Strickland calls on Kasich to release income tax returns

By JOE HALLETT

Columbus Dispatch

COLUMBUS

If taxes and death are life’s only certainties, then the attempted use of taxes to inflict political death is at least among its inevitabilities.

Most of the past 10 races for Ohio governor have featured attempts by candidates to use federal tax returns to humanize themselves or demonize opponents, but perhaps no candidate in the past 36 years has weaponized tax returns more aggressively than Gov. Ted Strickland in 2010.

Strickland’s campaign launched a new attack Monday, accusing Republican challenger John Kasich of being a hypocrite for demanding 28 years ago that an opponent release his federal tax returns, and then refusing to do so himself this year.

“Now after years of Wall Street bonuses, Kasich has changed his tune,” said Aaron Pickrell, Strickland campaign manager. ‘It is hypocrisy at its purest.”

Strickland, who has made public his income tax returns for the past 10 years, continually has pounded Kasich for refusing to release his. Kasich, a managing director of Lehman Brothers for eight years until the firm’s collapse Sept. 15, 2008, provided select reporters half-hour glimpses of his 2009 tax returns on April 2.

They showed that Kasich and his wife made nearly $1.4 million in 2008, including $587,175 from Lehman. Strickland reported that he and his wife had a total income of $166,321 in 2008, most from his gubernatorial salary.

In his first bid for Congress in 1982 against incumbent Columbus Democrat Bob Shamansky, Kasich made public his tax returns and called on Shamansky to do the same. Shamansky complied about five months after Kasich released his returns.

Pickrell said Kasich’s refusal to make public his income tax returns now raises suspicions.

“If he has nothing to hide, then he has nothing to lose,” Pickrell said.

Rob Nichols, Kasich’s campaign spokesman, said that Kasich and his wife, Karen, “have already released more information than they’re required and are happy to provide more if the General Assembly decides it’s necessary.”

Nichols said voters are more concerned about their own incomes than Kasich’s, “especially since Ohioans have seen their incomes grow 23 percent less than the national average.”

ft Strickland took office in 2006.

The politicizing of income tax returns has been a facet of Ohio gubernatorial races since at least 1974 when incumbent Democrat John J. Gilligan criticized GOP challenger James A. Rhodes for refusing to release his returns. Rhodes won anyway.

Kasich is only the second candidate in the past seven gubernatorial campaigns to refuse to release his tax returns. In 2006, Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell declined to make his public.

Do voters care? Joseph White, chairman of the political science department at Case Western Reserve University, believes they should.

Tax returns tell you “something about the candidates and what their priorities are,” he said. “Sometimes it shows good things about a person, like whether they are a generous person.”

In 2008, Kasich and his wife donated about 2 percent, or $27,326, of their combined $1.38 million income to charity, compared to Strickland and his wife, Frances, donating $30,749 to charity, or about 18 percent of their combined $166,321 income. But two-thirds of Strickland’s charitable contributions went to a fund to maintain the Governor’s Residence and garden and to cover the cost of public health care coverage for him and his wife.

White said Kasich has an extra burden to disclose his returns by virtue of his “claim to fame as a budget hawk.” It could be a problem for Kasich, White added, because he “is a believer in fiscal responsibility and won’t tell what his own fiscal situation is... The fact that he made a lot of money for a company that was driving itself bankrupt seems relevant.”

Kasich repeatedly has said that he headed a two-man Columbus office for Lehman and had nothing to do with the firm’s collapse.

Ohio gubernatorial candidate income tax returns since 1974 rarely have revealed surprises or embarrassments, such as in 1986 when then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton took a $2 deduction for donating a pair of used underwear to the Salvation Army.

After Democrat Richard F. Celeste released tax returns for 1982 and 1983 showing he was paid $45,250 by his own campaign for ‘consulting fees,’ the legislature passed a law prohibiting candidates and officeholders from paying themselves from their campaign funds.

Through voluntary disclosure of tax returns or required state financial disclosure statements, four of the past five Republican nominees for governor have been revealed as millionaires, while none of their Democratic counterparts approached that status.

Dispatch reporter Mark Niquette contributed to this story.