ohio to streamline regulations on
businesses, turned up the heat on prescription-drug abuse and picked a
fight with casino operators over the amount of money they will pay to
the state - even though he apparently has no legal authority to extract
more.
Some of the ideas he’s floated for future exploration include leasing
the Ohio Turnpike and privatization within the Bureau of Workers’
Compensation.
“We’re not going to slow down,” said Kasich, reflecting on his
whirlwind early days in office. “Are you kidding? We haven’t even hit
third gear yet.”
The magnitude of pushback to his agenda - Kasich was given a 30 percent
approval rating in a Quinnipiac University poll last month, 14 points
lower than predecessor Ted Strickland’s four-year nadir - stems from
Senate Bill 5. Democrats, labor leaders and some Republicans opposed to
the limits placed on collective bargaining characterize it as an attack
on the middle class.
Last month, a Dispatch review of 14,000 emails to Kasich showed that 84
percent of the correspondence he received was against Senate Bill 5.
But Kasich has encountered additional potholes as well, including
multiple lawsuits (one was over his appointment of California resident
Mark Kvamme to his cabinet, which was apparently unconstitutional).
While addressing employees from the Ohio Environmental Protection
Agency in January, Kasich thrice referred to a Columbus police officer
who issued him a traffic ticket in 2008 as “an idiot.”
He also dismissed early criticisms about a lack of diversity within his
cabinet by saying “I don’t look at things in terms of quotas.” Of the
23 positions Kasich considers to be in his cabinet, two were filled by
African-Americans.
“I served in the legislature when (Republicans) Bob Taft was governor,
when George Voinovich was governor,” said Chris Redfern, chairman of
the Ohio Democratic Party. “Gov. Kasich is much different than them. He
governs with elbows.
“In the short term, that might catch the attention of some of the
political observers in this town and get them talking, but in the long
term it tends to divide people.”
Gardner said Kasich was “challenging the status quo” more than any
governor since Gardner began serving in the legislature in 1985 and is
“advancing his goals as effectively as he can.”
Dale Butland, spokesman for Innovation Ohio, a liberal-leaning policy
group, submitted a statement to The Dispatch critiquing Kasich’s first
100 days in office.
While agreeing with the governor on prison-sentence reform and changes
to long-term health care for seniors, Butland criticized Kasich over
Senate Bill 5, his budget and excluding Jobs-
Ohio from Ohio’s public records laws, among other things.
“All in all, Gov. Kasich’s first 100 days have been an inauspicious
beginning,” Butland said. “Here’s hoping the next 1,360 will be better.”
Read it at the Columbus Dispatch
|
|
|
|
