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Washington
Post...
John Kasich: Spoiling
for a fight in Ohio
By George F. Will
Sunday, February 6, 2011
COLUMBUS, Ohio
In 1997, when Republicans controlled the U.S. House of Representatives
and John Kasich chaired the Budget Committee, he set his sights on the
GOP’s 2000 presidential nomination because “there just aren’t enough
hours left in my life that I can get everything done that I want to get
done.” He was 44.
The presidency eluded him, as it has every sitting congressman other
than James Garfield (another Ohioan), so Kasich went to work for Lehman
Brothers (deceased), Fox News (flourishing) and now Ohio (ailing). His
ebullience - 12 years from now, at 70, he will still seem like a boy
who rode his balloon-tire bike out of a Booth Tarkington novel - is not
dampened by a Midwestern winter’s slate gray sky hanging close to the
30th-floor governor’s office. Having occupied that office for four
weeks, he has plans as big as Ohio’s problems.
Its population is aging, and shrinking relative to the nation’s: From
2000 to 2010, only Rhode Island and Louisiana had slower population
growth (Michigan had negative growth); and Ohio is losing two
congressional seats. It will have 16 starting in 2013, down from 24 in
1960. Cincinnati has lost 40 percent of its population since 1950. Most
net new job creation in the nation is done by companies no more than
five years old, but Kasich says that Ohio’s taxation and regulation
environment discourages entrepreneurship. Which is one reason a third
of the state’s college students leave Ohio within three years of
graduation. Per-pupil spending in Cleveland and Youngstown public
schools is $14,573 and $13,823, respectively (the national average is
about $10,800); their graduation rates are 54.3 percent and 58 percent,
respectively. Nineteen percent of Ohioans are on Medicaid, which is
about 30 percent of the state’s budget.
Asked what the headline will be when Kasich submits his first budget,
he replies, “Probably, ‘Oh my God!’ “ When he was chairing the House
Budget Committee, Washington cut domestic appropriations 9 percent in
1996 and achieved a surplus in 1998, but that was with the economy
humming. Ohio’s projected fiscal 2012 deficit of 11 percent of the
state’s 2011 budget is serious, but far from the calamities facing
California (29.3 percent), Texas (31.5), New Jersey (37.4), Illinois
(44.9) and Nevada (45.2).
Kasich is in the process of privatizing the economic development agency
and enticed a Silicon Valley venture capitalist to run it for a
$1-a-year salary. Kasich’s traveling for Lehman Brothers was an
experience that affected him the way the years with General Electric
deepened Ronald Reagan’s enthusiasm for the private sector.
Kasich is considering privatizing some prisons and selling or leasing
the Ohio Turnpike (Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels leased Indiana’s).
Today, Kasich says, there are people getting paid $66,000 a year to
collect tolls that machines might collect. He says that the turnpike
revenue does not come to the state and he is puzzled about where it
does go.
With Republicans controlling all statewide elected offices (except one
Supreme Court seat) and both houses of the General Assembly, Kasich is
spoiling for some fights. One will be with the nursing home industry,
which will resist state attempts to save money by helping the elderly
stay at home. And there will be a brawl with the teachers union over
school voucher programs, charter schools and narrowing the topics -
e.g., class sizes - that can be subjects of collective bargaining. He
is prepared to threaten a state takeover of failing school systems and
is proud that Michelle Rhee, who was constructively confrontational
when running the District of Columbia’s schools, is from Toledo.
The son of a mailman - and a goulash of Central European ethnicities
(Hungarian, Czech, Croatian) - Kasich appeals to the blue-collar
workers whom Democrats have been losing since the 1960s and among whom
Democrats lost roughly 2 to 1 in 2010. There are many in Ohio, where
five Democratic members of Congress lost in 2010.
Michael Barone’s Almanac of American Politics calls Ohio “the first
entirely American state”: The original 13 began as British colonies and
the next three (Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee) were carved from
colonies. No Republican has won the presidency without carrying Ohio,
which has not voted for a losing presidential candidate since 1960. So
there will be national repercussions from whatever Kasich accomplishes
working here in this middle-size city in the middle of the state where
the Middle West begins, the region where the next presidential election
may be decided.
Read the article at the Washingto Post
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