Things to know about candidate John Kasich

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the budget expert with the wry humor and regular-guy style, is coming to the starting line of the nomination process – the Iowa caucuses – with one of the biggest compliments a presidential candidate can receive: attack ads against him. Gee, thanks, he might say. But the ads by Jeb Bush and an outside group are signs that Kasich’s longshot presidential bid has become a threat to other campaigns vying for the establishment mantle. Here’s a look at Kasich:

THE BRIEF

Kasich entered the presidential race just 16 days before the first presidential debate in August with no guarantee that he’d qualify for the stage. His could have been one of the shortest presidential bids in history. Instead, the strong-willed and sometimes abrasive governor jumped into the contest with more than a dozen other hopefuls by casting himself as a conservative who bucks his party on occasion and disdained the sport of bashing Democrat Hillary Clinton.

RESUME REVIEW

Kasich, 63, was raised a Catholic but turned to a more-fundamentalist brand of Christianity after his parents were killed by a drunken driver in 1987. He was born in McKees Rocks, Pa., but left the blue-collar town outside Pittsburgh to attend Ohio State University. As a freshman, he requested a meeting with President Richard Nixon, who obliged.

Kasich defeated an incumbent Democrat in 1978 to become the youngest person elected to the Ohio Senate, at age 26. Four years later, he was elected to the U.S. House, where he served nine terms. Kasich rose to prominence in 1997, when as House budget chairman, he became the chief architect of a deal that balanced the federal budget for the first time in decades.

A short-lived bid for president in 2000 led Kasich to trade Washington in 2001 for a decade-long stint as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers. In 2010, he narrowly defeated a once-popular Democratic incumbent to become Ohio governor.

Kasich cites his Christian faith for his pragmatic mix of policy positions – favoring income-tax cuts and smaller government while supporting Medicaid expansion under the federal health care law and certain tax increases.

DEBATE DIGEST

Kasich was asked in one debate about his assessment that his rivals’ tax and other plans are “crazy.” This set off a riff:

“To talk about [how] we’re just gonna have a 10 percent tithe and that’s how we’re gonna fund the government? And we’re going to just fix everything with waste, fraud, and abuse? Or that we’re just going to be great? Or we’re going to ship 10 million people out of this country, leaving their children here in this country and dividing families? Folks, we’ve got to wake up. We cannot elect somebody that doesn’t know how to do the job. You have got to pick somebody who has experience, somebody that has the know-how, the discipline.”