It's His Party
FERGUSON, ANDREW
It's His Party The Rise of John Kasich By Andrew Ferguson John Kasich, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the primary architect of this spring's federal budget agreement, wants to...
...First off, it wasn't supposed to be a fund-raiser," he says now...
...So when he decides he wants to run for president, as he almost certainly has, the way he runs tells us a lot about the Republican party...
...Maybe Ronald Reagan really is winning...
...He comes here most weekends to be with his wife...
...It's a Norman Rockwell tableau...
...There's a rumor that the Stones are coming to Columbus...
...We're going to have discretionary spending grow at one-half of one percent a year, compared to 6 percent it's been growin' for the last ten years...
...There's a sense of a loss of personal control, that the culture's collapsing, that their kids aren't safe, that they're not learning, or that the country's dangerous—this rise in gated communities and security systems...
...The revolutionaries of '95 are the bipartisans of '97...
...He is 45 years old, he has been in the House of Representatives 14 years, he has been obsessed with budget cutting and budget balancing for his entire career, and the Republican party has come to him at last...
...He is the most intense human being I've ever met...
...And you know what...
...This isn't an act...
...For one thing, regular guys seldom talk about how regular they are...
...to take her kids to day care, 'cause her husband left her, and when she goes to work she parks in a parking lot that's closer to Mars than it is to the terminal where she works...
...Ron Dellums came to my wedding...
...But they don't fail him often...
...Ron Dellums gave me a beautiful wedding present...
...I stopped doing language with him, because everything I told him, he just took and made it better...
...I go out there and do...
...It's not anything I'm trying to do...
...But what makes it interesting and worth repeating is that John Kasich is running for presi-dent—not technically, of course, not officially, though he is refreshingly uncoy about his ambition—and no one seems to think his running is a thoroughly ridiculous idea even though he is a relatively obscure congressman from Ohio...
...But frankly I'm a lot more interested in healing this country than in"—his voice suddenly drips with sarcasm—"than in engaging the enemy...
...She pulls and pants and strains at the leash...
...Now our Medicare savings are more than what we proposed in 1995 and we're going to actually have a capital-gains tax cut...
...I ask again about the conservative criticisms of the budget deal...
...I still think we can...
...His ideological eclecticism has led to other self-designations...
...His Jeep in the driveway boasts a "Save the Elephants" bumper sticker from the World Wildlife Fund...
...Words failed him...
...But now these people are mad, 'cause who are we going to fight...
...My other pitch, beyond this values thing, is that you've got to defang government...
...Though he successfully shepherded the agreement through the Congress, the deal itself remains controversial...
...There was a Democratic budget, a Bush budget, and a Kasich budget...
...But this budget agreement is so amazing...
...I want to talk about what we can accomplish...
...I just hate that culture...
...Just a couple of years ago (Penny, no...
...What's been happening is that the state has been encroaching, trying to secularize those areas where people need to have values based on their faith...
...Really, he's terrible to work for...
...We're out of balance...
...It's His Party The Rise of John Kasich By Andrew Ferguson John Kasich, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the primary architect of this spring's federal budget agreement, wants to talk off the record for a while...
...What he's got, you can't teach," Luntz says...
...In a recent speech to Republicans in Iowa, where he met (incidentally) with the party operatives and donors who might form the nucleus of a presidential campaign, he explained the necessity of a capital-gains tax cut like this: "Look, you've got to have rewards for the risk-takers in this country...
...He crosses and uncrosses his legs, props his Adidas up on a coffee table, sweeps the air with his arms and folds them across his chest and plumps the sofa cushion...
...It's kind of hard to figure out who you're going to fight with and what you're going to fight about anymore...
...He seems—yikes— almost proud of it...
...I'm just who I am," he likes to say...
...On his coffee table is a pile of working papers—a memo from his staff distilling into a few pages the central themes of Orestes Brownson's The American Republic, also a letter from an informal adviser containing ready-to-quote passages from Edmund Burke "on the need for values," as Kasich says...
...These are the things that are really gnawing at people...
...Understand, I don't like him all that much...
...Let's go walk my dog," he said...
...I don't care because I really believe this is the right thing to do for our country.'" He is unapologetic too about his passion for bipartisanship...
...But what's been happening over the course of the last thirty years—maybe since Madalyn Murray O'Hair—is that we have been attempting to secularize everything...
...For while it sounds progressive and compassionate—liberal, almost—and therefore flatters its audience, there is lurking beneath it, in that phrase "people who don't want to work," the Cadillac-driving, vodka-chugging welfare queen of blessed memory...
...Even defense, once a "bright line" division between the parties, is seen these days as primarily a matter of budgeting rather than national security—a question of "What can we afford...
...We were the last generation that thought we could change the world," he says, "and you know what...
...None...
...You know, I've been in politics 20 years," he announced to the gathering in Iowa...
...And those are...
...But it's because he actually believes this stuff...
...he is not, ideologically or temperamentally, a movement guy...
...The dog is a recent acquisition, and part of a new domesticity in Kasich's life...
...Oh, man...
...So I tell you, we didn't reform welfare for rich people...
...Maybe the message isn't quite ready for a full-dress unveiling—he's been road-testing it (to switch metaphors) in speeches around the country, particularly and portentously at appearances in New Hampshire and Iowa—but you get the drift of Kasich's thinking, wafting from Lincoln to the unavoidable Tocqueville, through Madalyn Murray O'Hair to the unlikely Sting, lead singer of the Police...
...Unlike most fortysomething conservatives, Kasich is not a self-hating baby-boomer...
...Is this America, or what...
...John Kasich and company have become Clinton-ian in their ability to call a square a circle," the Journal's editors wrote...
...This is the way we will govern this House, and govern this country," he said, "by making tough, tough decisions and coming toward the middle to serve our country...
...You might question our president's sincerity when he speaks of his love for the Mamas and the Papas, but Kasich's paeans to the greatness of, say, Deep Purple seem to reflect a genuine lack of taste...
...But Kasich's message-in-progress certainly does sound bipartisan...
...Here in 1997, John Kasich is Mr...
...He recently married his girlfriend of several years and is building a house on ten acres of countryside outside Westerville...
...From the evils of Big Government to the evil of gated communities: Such is the evolution of Republican doctrine in the 1990s...
...Kasich has never been particularly comfortable with the party's right wing...
...Ronald Reagan won...
...Which raises the question—a typically right-wing question, as Kasich says—of how you can engage in political debate when both sides are so busy agreeing with each other...
...Back in '89," he says now, "there were three budgets...
...And de Toc-queville probably more than anybody...
...It's not like we're done...
...Part of the frustrations conservatives have is, we won...
...Well, look...
...I once told this roomful of rich people," he told the roomful of rich people in Iowa, "Look, we didn't reform welfare for you...
...We still have entitlements to deal with...
...I'm a risk-taker...
...Friendships are not to be taken lightly in this world...
...That was a mix-up...
...They are, they are...
...I think it's fair to say we're a unique country where the church and state are separate, and should be separate...
...Maybe you've seen him when you forgot your briefcase one night and went back to your office on the 31st floor and there he was sweeping up and emptying the trash...
...But listen: I mean, Bill Clinton is like a Republican...
...Oh, man," he said...
...Kasich later reversed himself and didn't attend...
...You know, it's called syn-chronicity...
...Kasich speaks of his own singularity with an alarming insouciance...
...We turn down Westerville's lovely main street, dotted with courtyards and boutiques and a refurbished movie palace selling Amish antiques...
...That's what he's talking about now, here in his living room in Westerville, this larger message beyond balanced budgets...
...And Democrats are accepting that...
...Pooper-scoopers have not yet come to Westerville, apparently...
...But let me tell you something...
...Outside it becomes quickly apparent that Kasich doesn't walk Penny...
...Democrats, liberals, everybody...
...The Republicans looked disappointed, but only momentarily...
...And my friendship with him means more to me than making a bunch of Republicans happy, okay...
...The man just tests through the roof...
...Kasich is often all jazzed up—among people who follow politicians he's famous for this already, these rapidly blinking eyes, the shrugging shoulders, the restless hands and drumming fingers...
...Being a deficit-obsessive, he came late to the cause of tax cuts, and in 1994 he was one of a handful of Republicans to vote for Bill Clinton's crime bill...
...He is roundly disliked on the national-security committee, on which he sits, for his efforts to halt production of the B-2 bomber and to push vaguely defined "Pentagon reforms...
...I'm not one of those guys who wants to talk about all the problems...
...But in fashioning his post-budget-deal message, Kasich may be getting ahead of himself...
...If there is a prototype for the Republican of the Late Clinton era—not to mention the post-Clinton era— it is John Kasich...
...It's just silly for these conservatives to be griping...
...Oh great," Kasich says...
...he thing you've got to realize," one of Kasich's former staffers told me, "is that when he says, 'We've got to balance the budget for the children, we've got to do this for future generations,' he really means it...
...Clintonian, in fact...
...It was supposed to be a meeting of his breakfast club...
...He's beaming...
...Penny holds up suddenly and squats on the lawn of a handsome Victorian house...
...This is a great applause line that never fails to deliver, not only for Republican audiences but every other kind, too...
...In fact there were half a dozen budgets or more...
...We need more tax cuts...
...There's a lot of Republicans who watch what I do with the people on the other side of the aisle and they're beginning to learn...
...devising alternative budgets used to be a cottage industry among members of the budget committee...
...Most of the Washington conservative establishment—the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, etc., etc., not to mention THE WEEKLY STANDARD—has come out against it...
...Oh, man, look at this," Kasich says...
...Is this beautiful...
...How'd he like it...
...He's a hero to the sophomore class of House Republicans," Luntz says, referring to those House members elected in 1994 who are recasting the party's identity...
...I have a message I feel compelled to talk about," he tells reporters when he's asked whether he'll run for president, "not just in terms of what we've been doing to balance the budget, but the larger message of how the Republican party can essentially lead the way in terms of saving our culture...
...He says he doesn't want to be in Congress much longer— another term, maybe two—and he's twice refused the entreaties of local Republicans to seek higher office in Ohio...
...it has something to do with the separation of church and state and it involves a Democratic colleague of his and he'd rather not be quoted saying anything critical, but this is an issue that exercises him greatly, that he's been thinking about for a very long time, really since the beginning of his career, and if we don't come to terms in this country with this imbalance, this absolute craziness that happens when people make paramount this idea of individual rights over the community good, then really we're not going to come to terms in this country with the...
...There needs to be a synchronicity between the church and state in America...
...If you take the reward out of risk-taking, only idiots will take risks...
...Anyway, he wants to talk off the record about this news story he's just read...
...I think we still got to kill departments...
...Suddenly, from around a corner, a group of twenty or more schoolchildren comes charging toward an ice-cream parlor...
...We've got to deal with the baby boomers' getting older and the strain on entitlements...
...I'm in this to fix my country...
...Dems were telling us we were cutting taxes for the rich and making people on Medicare pay for it...
...I want him to run.'" Luntz is right: Kasich tries hard to connect...
...He brings to the politician's trade all the babyboomer characteristics...
...He is well loved by establishment Big Feet like David Broder and Al Hunt as the kind of Republican you can do business with—which means, in the conservative lexicon, the kind of Republican who gets rolled...
...I'm sorry, but there is no way to declare defeat on this...
...I've got to check that out...
...Few politicians have received such consistently glowing press...
...With the budget done, we can now move on to these other issues, which frankly trouble Americans more than the government's finances...
...Hill Republicans were scandalized earlier this year when Kasich agreed to appear at a fund-raiser for his friend Gary Condit, a Democratic congressman from California...
...They've got to realize, that debate is kind of over...
...He is extraordinarily expert at selling his ordinariness, even as he refuses—simply refuses—to apologize for his own political courage...
...Penny walks Kasich...
...When you hear a Republican politician touting "common-sense practical solutions" or referring to the estate tax as the "death tax," you're hearing Luntz...
...Penny leaves a deposit on the voter's grass...
...What I'm arguing to people is that the solutions to your schools and the broken homes and the solutions to poverty don't lie in the hands of government...
...And we did it for Carol, who's pouring Starbucks coffee at the airport for just above minimum wage, and she's wakin' up at 6 a.m...
...I hate to be in Washington," he says...
...He gives the dog a yank on its leash and glances around sheepishly...
...If the budget debate is, as Kasich says, "kind of over," what is the Republican message for elections to come...
...When I saw him in Westerville he'd just bought the new Depeche Mode CD...
...one of them shouts, and the rest stream into the shop, two beleaguered teachers bringing up the rear...
...So too with tax cuts: The $85 billion in tax relief called for in the budget agreement is the maximum we can expect from the Republican Congress for as far as the eye can see...
...It might not be quite as precise as talk of budget recisions and readjusting COLA formulas...
...You know Joe...
...There is no cynicism there...
...We resume our trot...
...I think that's a cause for celebration...
...I've got my Counting Crows tickets already," he says excitedly...
...The dog's name is Penny, after Tim Penny, the former Democratic congressman from Minnesota with whom Kasich designed a series of austere budgets, much praised for their spending cuts, in the early 1990s...
...These things have to be talked about and they all get down to this problem of values and justice...
...Luntz's specialty is the soundbite—highly stylized chunks of verbiage designed to ring the bells and win the approval of focus groups...
...I got into this because I'm a doer...
...But what now...
...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard...
...Republican...
...When the bill passed narrowly, over near-unanimous GOP opposition, he gave an impassioned speech in its defense...
...I swing for the fences...
...Ice cream...
...My point of view basically comes from the underdog," he says...
...On welfare reform he is particularly artful...
...The state has so secularized society that it's paralyzed us...
...And no wonder...
...I guess I'm kind of obsessed with fairness...
...Because it is immoral—it is a sin—to take money from Carol and from Joe and give it to people who don't want to work...
...We're sitting in the living room of his small clapboard bungalow on a leafy street in Westerville, just outside Columbus, Ohio, and a news story in this morning's Columbus Dispatch has him all jazzed up...
...Gary Condit is a friend of mine...
...We are all cheap hawks now...
...There's no calculation...
...It's about a balance, isn't it, about this unique relationship between certain things...
...And I remember a reporter said to me, 'Hey, you seem to be out there all alone on this thing.' And I said, 'I don't care...
...And I'll tell you another thing," he goes on...
...We're back to the living room in Westerville, where Kasich is working on it...
...Look: I'm not in this to be a Republican...
...His interest in environmentalism has led one member of the leadership to call him a "green squish...
...The oxymorons have served him well...
...I'll say, 'They want him to run for president.' And they say, 'Yes!' I'll say, 'Isn't he too young?' And they say, 'I don't care...
...But baby-boomer narcissism is deeper and more layered than the standard-issue narcissism of older politicians...
...I want to defang it at all levels and then set people free, and that, coupled with this set of values about decency and justice and compassion, it's then up to them to begin healing society, right there in their communities...
...Dellums, of course, is the left-wing congressman from California, with whom Kasich led the fight to scuttle the B-2 bomber...
...But he seems to be getting his domestic life settled in preparation for something big...
...There's only a way to declare victory...
...He is, bar none, the single best communicator the Republican party has— the best since Ronald Reagan," says Frank Luntz, a pollster who advises most of the leading Republicans on "communication techniques...
...And we're going to see Bush this summer...
...He brags of his love for rock 'n' roll...
...he is not only a populist but also "a cheap hawk" on defense and a "supply-side deficit hawk" on fiscal policy...
...This is where I live...
...He yells at his staff—a lot...
...For a man who has built his career on a mastery of budget arcana, he can be refreshingly colloquial...
...This is another essential characteristic of the baby-boomer politician that Kasich perfectly exemplifies: overweening self-regard...
...This is pretty good...
...And Ron Dellums said to me, 'John, I don't know where I'm going to be and I don't know where you're going to be, but I want you to know when you look at that present how much I love you guys.' Now, that is a priceless treasure...
...When I asked him about it, Kasich frowned and stood up...
...The language and the message he uses is better than anything any pollster could come up with...
...rather than "What do we need...
...Look, I do not think this budget agreement is an end-all," he says...
...And the reason no one thinks it's ridiculous is that John Kasich, more than any other Republican politician, more than Newt Gingrich even, occupies the center of gravity of the Republican party these days...
...My message is no longer that government is going to somehow solve these problems...
...We proceed at a half-trot down a cobblestone street overarched by towering oaks...
...I'm a doer...
...Even so he seemed unprepared for the heated criticism unleashed on the right by the budget deal with Bill Clinton...
...He's unbelievably stubborn...
...The political truth about this budget is that Republicans are selling out their agenda in return for President Clinton's blessing...
...I think it's the uniqueness of America, if you look at de Tocqueville or if you look at Lincoln, or whether you look at Martin Luther King, all of their observations are that America can't be separated from its values...
...Even sitting here on his couch, theoretically at rest, he is a near-riot of activity...
...But he's not, of course, and he knows he's not...
...And it was Kasich who brought the budget to the center of the Republican political debate, so that all issues were subsumed by it...
...We reformed it for Carol and Joe...
...His longstanding crusade against "corporate welfare"—tax loopholes and outright subsidies granted various American businesses—has alienated the Big Business lobby...
...But he freely acknowledges that Kasich does not need his advice...
...We did it for Joe...
...Oh, Penny," Kasich says, his usual slouch slumping deeper...
...Luntz has often screened tapes of Kasich's speeches and TV interviews for focus groups...
...He doesn't listen...
...It's to me a great term—the Police sang about it, remember that song...
...Kasich has lived here for twenty years, since he first ran for the state legislature, at the age of 26, in 1978...
...And it is pretty good (you can judge for yourself in a moment...
...Penny...
...they value comity above all...
...Oh, there's plenty of areas to engage," Kasich says...
...They reflect the perfectly admirable crash self-improvement course that politicians often undertake when they are about to go national...
...Um," Kasich says, stopping himself and pointing to my tape recorder, "you might want to turn that on now...
...The week we spoke in Westerville, the Wall Street Journal had unloaded a blistering editorial titled "William Jefferson Kasich...
...As he prepares to run for president, Kasich the budgetmeister, the master of numbers, is becoming increasingly allusive intellectually...
...So let's go to the audiotape: "I think what's happening is, we're on a rampage to secularize American society...
...For better or worse...
...He prefers to call himself a populist...
...I'm just a regular guy...
...His synapses seem to fire at twice the rate of any normal human being's...
...Surely there's very little in it that the president could disagree with...
...The party is now where he is, but he was there first...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 39
