Stand for Something

by John Kasich

  Of course, political intrigue and smear tactics are nothing new, and you can find distressing parallels between our modern elections and some of the (quite literal) backstabbing and infighting that went on in ancient Roman times, but things seem to have kicked up a notch with the advent of C-SPAN coverage and twenty-four-hour cable news channels, to where the venom and vitriol have gotten away from us.

  Nowadays, backroom negotiations and eleventh-hour deal making are considered fodder for the political pundits and the news junkies, and even the smallest initiative is subject to the kind of big-time second-guessing that can swing an election or kill a sound proposal. Good candidates are discouraged from even seeking office because they haven’t lived campaign-perfect lives (translation: they smoked marijuana in college, opposed the war in Vietnam, failed to declare wages paid to a domestic employee, or committed some other unforgivable transgression or crime against polite society), while weak candidates are propped up by party leaders as the best and the brightest when in truth they might just be the least objectionable. It’s enough to make you question how we even manage to function as a society, let alone thrive.

  Unfortunately, I don’t see anyone out there on our political landscape likely to stand against the tide of all these negatives. Not just yet, anyway. The prevailing strategy seems to be to ride it all out and hope for the best, but that’s not any kind of strategy. That’s wishful thinking, and wishful thinking is simply not going to get us anywhere close to where we need to be on this—not anytime soon. We need true and effective and inspiring leadership. We need for our elected officials to stand once again for America. And we need these things now more than ever before. We need our politicians to rail against the status quo, and to put the best interests of our children and grandchildren ahead of their own interests. We need to turn sharply from a system that grants our candidates and their party backers the right to cut each other’s legs out from under them, to pander for votes and peddle their influence, and to slick-package the truth and the public interest in such a way that it bolsters their campaigns. Like it or not—and here I check in on the side of not, in case you were wondering—politics has become a blood sport; it’s all about winning, and only a little bit about governing, and to my thinking the balance is all off.

  STANDING TALL

  Integrity isn’t a virtue you hear all that much about in our various branches of government, and not because it’s a given (which, of course, it should be) but because it’s so uncommon. I served in Congress with a principled man named Tim Penny. He was a Democrat from Minnesota whose frustration with Washington politics reached a tipping point when President Clinton proposed a big tax increase with few spending cuts, going against his own campaign promise. Tim had enough with empty Washington rhetoric, so what did he do? He quit, that’s what he did. You might think, Well, what in the world did that accomplish? In the short term, probably not a whole lot. The folks in Tim’s congressional district lost a good man in Washington, so on the surface Tim Penny’s response to Bill Clinton’s about-face actually cost the good people back home, but very quickly Tim took on a kind of folk-hero status—in Congress, in Minnesota, and across this great land. His stature grew enormously, simply because he took a stand. He was disillusioned with Clinton’s plan, and with a political system that seemed bound to support it; more to the point, he didn’t like how Clinton promised one thing and then went out and did another, so he stood against it.

  Tim Penny went on to run for governor, and he was defeated, but that could never diminish his reputation for doing the right thing. We’ll hear from him again, believe me, because this country needs good people who sound off against injustice and cowardice and avarice, folks like Tim who call it like they see it—and then go out and do something about it.

  Like Tim, I find this sea change in such groupthink-type political perspective more than a little offensive—and what most offends me as an American citizen is the way we’ve allowed that us-versus-them mentality to take hold. I repeat myself, I know, but it’s an all-important point. It’s the defining rift of our times, and on some very basic level at least it all comes back to those C-SPAN cameras, and that round-the-clock news coverage, and that win-at-all-costs approach in our campaigns. Or maybe it’s the blind reliance on pollsters and focus groups. Whatever it is, we’ve gotten to where the middle ground has collapsed around us, and we’ve been left on either edge of the precipice—afraid to take a step in any direction.

  To some people, compromise has become a dirty word in politics, but I don’t see it quite that way. Tim Penny didn’t see it that way, either. To compromise doesn’t mean to sell out. It doesn’t mean that you sacrifice your principles. It doesn’t mean that you bend to every special interest other than your constituents’. It means listening to the opinions of others, and respecting those opinions, and recognizing the value in searching for solutions built on consensus—and yet it’s within this great divide that we find many of the root ills of our political system.

  In my own career, very early on, I was constantly pressured by party leaders or legislative and congressional colleagues to toe this or that line, and I did my level best to ignore such coercion and lead with my gut. I would not be told how to vote or what to say, and yet there was significant pressure to do just that—on just about a daily basis. A couple weeks after I was elected to the Ohio state senate, for just one example, I was called to the governor’s office for a meeting on real estate taxes. The governor was a Republican, and a man I came to admire, but we differed on this one. He was proposing that there be no more voting on real estate taxes, and I thought this was just outrageous. I couldn’t even begin to understand the governor’s position. I mean, how can you put real estate taxes on the table without giving the people a chance to weigh in on it?

  So there I was, all of twenty-six years old, sitting around the governor’s desk with a bunch of men all fifteen or twenty years older than me (at least!), and I wasn’t about to be intimidated. We were all eating take-out hamburgers from Wendy’s, as we always did in these meetings because the governor was a shareholder, and I sat there with that wax fast food paper in my lap, waiting for one of the more senior legislators to say something, but when no one did I spoke up. I said, “Governor, I can’t vote for something like that. It’s just not right.”

  Let me tell you, I would have gotten a warmer response if I’d suggested that McDonald’s hamburgers were tastier than Wendy’s. The office fell silent, and the governor shot me this icy stare to put me in my place. My position may have been right and just, but it certainly wasn’t appreciated. Realize, I had already (and quite publicly) refused a pay raise, and now I was standing against this proposal on real estate taxes, and these people had probably heard just about enough out of this junior legislator.

  I found myself in another tense meeting just a few weeks later, with a group of local judges who were pushing for a pay raise of their own—this at a time when state employees were feeling the economic strain of a decades-old wage scale. I’d thought I was attending a dinner to discuss various issues affecting the community, but as the evening wore on it was clear this pay raise was all the judges wanted to talk about. I finally said, “Gentlemen, I’m not going to vote for a pay raise for judges until our state employees get a raise.”

  If any one of these guys had a gavel, he would have had at it and cited me with contempt of court. As it happened, all I got was their contempt. The judges started screaming at me, and telling me I would never amount to anything in politics, and kicking up the kind of dust you don’t normally see at such distinguished heels. One judge, with tongue only partly in cheek, suggested that if I ever got into any kind of trouble, I’d better be sure it wasn’t in his Franklin County jurisdiction. Man, these people were just furious with me, and I’m not sure I was right and that the judges weren’t entitled to pay raises for all their hard work and good counsel, but I told them what I thought. It was a priority to these judges, but only on a personal level; in my
mind the lower-level state employees had to come first.

  MR. KASICH GOES TO WASHINGTON (AGAIN)

  At the end of my four-year term as a state senator, I was faced with a difficult decision—owing mainly to redistricting. I could challenge one of the few mentors I’d cultivated in the legislature, a veteran state senator named Ted Gray who had gone out of his way to ease some of my growing pains as a young legislator. Or, I could run for Congress. I couldn’t see running a campaign against a friend and mentor who had helped me put my experiences in valuable perspective, so I made the decision to move on, running my congressional campaign as a sitting state senator, and as I did I looked back on some of the lessons I’d learned in the legislature. I realized I’d developed enormous respect for people who were fighters. It didn’t matter to me if they were Republicans or Democrats. It didn’t matter if we stood on the same side of a given issue. What mattered was whether or not they were principled, whether they fought for their values and beliefs. We might have differed on certain issues, but there was a mutual respect. I wouldn’t go so far as to call these relationships friendships, mind you, because of the old saw that suggests if you want a friend in politics you should buy a dog, but I had a good working relationship with several of our most liberal legislators, and it is only underneath such mutual respect that you can begin to explore common ground, and I set off for Washington in search of that common ground—not really having any idea what I would find.

  When I first told my dad I was going to run for office, he suggested I consider a career in banking instead. I don’t think he fully appreciated my impulse, but as I stated earlier, I went into politics to change the world. My family and friends in McKees Rocks had never known anyone in politics—and the idea that someone could be driven to make big, positive changes was unfamiliar to them because they didn’t know it firsthand. But they knew me, and they knew my mother’s determination to “fight City Hall” must have rubbed off on me, so I had their full support. They knew that my heart was in, around, and all over the right place, and that I meant to make a difference. I wasn’t out to play games or go through the motions of party loyalty, and if I saw a clear path toward a solution to a given problem that happened to meander through territory of my more liberal colleagues I meant to take it.

  We’re all driven by our own impulses, and there are as many different justifications to seeking office as there are candidates doing the seeking, and yet I maintain that a great majority of the people who initially set out for a career in politics do so for reasons that are noble and admirable. It’s what happens next that’s got me so concerned. You know, I have a good friend who was recently elected to the United States Senate. He spent millions to get elected, and he ran a good, straightforward campaign. I called to congratulate him not long after he took office, and before we had a chance to talk about our families or our golf games or anything else, he wanted to know how he could start raising more money for his reelection campaign. That’s the great catch-22 of our political system, isn’t it? You need money to win elections—and yet it’s the reliance on money that gets us into trouble, and it’s the insatiable desire for more and more of it that ultimately limits independence. For the most part, you get your money from the people who have it, and by and large too much of that money comes from special interest groups. The key here, though, is that just because someone or some group gives money to your campaign, it doesn’t mean they own you. Like every other politician in Washington, I took money from special interest groups, but in my case it never amounted to much, and as time went on these special interest groups were less and less inclined to contribute to my campaigns because they could never count on getting anything in return. I worked hard to ensure that the money never got in the way of my good judgment, but a lot of folks don’t make that effort, and when you have these huge gobs of money it begins to whittle down the system. It takes the edge off someone’s ability to make an honest assessment of a situation.

  Today, a mounting federal deficit and growing holes in our Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlement programs are threatening a financial meltdown, and the Bush administration is up against it. These are the front-burner issues of our day, but early on in my tenure in Washington we were facing a whole other muddle. I landed on the Defense Committee during my first few terms in Congress, which back then meant planning and plotting against the Russians. Six years into my tenure, I joined the Budget Committee, because I knew from my days in the Ohio legislature that the budget drives everything. I remember going to my first Budget Committee meeting like it was yesterday. I was stunned. On the Defense Committee, everybody sort of got along; for the most part, we all wanted to beat the Communists and there wasn’t much partisanship. On the Budget Committee, though, folks were tearing each other’s arms off. Every line item, or just about, was a fierce battle.

  I’ll get back to my work on the Defense Committee in just a bit, but I want to spend some time on the budget process because I think it’s instructive. I was overwhelmed at how little there was to fight over, because both budgets were deeply flawed proposals. Bush the First, his budget was terrible. And the Democratic budget was even worse. So I went back to my office and announced to my staff that we would write our own budget. They looked at me like I had blown a gasket, but I was dead serious. Why? Well, I happened to believe in balanced budgets, plain and simple. The business of government should be a value business just like any other. How can you go year after year, spending more than you take in? You just can’t. What about our responsibility to our children? We can’t saddle all these succeeding generations with an insurmountable debt just because it’s easier than achieving present-day accountability, and yet for too long that had been the default course.

  THE BOTTOM LINES

  The White House had the vast resources of the federal government working on its budget. The Democrats had hundreds of people crunching numbers on their version. In my office, we had six people on the job, and before we rolled up our sleeves and got down to it I said in all seriousness, “Well, we might be slightly overstaffed, but I think we can work it out.”

  And we did. We worked our tails off to get it done, but we got it done and managed to present a real budget with real changes, and if you check the Congressional Record you’ll see that in 1989 there was offered on the House floor the President’s budget, and the Democrats’ rebuttal budget, and the Kasich budget. Understand, a budget needs 218 votes out of a possible 435 to win passage, and the party in power always tends to prevail in these things. In actual practice, the budgeting process is a whole lot like a WWE Smackdown; it gets interesting and heated at times, but you always know how it’s going to turn out. It’s a very partisan endeavor. In these days of wall-to-wall television coverage, they flash the votes up on the screen for God and country to consider, so everyone knows where their elected officials stand, but back in 1989 that was not yet the case. (Actually, C-SPAN had been doing its thing since 1979, but folks weren’t watching in any kind of big way, and we’d yet to see all those cable news channels devoted to analyzing every nuance from the House floor, the way we see today.) We voted first on the Democratic budget. They were in the majority at that time, and they received 230 votes. Then we voted on the Bush budget, which received 213 votes, falling just short. The Kasich budget received 30 votes of approval.

  I went back to my office to talk to my staff after the vote. Everyone was deeply depressed. I said, “What’s wrong with you people? Are you crazy? I’m a mailman’s son, and we just had twenty-nine other elected members of Congress vote to adopt our budget to run the United States government. That’s fantastic, and we’re just getting started.”

  Every year I offered my own budget for consideration, and by the third or fourth year my budget received more votes than the President got for his budget, and in so doing I learned a few things about leadership. Leadership is not talking. Leadership is doing. Every time they beat my budget on the floor of the House and I lay there in a bloody heap, p
eople knew I was committed. It wasn’t talk. It was action. The other great thing about leadership is this: You can’t accomplish anything without a team. And, if you have a righteous cause people will come to that cause. I don’t care what it is. Little by little, year by year, my team built bigger and stronger and more viable budgets—each of them fiscally, socially, morally, and even politically responsible—and as a result of these efforts I leaped over seven other congressmen more senior than me to become the senior Republican on the Budget Committee. And then in 1995 when the Republicans won the majority I became chairman of the House Budget Committee and I thought, Okay, we’re cooking now. We were poised and ready to balance the budget for the first time since man walked on the moon—and I was right there in the middle of it, mixing it up, making a difference.

  As it happened, President Clinton wanted to phony up the numbers on this first go-round, so we shut down the government. Today, with perspective, pundits look back and suggest that shutting down the government under those circumstances was dumb, but I look back and think it was one of the greatest moments of my career. Why? Well, typically, politicians make their decisions based on votes. They’ll side this way or that way on an issue according to public opinion polls and reelection concerns. And yet in at least this one instance politicians set aside these concerns and stood up for what was right. For our children. For our shared future. For America. For this one battle, for the time being, we forgot about politics and focused on good government, and if we had to take a beating for it then so be it. And as a direct result of that government shutdown in 1995, we wrote a bill that provided for the first balanced budget in nearly forty years and allowed us to pay down the largest chunk of our staggering national debt in the history of this country. In all, not too bad for a guy who started out with only thirty votes in support of his first budget.