COLUMBUS, Ohio — John Kasich, the Ohio GOP’s endorsed candidate for governor next year, didn’t spare the rod to spoil the child Friday, when he branded Gov. Ted Strickland, in the wake of yesterday’s devised deal to balance the state’s budget that would not have passed without the votes of five Republican state senators, as feckless — a word whose definition means not fit to assume responsibility and being generally incompetent and ineffectual.

Ohio Dems blasted back at Kasich

While Kasich was harpooning Strickland, the Ohio Democratic Party was preparing its own fusilage of barbed points for him. ODP Chairman Chris Redfern said this about his sideline criticism: “John Kasich has no relationship with the truth. Once again, Kasich is offering attacks on Governor Strickland’s leadership while failing to propose any alternative of his own. Shockingly, he also criticized his own party, since the Republican-controlled Senate supported the budget.”

“Instead of jetting around the country giving paid speeches and continuing his career as a FOX News commentator, John Kasich should get off the sidelines, roll up his sleeves and actually offer solutions to the difficult challenges Ohioans face,” Redfern said, adding, “It’s one thing to sit on the sidelines and criticize. It’s another thing to show leadership and make tough choices during difficult times, as Governor Strickland has done.”

Redfern, a former member of the Ohio House, said the only proposal John Kasich has offered during this campaign is an “irresponsible plan to create a nearly 40 percent budget deficit and require dangerous cuts in funding for education and other vital services.” Redfern, who rehabilitated the ODP enough to help Strickland and other Democrats win statewide seats in 2006 and Barack Obama win Ohio last year, said Kasich’s carping without offering solutions is the same type of ‘leadership’ that John Kasich learned during his eight years working at Lehman Brothers on Wall Street, but it won’t work for Ohio’s Main Street.”

Kasich, GOP blast Strickland deal as a tax hike

Kasich, whose political career in Ohio and in Washington spans decades and who for the first time recently had one national polling firm put him ahead of his Democratic rival by nearly 10 percentage points, called yesterday’s deal “a carbon-copy continuation of the short-sighted, status quo thinking that sacrifices Ohio’s long-term prosperity at the altar of short-term political expedience.”

After nearly a year of “budget blunders, broken promises, erroneous revenue projections, flip flops, and timid leadership,” Kasich, who is reentering politics after nearly a lull of a decade during which he worked for the now-failed investment banking firm of Lehman Brothers and hosted a political talk show on the Fox News Channel, labeled Strickland’s bi-partisan deal, the center piece of which was the suspension for two years of the fifth and final year of a 21 percent reduction in Ohio’s personal income tax, as an increase of taxes on Ohio families and businesses.

Strickland has argued that his choices to fill a gaping budget hole of nearly $900 million, caused by revenue from proposed video slot machines that vanished when the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled earlier this year that his executive decision was subject to public referendum, were slim. While Kasich is going after Strickland, he has avoided taring business groups who rallied around the governor, who are traditionally supportive Republican positions on taxes, with the same brush he is using paint Strickland another shade of yellow.

Strickland said in published reports that the deal he struck with five Senate Republicans, who joined the dozen minority Democrats to send the legislation back to the House for its concurrence last night, avoided what he called a “cataclysm” situation that would have forced him to cut education or state services or both.

“I wish I’d been crying wolf, but it was very real….It would have caused us to deal with almost unimaginable consequences for K-12 education as well as higher education institutions,” said Strickland, according The (Toledo) Blade newspaper. “We could potentially have lost billions in federal resources.”

The first-term governor said the compromise avoided “thousands of teacher layoffs, school building closures and the elimination of athletic programs in our schools.”

GOP themes of taxes, deficits, better business climate front and center

Kasich, who has been circuit riding from one county Republican Party event or dinner to another for over a years, said Strickland’s deal will only “guarantee that our economy will continue to limp along for another year while our state leaders desperately hope things get better, but point blame elsewhere when things do not.”

Pushing forward the themes and talking points that will Republicans hope are trump cards in his gubernatorial campaign, Kasich scolding anyone who thinks this budget is one to be proud of. “This unimaginative, politics-as-usual agreement - now punctuated by its retroactive tax increase - will kill jobs and stifle job creation; it will prolong and exacerbate the pain felt by Ohio families and our struggling communities; and it will cause more of our workers and young people to flee our state in search of economic success elsewhere.”

He said Ohioans should no longer accept “the premise that our misery is an unfortunate reality of living in a Midwestern state with a manufacturing background,” and blasted Strickland’s record on jobs, saying the Buckeye State has lost more jobs than every one of its neighbors, with the exception of Michigan. “We are not victims of a geographic location but of a void in leadership, a lack of vision, and a Governor more concerned with an election that is a year away than he is with providing for Ohio’s long-term future.”

Kasich on Strickland: Feckless leadership

His lesson of caution he wants his supporters and those he wants to donate to his campaign to understand is that Ohio’s budget process this cycle has been costly due to “feckless leadership.”

He lashed Strickland for squandering “countless opportunities to reform government and to improve Ohio’s economic climate,” but said the former multi-term Congressman, born and raised in Appalachia, who was the first member of his family to attend and graduate from college, “routinely chose to keep the bureaucrats happy over providing for economic security.”

With unemployment news showing Ohio’s jobless rate is now at 10.6 percent, and with economic advisers telling Strickland the road to recovery will be long and low, Kasich took the governor’s comments just nine months ago that the worst thing he could do right now — in the throes of the worst recession since the Great Depression — would be to raise taxes and turned it on the governor, whose 2006 campaign slogan was that he would Turn Around Ohio from the deteriorated condition he found it in after 16 years of Republican rule and nearly eight years of policies pushed by then-President George W. Bush and Congressional Republicans who went along with a trillion dollar tax cut that mainly benefited the already wealthy class and two wars whose price tags will also be in the trillions.

Monday morning quarterbacking a luxury for Kasich for a while

Kasich has the luxury of being a face in the crowd who can Monday morning quarterback what happened in yesterday’s game rather than being a player on the field whose every move is scrutinized and parsed by political pundits and the media and will likely fall victim to the rule of unintended consequences.

So while the Kasich and the Ohio GOP smile over Strickland’s sliding approval ratings and sharpen their partisan knives to better slice and dice his every more going forward in their effort to reoccupy the Governor’s Mansion next year, the host of a political talk show on the Fox News channel will have to explain why voters should put back into office candidates who espouse the same policies and programs many believe put the state and the nation in the terrible mess it’s in now.

Does Kasich really have a “New Way, a New Day for Ohio,” or is it just a fresh batch of reheated supply-side Reagonomics that sounds good to those who benefited from it the first time but sounds bad to those who have suffered as a result of it?

Source: COLUMBUS, Ohio — John Kasich, the Ohio GOP’s endorsed candidate for governor next year, didn’t spare the rod to spoil the child Friday, when he branded Gov. Ted Strickland, in the wake of yesterday’s devised deal to balance the state’s budget that would not have passed without the votes of five Republican state senators, as feckless — a word whose definition means not fit to assume responsibility and being generally incompetent and ineffectual.

Ohio Dems blasted back at Kasich

While Kasich was harpooning Strickland, the Ohio Democratic Party was preparing its own fusilage of barbed points for him. ODP Chairman Chris Redfern said this about his sideline criticism: “John Kasich has no relationship with the truth. Once again, Kasich is offering attacks on Governor Strickland’s leadership while failing to propose any alternative of his own. Shockingly, he also criticized his own party, since the Republican-controlled Senate supported the budget.”

“Instead of jetting around the country giving paid speeches and continuing his career as a FOX News commentator, John Kasich should get off the sidelines, roll up his sleeves and actually offer solutions to the difficult challenges Ohioans face,” Redfern said, adding, “It’s one thing to sit on the sidelines and criticize. It’s another thing to show leadership and make tough choices during difficult times, as Governor Strickland has done.”

Redfern, a former member of the Ohio House, said the only proposal John Kasich has offered during this campaign is an “irresponsible plan to create a nearly 40 percent budget deficit and require dangerous cuts in funding for education and other vital services.” Redfern, who rehabilitated the ODP enough to help Strickland and other Democrats win statewide seats in 2006 and Barack Obama win Ohio last year, said Kasich’s carping without offering solutions is the same type of ‘leadership’ that John Kasich learned during his eight years working at Lehman Brothers on Wall Street, but it won’t work for Ohio’s Main Street.”

Kasich, GOP blast Strickland deal as a tax hike

Kasich, whose political career in Ohio and in Washington spans decades and who for the first time recently had one national polling firm put him ahead of his Democratic rival by nearly 10 percentage points, called yesterday’s deal “a carbon-copy continuation of the short-sighted, status quo thinking that sacrifices Ohio’s long-term prosperity at the altar of short-term political expedience.”

After nearly a year of “budget blunders, broken promises, erroneous revenue projections, flip flops, and timid leadership,” Kasich, who is reentering politics after nearly a lull of a decade during which he worked for the now-failed investment banking firm of Lehman Brothers and hosted a political talk show on the Fox News Channel, labeled Strickland’s bi-partisan deal, the center piece of which was the suspension for two years of the fifth and final year of a 21 percent reduction in Ohio’s personal income tax, as an increase of taxes on Ohio families and businesses.

Strickland has argued that his choices to fill a gaping budget hole of nearly $900 million, caused by revenue from proposed video slot machines that vanished when the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled earlier this year that his executive decision was subject to public referendum, were slim. While Kasich is going after Strickland, he has avoided taring business groups who rallied around the governor, who are traditionally supportive Republican positions on taxes, with the same brush he is using paint Strickland another shade of yellow.

Strickland said in published reports that the deal he struck with five Senate Republicans, who joined the dozen minority Democrats to send the legislation back to the House for its concurrence last night, avoided what he called a “cataclysm” situation that would have forced him to cut education or state services or both.

“I wish I’d been crying wolf, but it was very real….It would have caused us to deal with almost unimaginable consequences for K-12 education as well as higher education institutions,” said Strickland, according The (Toledo) Blade newspaper. “We could potentially have lost billions in federal resources.”

The first-term governor said the compromise avoided “thousands of teacher layoffs, school building closures and the elimination of athletic programs in our schools.”

GOP themes of taxes, deficits, better business climate front and center

Kasich, who has been circuit riding from one county Republican Party event or dinner to another for over a years, said Strickland’s deal will only “guarantee that our economy will continue to limp along for another year while our state leaders desperately hope things get better, but point blame elsewhere when things do not.”

Pushing forward the themes and talking points that will Republicans hope are trump cards in his gubernatorial campaign, Kasich scolding anyone who thinks this budget is one to be proud of. “This unimaginative, politics-as-usual agreement - now punctuated by its retroactive tax increase - will kill jobs and stifle job creation; it will prolong and exacerbate the pain felt by Ohio families and our struggling communities; and it will cause more of our workers and young people to flee our state in search of economic success elsewhere.”

He said Ohioans should no longer accept “the premise that our misery is an unfortunate reality of living in a Midwestern state with a manufacturing background,” and blasted Strickland’s record on jobs, saying the Buckeye State has lost more jobs than every one of its neighbors, with the exception of Michigan. “We are not victims of a geographic location but of a void in leadership, a lack of vision, and a Governor more concerned with an election that is a year away than he is with providing for Ohio’s long-term future.”

Kasich on Strickland: Feckless leadership

His lesson of caution he wants his supporters and those he wants to donate to his campaign to understand is that Ohio’s budget process this cycle has been costly due to “feckless leadership.”

He lashed Strickland for squandering “countless opportunities to reform government and to improve Ohio’s economic climate,” but said the former multi-term Congressman, born and raised in Appalachia, who was the first member of his family to attend and graduate from college, “routinely chose to keep the bureaucrats happy over providing for economic security.”

With unemployment news showing Ohio’s jobless rate is now at 10.6 percent, and with economic advisers telling Strickland the road to recovery will be long and low, Kasich took the governor’s comments just nine months ago that the worst thing he could do right now — in the throes of the worst recession since the Great Depression — would be to raise taxes and turned it on the governor, whose 2006 campaign slogan was that he would Turn Around Ohio from the deteriorated condition he found it in after 16 years of Republican rule and nearly eight years of policies pushed by then-President George W. Bush and Congressional Republicans who went along with a trillion dollar tax cut that mainly benefited the already wealthy class and two wars whose price tags will also be in the trillions.

Monday morning quarterbacking a luxury for Kasich for a while

Kasich has the luxury of being a face in the crowd who can Monday morning quarterback what happened in yesterday’s game rather than being a player on the field whose every move is scrutinized and parsed by political pundits and the media and will likely fall victim to the rule of unintended consequences.

So while the Kasich and the Ohio GOP smile over Strickland’s sliding approval ratings and sharpen their partisan knives to better slice and dice his every more going forward in their effort to reoccupy the Governor’s Mansion next year, the host of a political talk show on the Fox News channel will have to explain why voters should put back into office candidates who espouse the same policies and programs many believe put the state and the nation in the terrible mess it’s in now.

Does Kasich really have a “New Way, a New Day for Ohio,” or is it just a fresh batch of reheated supply-side Reagonomics that sounds good to those who benefited from it the first time but sounds bad to those who have suffered as a result of it?

Source: John Michael Spinelli