Toledo Blade...
Kasich meets with press, admits to a few stumbles  
December 21, 2011 

COLUMBUS — Despite what some might have expected, Gov. John Kasich on Monday said his administration was never “going to run over people.” 

Was it wise then to say shortly after his election last year, “If you’re not on the bus, we will run you over with the bus, and I’m not kidding.” 

Maybe not, the Republican governor said in an end-of-the-year meeting with the press. 

“The one thing I’ve learned in this job … sometimes what you feel in your heart is not something that should come out of your mouth,” Mr. Kasich said to laughs. 

He stressed, however, that he made the comment in a meeting with lobbyists, and that it was meant for that audience. 

“Lobbyists … should not be calling the tune, and they’re not,” he said. “We’ve set a tone now of doing the right thing.” 

The governor eschewed the practice followed by his predecessors of meeting individually with reporters for year-end interviews and instead held a talk show-style press conference to highlight what he considers to be unprecedented freshman-year accomplishments. 

His nearly yearlong fight over Senate Bill 5 wasn’t among them, although it was that which dominated the headlines in 2011. The law that he championed would have severely restricted the collective bargaining power of public employees, but it was soundly scrapped by voters on Nov. 8. 

The governor indicated no intention of picking up the pieces of the law, including some that polls showed were popular with voters, to pass in separate legislation. 

“I know you folks are so fixated on this,” Mr. Kasich said when asked about it. “That was a time when the shark ate me. It’s OK. … It was a big deal because there were a lot of protests and things like that, but you missed the story. Someday, the story will be written about what really happened here, an unbelievable amount of change that has happened in the state of Ohio and the benefits of that change. 

“I don’t always get it right,” he said. “I make mistakes. That’s the way it goes. If you can’t lose something and take it like a man or like a leader and learn from it, then you haven’t learned anything about life. They just said, ‘No.’ I’m OK with that. It’s cool. We move to the next thing.” 

The story that should be written, he said, centers on balancing the two-year budget earlier this year, erasing what had been projected to be an $8 billion shortfall without raising taxes but with major cuts to schools and local governments. 

The latter was primarily a result of not replacing one-time federal stimulus aid. 

As he passed around a microphone to cabinet members for more than an hour, the focus was on efforts to create jobs, recent drops in the state unemployment rate, and success stories at luring businesses to the state and helping to convince others, such as Chrysler Group LLC in Toledo, to expand. 

Mr. Kasich characterized the state of Ohio he inherited after he defeated Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland last year as an ailing patient that has been stabilized but is still far from recovery. 

“We were a sleeping giant, maybe in some respects a dying giant,” he said. 

Mr. Kasich pointed to the state’s creation of the private corporation Jobs Ohio to run the state’s economic development programs. He talked about the emphasis on reforming the state’s Medicaid program and taking on the expensive nursing home lobby rather than make wholesale cuts in patient services. 

“We were not going to run over people,” he said. “It was just not in our nature.” 

But Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern said the real story was the message that voters sent on Nov. 2 when they killed Senate Bill 5. 

“From his attacks on workers’ rights to voting rights to women’s rights, John Kasich has not stood with Ohio’s middle class in the past year,” Mr. Redfern said. “And rather than bringing our state together to solve problems, John Kasich has alienated and vilified Ohioans who disagree with him. 

“Unless Governor Kasich reaches across the aisle and stops attacking Ohio’s workers, he will spend the next three years as a lame duck,” Mr. Redfern said. 

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