How would candidate Kasich fare in a debate?

By Darrel Rowland

Columbus Dispatch

John Green can already see it.

An array of eager Republican presidential candidates lined up in a debate, and one of them – probably a current or former governor – asks an impertinent question of the Ohioan in the race:

How well could John Kasich run the country and work with a difficult Congress if the governor can’t get a Legislature dominated by members of his own party to approve major elements of his state budget proposal?

“You can just imagine in one of these upcoming debates, were Kasich to rise in the polls, that this would be something that would be brought up,” said Green, who has seen his share of presidential campaigns as director of the University of Akron’s Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.

“Governors, whether they’re Democrat or Republican, like to argue that they can get things done,” Green added. “It certainly would be an area in which he could be criticized.”

That notion is vociferously contested by Kasich’s team. “I don’t buy the premise,” said state Budget Director Tim Keen. “If you look at a broad perspective over time, I don’t think it holds water.”

Of course, the state budget process isn’t finished for this year. Final approval of the two-year spending plan of more than $71 billion is expected this week by the Senate, then a House-Senate conference committee – traditionally with input from the governor – will come up with a final version by the end of June.

The GOP-dominated Legislature has discarded a number of major elements in the budget plan that Kasich unveiled in February, and it seems unlikely most will be restored.

“It’s pretty stark when you compare the governor’s proposals to the Senate version of the budget,” Green said.

Examples:

The governor’s school-funding proposal – for the second budget in a row – has been largely discarded.

For the third time, his push for a severance-tax increase on shale-oil and gas drillers apparently is going nowhere, despite calling the current rate a “big fat joke” in his State of the State address.

Kasich’s core budget proposal – a 23 percent reduction in state income-tax rates and increased personal exemptions for those earning less than $80,000 – has been whittled to a 6.3 percent rate reduction with no exemption increase.

That’s because lawmakers rejected most of the $5.2 billion in tax increases he wanted to help pay for the proposed $5.7 billion income-tax cut. It also put a major dent in Kasich’s overall philosophy of shifting Ohio from income taxes to consumption taxes.

His plan to allow two-year colleges to award some bachelor’s degrees – rolled out by the administration in January at a Dayton community college – was cast aside.

The 2-year-old Straight A Fund, $250 million touted by Kasich as a way to reward innovative schools, was killed.

His pledge that the state would pay for additional law-enforcement training was undercut when lawmakers diverted money earmarked for local governments to cover the cost.

His strongly worded year-end speech to the Ohio Chamber of Commerce to look at the big picture and not pick away at individual taxes made little impact.

Daniel Navin, the chamber’s assistant vice president for tax and economic policy, testified that the business group opposed Kasich’s plan because it “will not result in a substantial improvement to the state’s economic competitiveness.”

In all, the Legislature has made nearly 1,500 changes, major and trivial, to Kasich’s budget proposal, according to a list by the nonpartisan Legislative Service Commission. While budget-to-budget comparisons are dicey, fewer than 1,100 changes had been made by this stage in the process of his last budget.

No governor gets blanket approval from the Legislature for everything requested in a proposed budget.

Curt Steiner, a top aide to Gov. George V. Voinovich in the 1990s who has remained active in Ohio politics, said one reason Kasich is shot down so often is that his budget requests are ambitious, policy-filled proposals rather than the traditional spending plan.

“Everybody has to be given a different length of measuring tape. You have to factor in the heavy lift that he asked the Legislature to do,” Steiner said.

“Because he’s not doctrinaire and a cookie-cutter Republican, some of the stuff is not traditional. But I think that is what people are looking for, someone who will look to the issues and deal with them.”

Chris Schrimpf, the Ohio Republican Party communication director who has been serving as Kasich’s spokesman, said, “He worked to balanced the [federal] budget for the first time since man walked on the moon, and he was a defense reformer.

“He turned an $8 billion [state] budget shortfall into a surplus and signed the largest tax cut in the nation.

“Clearly he gets things done.”