by John Kasich
Regrettably, we’ve increased the national debt at an unbelievably alarming rate, and along the way we’ve blown the opportunity to take some of our surpluses and put them to work saving some of our biggest, most essential social programs. But we were on it, for a while. We had it covered, for a while, until we let ourselves be swayed by a new agenda that had almost nothing to do with fiscal responsibility.
Looking back, I’m as proud of my work on the Budget Committee as I am of anything else I did in government—and that pride runs well beyond the bottom line on the balanced budget we eventually put forward. It’s about something more than just patting ourselves on the back, and here it is: For a brief, shining moment, our system was firing on all cylinders, and working the way it was meant to work, and I count myself lucky to have been a part of it. Realize, beginning in 1993, when our committee first came together from all different parts of the country, representing all different interests and all different political perspectives and agendas, we made a concerted effort to look past our conflicting interests and work toward a common goal. We were from New York, and Ohio, and the South, and the Pacific Northwest. There was even a congressman on our committee from Iowa who didn’t understand New York City and everything it represented, contending that New Yorkers could never understand the economy of the West—and on this, he was probably right.
COMING TOGETHER, COMING APART
But even though we came from all points on the American compass, we recognized that it was our job to offer some type of direction for our shared economic future, and so we looked at one another and made a decision that we would all hang together or we would simply hang. And it was something to see, the way these dug-in politicians were good to their word. One by one, they gave up programs and expenditures that had been a high priority for them going into this process—in many cases, items that were critical to their reelections—and I watched them stand tall in the name of doing something for our children, for our shared future. For America. Indeed, we watched one another take beating after beating from our local newspapers back home. We shut down the government and took turns being mocked and criticized by our constituents. But we didn’t break. We didn’t bend. We lowered our heads and got it done, and at the other end we came to understand the power of team, the power of sacrifice, and the power of government when it’s able to set aside all these other interests and give folks a chance to demonstrate courage and commitment.
Sad to say, we’ve drifted from that great, shining moment, and I look on now from my sideline perspective and wonder what will happen next. You can only march an army so far before it has to stop to rest, recharge, and reconnoiter, and right now we’re stuck waiting for someone to get us marching again. Right now, the pendulum has swung back toward the wicked part of politics—staying in power, worshipping reelection, caring only about party loyalty, not associating with the other side, always wanting to be right—and it’s all made worse by these so-called political pundits who have lately come to inform our national debate on any number of issues.
Just who are these people? They’ve never held office, never run for office, and yet they loom as armchair quarterbacks, pontificating in black-and-white on complex issues that don’t lend themselves to simple solutions. If you’re not in there doing it, then you can’t really understand what it’s all about. These folks start moving the public into silos, painting everyone who dares to disagree with them as the enemy. In radio, they call it narrowcasting, when a talk show is targeted to a specific demographic such as conservative middle-class males, making it easier and more cost-effective for advertisers to reach out to their intended audience. In reality, I call it divisive—and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The pundits and analysts and experts start lining up their supporters and putting them into these silos, and the next thing we know we’re all of us lined up against one another, unable to see another point of view because we’ve surrounded ourselves with all these like-minded perspectives. The constant drumbeat of this us-versus-them-type message leaves us all thinking our point of view is the only point of view, and that anyone who takes an opposing view is somehow un-American.
In the middle of all this, we now have a federal deficit that once again threatens to choke our government and our economy, a Social Security system that’s melting down, a health care system that’s floundering at best, retirees losing their pensions, and on and on. Heck, General Motors may end up declaring bankruptcy if it can’t figure out how to deal with its health care costs, that’s how far we’ve fallen, and it’s threatening the financial security of this country. My daughters’ future! And I’m bitter about it, because it doesn’t have to be this way. I was privileged to see firsthand that it doesn’t have to be that way, and I mean to shine a light on that privilege so that others might see it as a kind of beacon.
Our Founding Fathers got it right, didn’t they? Limited government. The strength and character of our elected officials. This is what politics is all about. At times, it’ll fire on all cylinders and consider the public interest ahead of the special interest; it’ll weigh the future ahead of the present. Our politicians will get it right. They’ll stand up even when people are threatening to burn down their homes, and they’ll bring about equal rights. They’ll stand up and vote for the cuts and changes in the federal budget, in order to get it balanced. I’ve seen it happen, and I will see it again. Someone will alight on our political landscape and give that army some new marching orders. It’s just that I don’t see it happening anytime soon, which I guess means that things have to get a little worse before they start getting better. Perhaps it’s only in moments of profound crisis that our leaders feel empowered to rise up against the tide of conventional thinking, and maybe we’re just not there yet. That’s where we’re headed, and I worry that the solutions of tomorrow are going to be a whole lot more difficult to achieve than if we had some strong leadership in place today, but that pendulum will swing back before too long and it will be all to the good. That army will be refreshed and resume its march, and folks will once again come together and stand tall and accomplish great things. You can count on it.
THE B-2 BATTLE
Now, let me amend what I wrote earlier about my time on the Defense Committee: It’s not entirely accurate to suggest that everybody got along because we were united against a common enemy. In addition to the Russians, there was another enemy working against U.S. interests at the time, and that was the status quo. It’s the number one drag on our bottom line—in every arena, and in the political arena it can be a real party killer. I may have been strong on defense, but at the same time I was openly critical of the excess spending in every aspect of the federal budget, which cast me as a kind of cheap hawk and served to essentially alienate me from everyone on both sides of every argument, and made for more than a few tense moments with colleagues who had no room in their thinking for shades of gray.
And, as astonished as I was to discover some of the wasteful spending in the Pentagon budget, I was even more astonished that hardly anyone was speaking out against it. The mantra in Washington at the time was to trim the fat from our social welfare and entitlement programs. But to take the welfare out of the Pentagon? Well, that was tantamount to signing my own pink slip. And to do so as a cheap hawk Republican, who walked the political tightrope of being strong on defense and tight with a dollar, was pretty much like walking the streets of Washington with a “Kick Me!” sign taped to my back. One of my congressional colleagues even called me a traitor to our country, that’s how out there my position seemed to be among the hawks in the Republican Party, but my feeling was that we needed to ferret out this waste no matter where we found it—and if it cost me some political currency then that would be a small price to pay.
Not incidentally, I thought about jumping across the table and punching the guy who called me a traitor, at a budget meeting in Newt Gingrich’s office, but even I could see this would not have been a good career move. To be sure, it was one of the seminal m
oments of my time in office, and it remains so because I chose to take the high road and rise above all that party line nonsense. I let the comment hang there and sink in, and then I looked at this guy and said, “You’ll be lying in bed tonight, and you won’t be able to get your own words out of your head. You’ll regret what you said, and you’ll want to call me and apologize, but let me save you the trouble. I forgive you. I’m not mad. You just don’t know any better.”
Clearly, it was not considered good politics to go up against the pro-defense lobby, especially for a Republican, but I didn’t think it was good government to keep signing off on these ridiculous expenditures. Most ridiculous of all, I came to think, was the development of the B-2 stealth bomber, which at the outset was presented as an essential weapon against the Soviets. I used to listen to the B-2 proponents, spinning all their tales of gloom and doom, and glory and might, and get the feeling I had stepped into some overproduced Cold War action movie. In any given year, the development of the B-2 was a relatively small line item in the overall defense budget, but the long-term plans for the bomber would be realized at a staggering cost, over time. At anywhere from $1 billion to $2 billion per plane, it seemed a colossal misuse of taxpayer monies—and a misguided defense strategy, to boot—and I never understood why we needed to fly a plane around inside the Soviet Union in the middle of a nuclear war, just to drop some more nukes! It made no sense. As I understood it, one nuke was enough to give the Russians a really bad day, so why spend all this money on overkill? And we weren’t talking about just one B-2. Initially, there was to be a squadron of 132 of these bombers, a number that was whittled down to seventy-five and eventually to twenty, although even that figure remained open for discussion.
Once again, the discussion flowed from a bipartisan group that stood together in the face of strong party pressure to stand down. And once again, I was privileged to be a part of that group, although it was a lonely fight at the outset. In the beginning, it was just me and my good friend Ron Dellums, a decidedly liberal black Democrat from Berkeley, California, who would go on to become chairman of the Armed Services Committee. We were an unlikely pair, to throw in together over such as this, but we saw this one issue through a similar lens. Over the next ten years, our opposition effort grew to where our fiscally and patriotically sound arguments became more and more popular, but it wasn’t an easy position to take in the early going. Only a few Republicans stood against the defense establishment in those days—and yet there we were, standing for something we all believed was right and good for the future of America.
At one point, Dick Cheney made a side deal with me to freeze the number of planes on order at twenty, in exchange for my agreeing to back down in my fight, which Newt Gingrich and company could then take as my grudging support. We even shook hands on it, and yet a year or so later Cheney was out there thumping for forty. I went onto the House floor and accused him of breaking his word, and to this day he despises me for it, but I felt it was the right thing to do, to call him out in this public way.
We should all be accountable for our actions, wouldn’t you agree? Parents, teachers, businessmen and -women . . . and yes, even our government leaders. Especially our government leaders. It seemed to me, then and still, that if we are vested with the power to broker deals, and to negotiate with one another for our support of various bills or programs or measures, then we are honor-bound to live up to those agreements, even if they are made on the fly or in some back room or corridor. We ought to be good to our word—because, in the end, that’s all we’ve got. “In God We Trust” . . . it says as much right there on our dollar bills. But what about our government officials? We should have a few more reasons to trust in them as well.
Back to that B-2 fight. For my money, which I tended to see as the American taxpayers’ money, I wanted to cancel the plan and redirect some of those funds to develop standoff weapons, a relatively new technology at the time, one that would allow us to accurately fire against our enemies at tremendous distance from our targets. Now, nearly twenty years later, these so-called smart weapons are an essential part of our defense arsenal, and have been put to both cost-effective and tactically effective use, but back then our party was prepared to throw massive amounts into its B-2 program. For a time, many of the major defense contractors and subcontractors in America would have loved to have seen me get hit by a cement truck, that’s how incensed people were at my position. Thankfully, I wasn’t standing alone. Ron Dellums was right there alongside me, stride for stride, and together we lifted our voices and hoped to start a chorus. We were indeed an unlikely pair, but we became great friends along the way. I’ll never forget our very first press conference. There was a reporter from the Chicago Tribune and another from the Columbus Dispatch, and then there was the two of us, and I remember thinking we were pretty much alone in this fight.
(I also remember thinking we’d need to do a much better job getting support for our position, considering that we couldn’t even drag Dellums’s hometown paper to our first press conference!)
It was the fight of our political lives. You don’t just kill a major weapons system like the B-2 stealth bomber, but that’s what we set out to do. We fought the Republicans. We fought the Democrats. We fought every special interest group that took a special interest in the fight. And our hands were tied the whole way. We couldn’t give out PAC money. We couldn’t fly people out to California to get a look at these planes. It didn’t happen overnight, but we got it done. After ten relentless years, during which Ron Dellums and I refused to back down and managed to bring a whole bunch of good people over to our side of the debate, from both sides of the aisle, production was stopped after those twenty planes, and it marked the first time in the twentieth century that a major weapons system had been halted.
ON REFLECTION
For too long in this country, the definition of good politics has been success—meaning how successful you’ve been in seeking and retaining office—but that’s not my definition of good politics, and it certainly isn’t my definition of success. To me, good politics is not winning, it’s doing. More than that, it’s doing the right thing—doing right by your constituents, doing right by your principles, doing right by the values that shaped and defined you as a child. If you win, that’s great. If you lose, that’s okay, too, as long as you were true to those values, and true to your word, and true to yourself. That, to me, is success. If you don’t get elected, you can move on. There are worse things in life than standing for something and losing an election as a result. Life goes on, and there are bigger and better opportunities around every corner. I truly believe that.
By the time I was elected to my final term in Congress in 1998, I could see that the Republicans were faltering. The discipline we had demonstrated on the budget was lost. The ability to seek out our Democratic colleagues and to build consensus on a variety of issues was suddenly beyond our reach. Where there had only recently been a strong sense of purpose and resolve and sacrifice there was once again a vacuum, and this was especially troubling because this was a crowd that had done some great things in my political lifetime. Not only did we balance the budget, but we paid down the largest amount of debt in our nation’s history. We saw the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet “evil empire.” It had been “morning in America,” as Ronald Reagan reminded us—and what a wonderful morning it was. And yet without a spirited and inspiriting leader like Reagan to guide us, we had started to give it all back, to where we were once again operating in business-as-usual mode, and I started to think the Founding Fathers had been right to seek a limited government, because at any given time the generally good people who occupy that government are likely to be swayed by so many outside forces and special interests that we’ll need to put some checks and balances in place to keep everyone honest.
I also started to think that perhaps I might offer some of that leadership, and so I threw my hat in the ring as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination i
n 2000. Recall, it had been one of my childhood dreams to become President of the United States, and here I caught myself thinking that even if my reach happened to exceed my grasp on this one I would do well to reach just the same. Just as it was with my first campaign for the state senate, I didn’t have a whole lot of resources, and pundits didn’t give me any real shot at winning, but I kept at it for as long as my money held out, and one of the main reasons I held on was because I believed deeply in what I was talking about. I thought I had some pretty good ideas, and I wanted to give them a hearing, but at the same time I didn’t want to go into debt. The shocker, to most everyone around me, was that when I announced that I was folding the tent on my presidential campaign, I also announced that I was retiring from Congress. Why? Because I had started to think there just weren’t enough hours left in my days for me to accomplish everything I wanted to accomplish in elected office, and that I could perhaps do some of those things more effectively in the private sector. I could stand on the outside looking in, and work to bring about change from a new perspective. Anyway, I thought, I could give it a try.
And then a curious thing happened. I started to realize that no one really remembers you once you leave office. Most politicians don’t understand this until they step off the political treadmill and even then we’re slow to cop to it. But I recognized that the impact most of us manage to make is no more lasting than a footprint in the sand. Like athletes, our time at the top is short; our legacies, if we managed to build them at all, fade quickly from memory. When the tide comes in, and time marches on, our contributions are all but lost—and all that remains, at best, is a snapshot. I guess I’m mixing my metaphors again on this one, but you get the idea. Politicians have to ask themselves how they want to be remembered, and to accept that they most likely won’t be remembered at all. What do we want that snapshot to be? How do I want to answer my daughters when they ask me what I did when I was in office? Do I want to be able to say that I was a good Republican, or a good Democrat, and leave it at that? I don’t think so. That’s not enough. Not even close.