Seems fairly moderate to me.
Check this out
http://www.ohio.com/news/education/ohio-gov-john-kasich-moderate-image-cloaks-conservative-positions-1.665288As Republicans head into a two-week marathon of high-stakes primaries that likely will determine the party nominee, they have two John Kasichs on the ballot: The governor with a record of staunch conservative public policy, and the one whose campaign message has created an image of compassionate moderate.
If voters mark his name, which one are they electing?
His campaign has delivered a calm, affable candidate.
He gets personal at town halls and, in comparison, runs a clean campaign. Supporters like his candor, see authenticity in his gaffes and respect his discipline. Newspapers endorse him on a record of working with Democrats like President Bill Clinton, who signed a balanced spending plan when Kasich led the House Budget Committee.
“He has a record of pragmatic Midwestern conservatism,” the Boston Globe wrote before Kasich’s second-place finish in New Hampshire.
He’s viewed as a compassionate governor who expanded Medicaid against the will of his party and to the pleasure of President Barack Obama. He also alienated the tea-party voters. Answering to God, Kasich said he’d rather help the working poor than play politics.
In the year before announcing his candidacy, he proposed more aid to city schools with concentrated poverty and Democratic voters. And he vetoed the same for wealthier suburban schools.
In the battle for moderate voters who loathe Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the seemingly unorthodox Ohio governor could be an appealing alternative.
Different view at home
But then there’s the prickly politician who easily gets his way because the heavily gerrymandered Democratic state has an overwhelming Republican majority in both houses of the legislature.
He’s pushed to privatize government functions, in particular education, and to significantly weaken public unions.
Behind closed doors, his staff worked with business leaders in Youngstown to orchestrate a takeover of the public schools, taking control of the district from voters and their elected school board and turning it over to a business manager.
Ohioans rejected his plan to curb collective bargaining for public employees in 2011. Still, he’s privatized jails, the state’s economic development office and — last year — outlawed union rights for health care workers. He shifted money away from public school districts to quadruple the number of private school vouchers and increased aid to nonunionized charter schools.
On social issues, he’s unequivocally conservative.
Nearly half of Ohio’s abortion clinics have folded under restrictive laws passed under his governorship. A bill he signed last week defunds Planned Parenthood. On marriage equality, Kasich lined Ohio up on the losing end of a legal battle which, after reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, resulted in legalized gay marriage, everywhere.
Help for the rich
Kasich has accelerated Ohio’s shift to a regressive tax system that disproportionately benefits the wealthy.
Before the legislature tweaked his last biennial tax plan, Kasich recommended a mix of tax increases and cuts that would have resulted in the lowest 20 percent of Ohioans paying $116 more while the wealthiest 1 percent (who earn about $1 million on average) save $11,906 each, on average, according to analyses by Policy Matters Ohio and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in Washington, D.C.
The legislature said no to Kasich’s half-percent sales tax hike and reduced his income tax cut from 23 percent to 6.3 percent.
This back-and-forth with the legislature plays out every two years as Kasich seeks to abolish the income tax. He’s already outlawed the death tax and curbed small business taxes. Kasich has tried to pay for income tax cuts by increasing other taxes on cigarettes and natural gas, and the sales tax.
“The governor has been very clear that the income tax needs to be reduced and eventually eliminated in order for Ohio to perform optimally economically,” Kasich’s budget director Tim Keen said in an interview.
Keen didn’t explain what would replace the income tax, which in 2014, for the first time in decades, produced less state revenue than the sales tax.
A decade ago, the income tax produced about 3 percent more than the sales tax. This year, the income tax could produce 15 percent less than sales, according to OBM projections. That’s a significant change.
“When you raise sales taxes and you cut income taxes,” explained Zach Schiller with Policy Matters, “it benefits the wealthiest Ohioans to the greatest degree. And that’s what’s happened under Kasich.”
Image issue
Even before Kasich’s impressive second-place finish in New Hampshire, Danielle Coombs — a Kent State professor who wrote a book about the 2012 Republican primary — found it interesting that so many people knew so little about him, except his name.
“It was really surprising to hear so many people with the perception that he was so popular in Ohio,” said Coombs, who traveled to Florida this month on business.
The idea that Ohioans love Kasich, Coombs deduced, had something to do with the 64 percent of voters who re-elected him in 2014 — something the Boston Globe noted in endorsing Kasich before the New Hampshire primary. What America might not know about Kasich’s lopsided re-election, Coombs said, is that his opponent, a former Cuyahoga County executive, lacked a driver’s license for a decade and was found in a car late at night with a woman other than his wife. Such facts, like first winning by only two percentage points in the 2010 national Republican landslide, could provide ample context for the uninformed voter.
Better with age
It’s not uncommon for elected officials to change their behavior when campaigning, said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.
“I think it’s just maturing as a politician,” Green said of the “acerbic” versus the “gentle” Kasich.
In this contentious race, Republican candidates have had success distancing themselves from their own party. Kasich — who calls the party his vehicle, not his master — is now appealing with a positive message that relies on his long record of public service. That could work, Green said.
Outside candidates, as evidenced by Trump’s low favorability rating among the general population, have a tendency to repel voters they don’t attract. Kasich, with a soft smile and affability, has separated himself in the once crowded GOP field.
“I think the decision to be a moderate conservative was a calculated decision,” said David Pepper, chairman of Ohio’s Democratic Party. “You don’t out-conservative Ted Cruz.”
Squishy numbers
In Thursday’s raucous debate, Kasich tried to shame the others by recalling the innocence of a 12-year-old girl who, at a town hall meeting, told him, “I don’t like all this yelling and screaming at the debates. My mother’s thinking I might not be able to watch the thing anymore.”
Some national media have called him a “voice of reason” — an unnerving thought for critics at home.
“On TV, I can’t believe what I’m seeing because he has not been moderate as the governor of Ohio,” said Joe Schiavoni, the minority leader in the Ohio Senate. “His rhetoric doesn’t match his action. I’m not trying to take a shot at him.”
Democrats in the Senate accused Kasich of balancing the projected $8 billion budget shortfall — a number that remains controversial — on the backs of Ohio’s local governments, forcing radical cuts in schools, police and fire departments.
Keen and Republicans reject that assertion, pointing to one-time federal stimulus dollars that Democrats used to keep public education funded as state revenues tumbled. The stimulus expired as Kasich entered office, so there was nowhere to turn. But not only did they allow that to expire, but he also cut another $487 million in state aid to schools in his first budget.
Kasich’s claim of restoring jobs to their former strength also begs interpretation. The governor has taken credit for 400,000 new jobs since taking office. However, he’s leaving government jobs out of the equation.
The Beacon Journal contracted with its former data reporter David Knox to analyze Ohio’s jobs numbers. While he confirmed that Kasich correctly claims that private sector jobs have grown since taking office, total employment remains below the pre-2008 recession level because of the dramatic cuts in government jobs.
Still, using Kasich’s logic of counting only private sector jobs, Knox reckons Ohio ranks 22nd in job growth, hardly “one of the fastest growing states in the country”, as Kasich said in New Hampshire this month.
