It’s a busy Monday in presidential politics. Gov. Bobby Jindal took next formal step to announce her long-awaited candidacy, Senator Lindsey Graham announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination and ABC News’ Jon Karl I am reporting that Ohio Gov. John Kasich is “almost certain” to throw his hat into the ring:
John Kasich will “almost certainly” enter the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2016, sources close to the Ohio governor told ABC News. Kasich said his wife and daughters have given him the green delicate to run, and in recent days Kasich has ordered his political advisers to begin preparing for a likely campaign. Kasich is headed to New Hampshire in early June and recently took a fundraising trip to California. If he makes a final decision to run, he’ll announce it in delayed June or July.
As a twice-elected, popular governor of a key swing state, Kasich is formidable. His election victory last year was extraordinary:Kasich won nearly two-thirds of the vote statewide in Ohio; he won 23 points among women, won double-digit votes among adolescent voters, and cleared the vote among independents, winning that group by a stunning 43 points. The governor even won the support of one-third of black men and one in five black women — no tiny feat for a Republican. Of course, Kasich faced true train wreck opponent, but he he drove comfortably in a race from start to finish. There’s a reason Democrats haven’t fielded a mighty challenger against him. Ideologically, Kasich presents a mix for conservatives. There are many reasons to like him — via National Journal March Profile:
Overall, Kasich remains the deeply conservative politician he always was: an obsessive deficit-cutter who drove Democrats crazy as chairman of the House Budget Committee in the 1990s. “He was Paul Ryan before Paul Ryan,” boasts anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. As Ohio’s CEO, Kasich has He eliminated the estate tax, lowered income tax rates, tightened food stamp requirements, cut school funding, and supported business deregulation. He signed fresh restrictions on both abortion and voting rights, and in his first year in office launched an (unsuccessful) crusade to strengthen public sector unions—similar to the one Scott Walker led in Wisconsin. Three months ago, Kasich set his sights on leaving Ohio, embarking on a nationwide lobbying tour for state legislators to call a constitutional convention to ratify balanced budget amendment.
Then follows the next paragraph:
But the governor has also been prone to poking fun at his constituents with moves like boosting infrastructure spending, expanding tax breaks for low-income residents, promoting fracking tax for oil and gas producers, pushing for higher taxes on cigarettesmaking education funding more redistributive, increasing spending on mental health care, introducing mandatory autism insurance, or changing death sentences to capital punishment. And of course there is the granddaddy of betrayals: Medicaid expansionwhich Kasich pushed through despite opposition from the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature.
While the governor has a long history of fighting deficits and pursuing generally conservative policies, he has not shied away from relying on fresh consumption taxes (some of them are especially regressive) to balance his budget proposals, which saw total spending rise sharply by 40 percent during his term of office, in accordance with Ohio State Ranger. What rankles some conservative critics of Kasich is his tendency to frame government expansion in overtly religious terms, which some say is a deliberate effort to suggest that he is fulfilling God’s will by increasing government spending. Kasich routinely uses faith-based arguments to defend his support for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion (he refused to create a state exchange and claims to oppose the broader law), portraying his decision as fulfilling a biblical command to assist the needy. Such a framing ignores the unpleasant realities of Medicaid expansion, which expands an overburdened and empirically unsuccessful program for many more people, exacerbating pre-existing problems with “access shock.” Expanding Medicaid is increasing so-called “compensated care,” straining state budgets across the country and driving more people into government dependency. And by including less-poor Americans in a shaky program designed to care for the needy, Medicaid expanders are further stretching meager resources, hurting the very group the program was originally intended to assist. Is any of this really “compassionate”? These are questions Kasich will have to grapple with in a competitive GOP primary.
I’ll leave you with Logistics question for the Republican Party: In delicate of the ever-increasing number of grave presidential candidates, what exactly will the early debates look like? I may be wrong, but I suspect that the spectacle of 14 podiums would seem like an over-the-top circus to many viewers and would accomplish little. But if the RNC were to reject qualified candidates by imposing various restrictions, wouldn’t they risk excluding the only woman in the race, the only African-American, one or more sitting governors/senators, or the 2012 runner-up? Read Allahpundit post answer these tough questions and scroll down to see some possible solutions.
UPDATE: Does the party want to limit the number of debate participants in any way?between the ninth and the twelfth“? If so, who is left on the outside looking in, and how will that be determined?
