Basic bio info
John Kasich was born May 13, 1952, in McKees Rocks, Pa. The son of a postman, he earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from Ohio State University.
He has been governor of Ohio since 2011. His prior political experience was a state senator in Ohio, 1979-1982, and U.S. House, 1983-2001. When he won a seat in Congress in 1982, he was the only Republican that year to defeat an incumbent Democrat. He went on to lead the House Budget Committee, and led a successful effort to balance the federal budget when Bill Clinton was president.
After leaving Congress, he worked as a Fox News host and a banker at Lehman Brothers.
He and his wife have two daughters.
His stand (entering the race)
Gov. John Kasich, a voluble and blunt-talking maverick who is hoping his upbeat vision for a united America can catapult him to the White House, declared Tuesday, July 21, that he is running for president, telling a crowd he has “the experience and the testing — the testing that prepares you for the most important job in the world.”
Kasich, joined by his wife and 15-year-old twin daughters, addressed several thousand cheering supporters inside the student union building at Ohio State University in Columbus, offering a centrist appeal designed to paint him as a common-sense Midwesterner who can fix a broken Washington. He avoided attacking President Barack Obama, as his Republican rivals had done.
The event was a return of sorts: As an 18-year-old Ohio State freshman in 1970, Kasich wrote President Richard Nixon to plead, successfully, to visit the White House. But Kasich seemed determined to link himself to another Republican president, the conservative hero Ronald Reagan, whose optimistic oratory he sought to evoke.
“The sun is rising, and the sun is going to rise to the zenith again in America, ” Kasich said at one point, recounting his advice to citizens of an Ohio community whose economy was devastated during the recession. He wrapped up his speech with another Reagan-esque declaration: “The light of a city on a hill cannot be hidden. America is that city and you are that light.”
Kasich, 63, became the 16th prominent Republican to enter the 2016 field. As a two-term governor in a critical swing state — no candidate since John F. Kennedy in 1960 has won the White House without winning Ohio — he is a credible candidate, although his late entry means he has catch-up work to do. He is also an unconventional one.
His long and sometimes meandering 43-minute speech, delivered with notes but no script and no teleprompter, was classic Kasich: gritty and at times defiant — “They said it couldn’t be done; I proved them wrong, ” he said, recounting naysayers he has met along the way — and laden with his own faith-inspired, if idiosyncratic, pearls of life wisdom.
In ignoring Obama, the governor may have missed an opportunity to gin up enthusiasm on the Republican right — a constituency that is already suspicious of him because of some of his moderate policy positions, including his expansion of Medicaid under Obama’s health law.
“This is about the future and bringing people together, ” John Weaver, Kasich’s chief strategist, said after the speech, adding, “Obama is not on the ballot.”
He is also highlighting his national security credentials (he spent 18 years on the House Armed Services Committee) and what calls his “Ohio story, ” of jobs and economic recovery as governor, boasting of the $2 billion surplus his state has amassed on his watch.
“We are going to take the lessons of the heartland, ” he said, “and straighten out Washington, D.C.”
His support
Kasich cites his Christian faith in public policy decisions, and his stands on social issues tend to reflect GOP values. He backed Ohio’s ban on gay marriage. But after the Supreme Court invalidated such state bans, he urged public respect for the decision and attended a gay wedding the next weekend.
Kasich is a death-penalty supporter who’s seen 12 men executed under his watch. He also pushed back Ohio’s execution schedule into 2016 after problems with lethal injection and commuted some sentences. On gun rights, he supported a ban on assault-type weapons when he was in Congress but signed an Ohio law reducing training, residency and license-renewal requirements for people permitted to carry concealed weapons.
He’s called climate change a problem that should be addressed but told the Financial Times he’s not clear on the causes of it and does not favor “dramatic economic change of policy” when the science, in his view, is not certain.
When it comes to military issues, he favors a strong military and a strong U.S. Kasich supports the deployment of U.S. ground troops as part of an international effort to defeat Islamic State one group militants. He favors a significant expansion of the Navy and says, in retrospect, the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. As a member of the House Armed Services Committee in the 1990s, he voted to limit production of the B-2 bomber. Despite leaving Washington in 2001, he says he’s maintained relationships with political figures abroad. “I’m not brushing up on anything,” he adds. “I’ve been involved in this for a very long time.”
His critics
Kasich’s connections won’t appeal to a growing number of Republican voters who say they prefer an outsider candidate over one with experience in Washington.
Conservative guru Erick Erickson has been among many who have taken umbrage at the Ohio governor’s explanation for expanding Medicaid coverage under Obamacare (an expansion that has faced resistance from Republican governors). When the time came, the governor said he wanted to face his maker with a clear conscience. “Now, when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”
Erickson, who organized the RedState Gathering this summer in Atanta, said, “I don’t need a preacher-in-chief. I’ve got a preacher already.”
In Ohio, the governor initially embraced alternative-energy mandates that prompted wind, solar and other renewable energy companies to expand operations, but then backed a two-year delay in the rules in a compromise with GOP lawmakers who want them repealed. He’s repeatedly tried to raise taxes on oil and gas drillers, without success.
