by John Kasich
The meeting took place, and we were of all stripes: rabbis, priests, ministers, Irish rock ’n’ rollers, Midwestern congressmen . . . The meeting was a success, and at the end I could see Pat Robertson and Bill Clinton yukking it up at the front of the room, and I turned to that anxious staffer and said, “Now do you believe in miracles?”
Good politics shouldn’t be about us or them. It shouldn’t be about winning or losing. Good politics should be about doing. If you win, that’s great. If you lose, that’s okay, too, as long as you’ve worked tirelessly for your ideas and your ideals. As long as you’ve done something—because, here again, the accomplishment is in the doing. It’s in the effort, the taking care. Talk to a successful businessperson and he or she will tell you their version of the same thing. They’ll tell you they’re not searching for profits but for excellence. Build the best widget, design the best system, offer the best customer service and the profit will come. Run the tightest ship and you’re less likely to spring a leak. In politics, if you’re always searching for votes you’re a panderer. Ultimately, you get the votes because you stand for something. In business, if you’re always searching for excellence you’re an industry leader and it’s clear to all what it is you stand for: quality, achievement, value. Ultimately, you get the business because you’ve earned it.
KEEPING FAITH
Two subjects central to this discussion, of course, are religion and family, so let’s make room for them here. Just so you know where I come from on these fronts, I was an altar boy as a child, a card-carrying Catholic from a small, working-class, church-abiding community. (More on this a bit later on.) It’s unbelievable and unacceptable to me that the Catholic Church has not been completely accountable for the various scandals that have enveloped it. The molestation and sexual abuse charges. The duplicity. It’s enough to drive a mailman’s son from McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, to question his faith—until I realize that we must separate the church from the individuals who presume to be in charge. People come and go, priests come and go, but it’s the religion that matters. It’s the religion that sustains us. I would never force another individual to believe what I believe, but I feel strongly that we all need to believe in something greater than ourselves, and I also maintain that once we define that something we need to invest in it wholeheartedly. Not in the people who preach it or administer it but in the belief itself.
Another thing you’ll find as you read along in these pages is that I like to circle my various points to where I can bring things around and sound a resonant theme. In this case, my circling takes me back to golf—because, after all, religion is a lot like golf, don’t you think? (No, I don’t suppose you do, but stay with me and you’ll see what I mean.) There are a whole mess of rules in most every religion, just as there are a whole mess of rules in golf. If you tee off and you hit it out of bounds, you tee off again. You take your stroke penalty and move on. But golf is not about the rules. When you sit down and talk about your latest round, you don’t talk about the rules. The rules are simply taken for granted—and you abide by them, for the most part. You don’t give your ball a more favorable lie. You don’t grab a new ball from your golf bag to replace the one you lost in the woods without taking a stroke penalty. In any case, you aren’t meant to do these things, although there are exceptions to even these rules. Once, I was playing with a good friend of mine who didn’t take the rules as seriously as the rest of us in our foursome, so I good-naturedly called out to him and said, “Hey, you’re not supposed to move your ball.” To which he good-naturedly replied, “Hey, you’re not supposed to be looking.”
My point here is that the rules of golf are not the object of the whole enterprise. They’re not what golfers dwell on. They dwell on the game itself, on the enjoyment they derive from it, the relaxation, the camaraderie, the competition, the fulfillment of a well-played round. Once again—the doing, the taking care. The same holds for religion. It’s not about the don’ts; it’s about the dos. It’s not about the judgment; it’s about the grace. It’s not about the downside; it’s about the upside. It’s not about our faults; it’s about our potential. And the great thing about religion is that it’s shot through with second chances. Come clean, own up to your mistakes, resolve to do a better job the next time out, and all is forgiven. It’s like a spiritual mulligan, a do-over, an opportunity to start anew.
Is it necessary for an individual to be a religious person in order to be an ethical or moral person? On an individual basis, probably not, but in a large, sprawling society I think it’s essential. Anyway, that’s my view. Without a calling to some higher authority, without a belief in something bigger than ourselves, we’ll never figure things out. I look on the Bible as a kind of spiritual roadmap, offering a constant touchstone that can help me withstand the ebb and flow of contemporary society, pointing me in directions that ought to be intuitive. Even better, it’s like a blueprint. Anybody can build a crooked house, but to do it right you need that blueprint. You need that foundation. And it’s easy enough to get confused, sorting through our mass media and popular culture. We are, at bottom, a country built on the principles of Christianity and Judaism, and yet we make abundant room for Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and believers of every other faith. Good for us. Good for all of us. Whoever you are, and whatever your beliefs, you can come and live among us.
We’ve tightened up our borders a bit, since September 11, 2001, and in some communities our tolerance thresholds have been challenged as we attempt to coexist with our Arab friends, but America’s open-door, melting-pot, inclusive approach remains essentially intact: You can build your temples here. You can enjoy our American way of life. You can buy into the same deal, same as anybody else, but for the whole lot of us to survive and thrive as a pulsing, booming society there needs to be that religious foundation, and there ought to be some uniformity within that foundation. Clearly, our Founding Fathers recognized this as well—celebrating our Judeo-Christian principles in our Constitution, in our Pledge of Allegiance, in our currency, and in virtually every significant building block of our American foundation. The Jewish and Christian religions that flow from these principles give us our shared conscience, and provide an essential bulwark for any free and dynamic society.
FAMILY TIES
As foundations go, not a one stands as strong as the American family, although recent developments suggest I should temper this one a bit to state that not a one has the potential to stand as strong as the American family. I think we’d all agree that there has been a steady erosion of the importance of family in our me-first, get-it-while-you-can society, and hand in hand with that erosion is a sharp increase in the national divorce rate and a steep decline in what politicians have taken to calling family values. But what are family values, after all, if not a harking back to a simpler, more innocent time, when our lives weren’t so chaotic, and our choices far less likely to get us into trouble? I grew up in a time and place where it was okay for a kid to hop on his bike first thing in the morning, ride down to the schoolyard, and spend the entire day bouncing from one unplanned activity or encounter to the next, until the sun started to sink low and it was time to pedal home for dinner. And yet times have changed, and I don’t think you’d find too many parents in too many communities who allow their children the same kind of autonomy. These days, our kids’ lives are so heavily programmed and supervised it’s a wonder they ever learn to think for themselves. It’s the lament of nearly every parent I know with young children, that their family dynamic is built around short car pool rides to dance-art-music-karate-soccer-gymnastics lessons and that there never seems to be any time for anything else. No chance to just sit and talk, or think, or read. Not enough time for our children to daydream, or to amuse themselves. Sometimes it seems that parents, particularly working parents, have become so busy that they measure their success as parents by their availability to drive those dance-art-music-karate-soccer-gymnastics car pools. Fathers playing catch with sons? You can just for
get about it in a great many American households, unless it’s a scheduled activity, with a reminder tacked to the kitchen bulletin board, to be done in the company of dozens of other harried fathers and sons on a town field.
And what about our families wracked by divorce, or desertion, or disinterest? How can we go about fixing these broken homes when so many of us can’t even manage to get it right in our intact, nuclear households? It’s enough to get you to throw up your hands in despair, and yet we press on, because we are a resilient lot, and because we are steadfastly determined to get it right for the sake of our children. That next generation is always a powerful motivator. I know in my case, I started looking at the world through a different lens once I became a father. I got around to it fairly late, and when I finally did I caught myself second-guessing a lot of my decisions, and wondering how my actions might make me look to my kids. Big things and small, it’s all about setting an example, and taking the lead, so I make sure to keep my seat belt on even when I’m in the driveway, and I make sure to treat people decently, even when it’s one of those telemarketers who seem always to interrupt us during dinner. Don’t tell your daughters one thing and do something else, I’ve learned, because they don’t care what you say; they care what you do, and they remember what you do, and they learn from what you do. Oh, you better believe it.
Our children are the greatest equalizers in the world. They keep us honest, and striving. Or, at least, they should. I often joke that we should live our lives as if there were some sort of mommy-cam or daddy-cam jury-rigged to record our every move, so that we would at all times conduct ourselves as if we were being watched by our children, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: It’s no joke. I’m serious. We should live like we’re being monitored, because we are. We are being watched. We are setting an example. We are being judged.
Lately, I catch myself wondering how much of what people say in their eulogies is actually true, and it occurs to me that we would all do well to make it our business that at least three-quarters of the nice things people say about us after we’re gone should be somewhat accurate. That seems like an attainable goal—and a lofty objective.
I think in this context of a guy like Stephen Ambrose, the great historian who fell from public esteem at the tail end of his notable career. Remember him? He wrote books about Custer and Crazy Horse and World War II. Prize-winning, best-selling, critically acclaimed histories that cast him as a true chronicler of the American experience. I’ve got his books stacked all the way to my ceiling, I thought they were just marvelous, and then I picked up the paper one day and read about how he’d been charged with plagiarizing his material. I picked up another paper the next day and there were new charges of same, and my first thought was, What am I going to do with all these books? And it wasn’t just Ambrose. For a while there, a number of prominent writers and historians were made to deflect similar allegations, including Doris Kearns Goodwin—a Harvard Ph.D. whose incisive accounts of the Kennedys and the Roosevelts and the Red Sox put her on the best-seller list, and whose apparent failure to footnote certain passages put her on the defensive.
In Goodwin’s case, she seemed to salvage a good deal of her reputation by copping to the charges against her in what ways she could. She called herself sloppy and lazy. She admitted to paraphrasing certain material, and neglecting to credit some of her sources, and readers and fellow scholars seemed to want to cut her some slack. Ambrose wasn’t so lucky. He died of lung cancer soon after all those charges were brought against him, and his reputation was perhaps permanently stained. There was a prominent obituary upon his death, and it was a beautiful tribute except for one sentence, and as I read it I wondered, How much would his family have given to take out that one sentence? What would Ambrose himself have given? Indeed, how much would all of these people pay to turn back the clock and undo their mistakes and missteps and miscalculations? To reclaim whatever it was that their parents or grandparents tried to teach them? To uphold the values that at one time or another had upheld them?
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
I went into politics for one basic reason: to change the world. It sounds like a line, and in some respects I suppose it is, but it’s also the God’s honest truth. I didn’t go into it to become a wheel in some well-oiled party machine. The Republican Party was my vehicle, not my master. That’s not what drove me. What drove me then and what continues to drive me now are ideas. Issues and ideas. Doing the right thing. Being heard. Making a difference. I was elected to the Congress of the United States at the age of thirty, and many of the people I grew up with didn’t know what to make of me because politics was such a tarnished profession. In fact, I went to one of my high school reunions at some point during my tenure in Congress, and this one guy walked up to me and said, “Hey, Johnny, I voted for you as most likely to succeed. What the hell happened?”
It was, I thought at the time, a good question, and I ask my own version of same as I consider the world we’ve all made for our children. What the hell happened? We’ve increased our federal deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars, adding to the trillions of our national debt. We’ve blown an opportunity to take some of our surpluses and put them to work saving some of our biggest, most essential social programs. We’ve let Social Security deteriorate to where more eighteen-year-olds believe they stand a better chance of seeing a UFO in their lifetime than a Social Security check. We’ve seen health care costs spiral out of control, and unconscionable legal fees scare honest, hardworking folks from starting or sustaining their own businesses. It’s downright depressing if we don’t look at the bigger picture, and the bigger picture is this: What goes around comes around. For every valley, there’s a peak. Everything’s on a pendulum, folks, and it’s only a matter of time before fate and fortune swing back in our favor. We need look no further than our recent history to remind ourselves that such swings are the nature of the American beast. Everything old is new again. Our slumps will replace themselves with hot streaks—provided we grab hold and do what we can to swing the pendulum back in a more positive direction.
Right now, as I stated at the outset, I believe we’re in a leadership slump. That’s just how it is, but it won’t be this way forever. We’ll elect and appoint new leaders and they will rise to the occasion. People say there will never be another Franklin Roosevelt, but there will be another Franklin Roosevelt. There are only a few folks still around who felt the full effects of the Great Depression, but a whole lot of us were alive to take in some of the ripple effects. You might think your 401(k) took a hit when the bubble burst on all those Internet stocks, but that was nothing up against the Depression. People jumping out of buildings. People unable to get their money out of their banks. People looking desperation in the eye and not liking what came back in the reflection. I can never shake the image of my father and his brother—my Uncle George, who later became a guidance counselor and who had a tremendous positive influence on thousands of kids—going to school in clothes fashioned from old flour sacks, that’s how hard the Depression shook our family tree. And yet Franklin Roosevelt got up on that stage at his first Inaugural and delivered a line that’s as appropriate today as it was back then: “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” That was leadership.
Roosevelt knitted together perfect strangers who all became part of a single American family. You’ve heard your fathers and your grandfathers tell you about going to the store with no money in their pockets and putting their purchases on a tab, but there was rarely any tab. These store owners carried their longtime customers because it was the right thing to do, and because Franklin Roosevelt empowered and emboldened them to do so. Because he made us feel we were all a part of the same family. Working together. Struggling together. Succeeding together.
Franklin Roosevelt led us through the Depression, and then he took us through a world war with the same unflagging principles. In 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, 95 percent of the American people said it was none of our business. He
ck, there were even people inside the Roosevelt administration who suggested we make a deal with Hitler. Can you imagine what the world would look like today had we made a deal with Hitler? It’s unthinkable, and yet we came through that Depression and that world war and we emerged as the most powerful nation in the history of the world. That’s leadership. That’s courage, and vision. And that’s inspiring people to a higher purpose.
Back to sports again, for just a beat. I can’t write about that time in American history without invoking Jesse Owens, the dazzling runner. There’s a monument to him outside Ohio Stadium, and he is always very much on the minds of the folks in my hometown, so he stands front and center as I write this. You want to talk about leadership? This was a guy who stood up to Adolf Hitler in those Olympic games in Berlin, and showed the world what it meant to be free. He didn’t pump his fist in the air, or gyrate his hips, or showboat like some of today’s athletes. He just went out and got it done, and in so doing he made a powerful statement that shook the world.
Now, consider what passes for leadership in some parts of the world today. The spiritual head of Hamas, the radical Palestinian group, sends a woman (the mother of two children) on a suicide bombing mission in a busy Israeli square. She wears a belt filled with dynamite, and also with bullets and screws so that when she exploded she could kill more people. Not soldiers, but innocent men and women. And children. This made headlines the same week we celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday in this country, and I had a hard time considering the one without the other. The violence against the nonviolence. The swing of the pendulum that will inevitably swing back our way once more. King wrote, “No law of man that does not square with the law of God is moral.” He wrote this from a Birmingham jail cell, and in the same missive he vowed not to return violence with violence, and when he was released from jail he marched. His supporters complained that they were being beaten and gassed, but still he marched, and in so doing he offered the kind of inspirational leadership and determination that ultimately connected with our shared sense of decency and justice. And all across the country, in white suburban America, people took up King’s cause. We demanded change on the strength of his leadership.