Republican Gov. John Kasich in his office at the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio (Photo: Joshua A. Bickel for Yahoo News)
It’s a frozen February evening in West Virginia, and John Kasich has gotten sidetracked yet again. For two full days, Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, has been wooing local legislators and jousting with the press as he tours Columbia, S.C., and Charleston, W.Va., in support of his longtime hobbyhorse: a federal balanced-budget amendment.
He has also been telling everyone who asks, including a growing gaggle of national reporters (CNN’s Gloria Borger, Bloomberg’s Dave Weigel) that he is thinking about running for president in 2016. “I’m taking no options off the table in terms of my future,” Kasich, 62, declared in South Carolina — a pivotal early-primary state, and the first of many he plans to visit. (New Hampshire is next on March 24.) “I hope to do a significant amount of traveling.”
But for now, at least, the traveling is over. It’s time to relax. Kasich and his entourage are about to leave the West Virginia Statehouse. Outside, the governor’s private plane is waiting to whisk him back to Ohio; an aide confirms that there is wine onboard.
The only hitch, as anyone who has ever met him can confirm, is that Kasich cannot relax.
“Energy is what drives things,” he will tell me later. “Excitement! Progress! Innovation! Forward! Discover America! Find the Pacific Ocean! Climb the mountain! Chart the course! Change the world! Land on the moon! Go to Mars! I mean, that’s my job. My job is to say to people, ‘Go do it. Go! Go West, young man! But let me know where you are, OK? ’Cause I don’t want to have to send a bunch of people out to save you because you didn’t have a canoe to get across the Missouri River.’”
Photo: Joshua A. Bickel for Yahoo News
This is how Kasich is. His colleagues in Congress — Kasich represented Ohio’s 12th House District for 18 years and rose to national prominence as the chief architect of the GOP’s historic 1997 balanced-budget deal with President Clinton — used to joke about dosing him with Ritalin. His speaking voice is a marble-mouthed Pittsburgh bark. It tends to be several notches louder than the prevailing level of conversation. When he is not speaking, which is not often, his lips flutter and purse, desperate to get back in the game. He starts to answer questions before you can finish asking them. Even his hair, a bristly clipper cut, looks perpetually on edge, as if it has just endured yet another night of tossing, turning, restless sleep.
“What’s that?” Kasich says to no one in particular.
He is staring at a large black poster, one of several lining the walls of the Statehouse’s main corridor. He unfolds his reading glasses. The whole thing — an antismoking advertisement — is covered with handwritten notecards from children who have been “touched by tobacco.”
Kasich leans closer. “Jim!” he says. “You gotta see this!” Kasich’s traveling press adviser trots over. A few seconds later, Kasich spies Tim Armstead, the speaker of the West Virginia House. “Speaker!” he shouts. “You should talk about that” — Kasich taps one of the notecards — “in the House. You should talk about it on the floor. I’m so touched by this. I mean, God — these children, they need us. We need to work on this.”
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