Ohio taxpayers can get an unwelcome taste of D.C. as Gov. John Kasich brings President Obama’s favorite policies and tactics to the Buckeye State.
Narrowly elected as a small-government conservative in 2010, Kasich veered sharply left despite Republican majorities in both houses of the Ohio General Assembly.
Candidate Kasich warned that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion “will impose large and unsustainable costs on states.” But after failing to curb union power in 2011, Kasich decided last winter to show how caring and moderate he is hanging the millstone of Medicaid expansion around Ohio’s neck.
Kasich used laughably false arguments to undermine conservative critics, claiming that the Obamacare expansion would be paid for with “Ohio tax dollars” and warning that a slice of some imaginary Ohio funding pie would be served to other states if Ohio rejected it.
While political arguments over Medicaid expansion were substantial news for much of 2013, the Ohio dinomedia allowed Kasich to lie about billions in taxpayer money without blinking an eye.
Sound familiar?
Coordinating communications with the civil rights lobby in the same way Obama often does, Kasich delivered a “compassionate conservative” speech that made Clinton blush.
Kasich even tweaked Obama’s routine of burning straw men opposed to substantial government: Just add brimstone. Frustrated by opposition to Obamacare expansion, Kasich warned his enemies that he would they can secure their place in hell.
Nevertheless, the Ohio Legislature – lobbied by grassroots groups that the press admits to nothing but ridicule – stripped Medicaid expansion from the state budget and even passed language expressly prohibiting it.
Kasich responded by vetoing the ban on Medicaid expansion then unilateral expansion of Medicaid when several more months of emotional blackmail didn’t work.
The legislature didn’t want to expand the government the way Kasich wanted, so Kasich took a page from Obama’s playbook and pretended that such a major policy decision was an executive matter.
Ohio’s newspapers cheered along, but the left-wing press was only part of the state’s problem.
Like Obama, Kasich is a shark in a fraught ecosystem of political nerds who want to support advance the welfare state.
“I think for some Ohioans, unless you’re a Nazi with a business card, you can’t be a Republican.” – a Republican Party lobbyist and Kasich advisor told The Daily Beast in an autumn story about intra-party conflicts.
“All conservatives oppose Obamacare, and Ohio Republican leaders have helped lead that opposition,” he added. Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges said in a hilarious announcement on the day Kasich officially announced his move to expand Medicaid to legislative opposition.
“On the separate issue of Medicaid, good conservatives have worked to improve the program and engaged in healthy debate about its future,” Borges added.
Ohio Republican Party’s idea for “healthy debate” involves branding critics as secret Democrats and instructing faithful sites to be blacklisted.
Perhaps the first obvious red flag of Kasich’s term was the governor’s creation of JobsOhio, a secret publicly funded nonprofit organization later described in Fortune as an “Obama-style jobs plan.”
Before spending most of 2013 expanding Medicaid, Governor Kasich was using Obama-worthy class warfare rhetoric to push for a tax boost on fracking.
In 2012, Kasich toured Ohio promising that his fracking tax proposal would redistribute money from wealthy out-of-state Big Oil companies in the name of fairness and job creation.
Sure, Kasich’s plan – which the legislature and industry now tepidly support after seeing it during the Medicaid expansion – would also hit Appalachian landowners, but Governor Kasich cares about personal property rights as much as President Obama.
When it comes to school choice, the Second Amendment, and the rights of the unborn, Kasich signed some good policies sent to his desk by a Legislature pushed in the right direction by Ohio taxpayers… but even setting aside the expansion of Medicaid, both of Kasich’s budgets increased the reach and cost of the state.
Lately, it seems that the main difference between John Kasich and Barack Obama is that Obama does not claim to be a limited-government conservative.
