IT’S HIS PARTY

Kasich is often all jazzed up — among people who follow politicians he’s famous for this already, these rapidly blinking eyes, the shrugging shoulders, the restless hands and drumming fingers. Even sitting here on his couch, theoretically at rest, he is a near-riot of activity. He crosses and uncrosses his legs, props his Adidas up on a coffee table, sweeps the air with his arms and folds them across his chest and plumps the sofa cushion. His synapses seem to fire at twice the rate of any normal human being’s.

Anyway, he wants to talk off the record about this news story he’s just read; it has something to do with the separation of church and state and it involves a Democratic colleague of his and he’d rather not be quoted saying anything critical, but this is an issue that exercises him greatly, that he’s been thinking about for a very long time, really since the beginning of his career, and if we don’t come to terms in this country with this imbalance, this absolute craziness that happens when people make paramount this idea of individual rights over the community good, then really we’re not going to come to terms in this country with the . . .

“Um,” Kasich says, stopping himself and pointing to my tape recorder, “you might want to turn that on now. This is pretty good.”

And it is pretty good (you can judge for yourself in a moment). But what makes it interesting and worth repeating is that John Kasich is running for president — not technically, of course, not officially, though he is refreshingly uncoy about his ambition — and no one seems to think his running is a thoroughly ridiculous idea even though he is a relatively obscure congressman from Ohio. And the reason no one thinks it’s ridiculous is that John Kasich, more than any other Republican politician, more than Newt Gingrich even, occupies the center of gravity of the Republican party these days. He is 45 years old, he has been in the House of Representatives 14 years, he has been obsessed with budget cutting and budget balancing for his entire career, and the Republican party has come to him at last. The party is now where he is, but he was there first. So when he decides he wants to run for president, as he almost certainly has, the way he runs tells us a lot about the Republican party. Here in 1997, John Kasich is Mr. Republican. For better or worse.

“I have a message I feel compelled to talk about,” he tells reporters when he’s asked whether he’ll run for president, “not just in terms of what we’ve been doing to balance the budget, but the larger message of how the Republican party can essentially lead the way in terms of saving our culture.”

That’s what he’s talking about now, here in his living room in Westerville, this larger message beyond balanced budgets. So let’s go to the audiotape:

“I think what’s happening is, we’re on a rampage to secularize American society. I think it’s the uniqueness of America, if you look at de Tocqueville or if you look at Lincoln, or whether you look at Martin Luther King, all of their observations are that America can’t be separated from its values. And de Tocqueville probably more than anybody.

“I think it’s fair to say we’re a unique country where the church and state are separate, and should be separate. But what’s been happening over the course of the last thirty years — maybe since Madalyn Murray O’Hair is that we have been attempting to secularize everything. You know, it’s called synchronicity. It’s to me a great term — the Police sang about it, remember that song? It’s about a balance, isn’t it, about this unique relationship between certain things. There needs to be a synchronicity between the church and state in America. What’s been happening is that the state has been encroaching, trying to secularize those areas where people need to have values based on their faith. We’re out of balance. The state has so secularized society that it’s paralyzed us.”

Maybe the message isn’t quite ready for a full-dress unveiling — he’s been road-testing it (to switch metaphors) in speeches around the country, particularly and portentously at appearances in New Hampshire and Iowa — but you get the drift of Kasich’s thinking, wafting from Lincoln to the unavoidable Tocqueville, through Madalyn Murray O’Hair to the unlikely Sting, lead singer of the Police. As he prepares to run for president, Kasich the budgetmeister, the master of numbers, is becoming increasingly allusive intellectually. On his coffee table is a pile of working papers — a memo from his staff distilling into a few pages the central themes of Orestes Brownson’s The American Republic, also a letter from an informal adviser containing ready-to-quote passages from Edmund Burke “on the need for values,” as Kasich says. They reflect the perfectly admirable crash self-improvement course that politicians often undertake when they are about to go national.

But in fashioning his post-budget-deal message, Kasich may be getting ahead of himself. Though he successfully shepherded the agreement through the Congress, the deal itself remains controversial. Most of the Washington conservative establishment — the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, etc., etc., not to mention THE WEEKLY STANDARD – – has come out against it. The week we spoke in Westerville, the Wall Street Journal had unloaded a blistering editorial titled “William Jefferson Kasich.”

“John Kasich and company have become Clintonian in their ability to call a square a circle,” the Journal’s editors wrote. “The political truth about this budget is that Republicans are selling out their agenda in return for President Clinton’s blessing.”

Kasich has never been particularly comfortable with the party’s right wing; he is not, ideologically or temperamentally, a movement guy. He prefers to call himself a populist. His longstanding crusade against “corporate welfare” — tax loopholes and outright subsidies granted various American businesses — has alienated the Big Business lobby. He is roundly disliked on the national- security committee, on which he sits, for his efforts to halt production of the B-2 bomber and to push vaguely defined “Pentagon reforms.” His interest in environmentalism has led one member of the leadership to call him a “green squish.” (His Jeep in the driveway boasts a “Save the Elephants” bumper sticker from the World Wildlife Fund.) Being a deficit-obsessive, he came late to the cause of tax cuts, and in 1994 he was one of a handful of Republicans to vote for Bill Clinton’s crime bill. When the bill passed narrowly, over near-unanimous GOP opposition, he gave an impassioned speech in its defense. “This is the way we will govern this House, and govern this country,” he said, “by making tough, tough decisions and coming toward the middle to serve our country.”

His ideological eclecticism has led to other self-designations; he is not only a populist but also “a cheap hawk” on defense and a “supply-side deficit hawk” on fiscal policy. The oxymorons have served him well. Few politicians have received such consistently glowing press. He is well loved by establishment Big Feet like David Broder and Al Hunt as the kind of Republican you can do business with — which means, in the conservative lexicon, the kind of Republican who gets rolled. Even so he seemed unprepared for the heated criticism unleashed on the right by the budget deal with Bill Clinton.

When I asked him about it, Kasich frowned and stood up. “Let’s go walk my dog,” he said.

The dog’s name is Penny, after Tim Penny, the former Democratic congressman from Minnesota with whom Kasich designed a series of austere budgets, much praised for their spending cuts, in the early 1990s. The dog is a recent acquisition, and part of a new domesticity in Kasich’s life. He recently married his girlfriend of several years and is building a house on ten acres of countryside outside Westerville. He says he doesn’t want to be in Congress much longer — another term, maybe two — and he’s twice refused the entreaties of local Republicans to seek higher office in Ohio. But he seems to be getting his domestic life settled in preparation for something big.

Outside it becomes quickly apparent that Kasich doesn’t walk Penny. Penny walks Kasich. She pulls and pants and strains at the leash. We proceed at a half-trot down a cobblestone street overarched by towering oaks. I ask again about the conservative criticisms of the budget deal.

“Look, I do not think this budget agreement is an end-all,” he says. “I think we still got to kill departments. We need more tax cuts. We’ve got to deal with the baby boomers’ getting older and the strain on entitlements.

“But this budget agreement is so amazing. Just a couple of years ago (Penny, no!), Dems were telling us we were cutting taxes for the rich and making people on Medicare pay for it. Now our Medicare savings are more than what we proposed in 1995 and we’re going to actually have a capital-gains tax cut. And Democrats are accepting that!

“Part of the frustrations conservatives have is, we won. (Penny!) It’s kind of hard to figure out who you’re going to fight with and what you’re going to fight about anymore. I think that’s a cause for celebration. But now these people are mad, ’cause who are we going to fight?”

Penny holds up suddenly and squats on the lawn of a handsome Victorian house. “Oh, Penny,” Kasich says, his usual slouch slumping deeper. Penny leaves a deposit on the voter’s grass. “Oh great,” Kasich says. “Oh, man.” He gives the dog a yank on its leash and glances around sheepishly. Pooper- scoopers have not yet come to Westerville, apparently. We resume our trot.

“It’s not like we’re done. We still have entitlements to deal with. But listen: I mean, Bill Clinton is like a Republican. We’re going to have discretionary spending grow at one-half of one percent a year, compared to 6 percent it’s been growin’ for the last ten years. I’m sorry, but there is no way to declare defeat on this. There’s only a way to declare victory.

“It’s just silly for these conservatives to be griping. They’ve got to realize, that debate is kind of over. Ronald Reagan won!”

We turn down Westerville’s lovely main street, dotted with courtyards and boutiques and a refurbished movie palace selling Amish antiques. Kasich has lived here for twenty years, since he first ran for the state legislature, at the age of 26, in 1978. He comes here most weekends to be with his wife. “I hate to be in Washington,” he says. “I just hate that culture. This is where I live.”

Suddenly, from around a corner, a group of twenty or more schoolchildren comes charging toward an ice-cream parlor. “Ice cream!” one of them shouts, and the rest stream into the shop, two beleaguered teachers bringing up the rear. It’s a Norman Rockwell tableau. “Oh, man, look at this,” Kasich says. He’s beaming. “Is this beautiful? Is this America, or what?”

“The thing you’ve got to realize,” one of Kasich’s former staffers told me, “is that when he says, ‘We’ve got to balance the budget for the children, we’ve got to do this for future generations,’ he really means it. There is no cynicism there.

“Understand, I don’t like him all that much. He is the most intense human being I’ve ever met. He doesn’t listen. He yells at his staff — a lot. Really, he’s terrible to work for. He’s unbelievably stubborn. But it’s because he actually believes this stuff. There’s no calculation. None.”

Unlike most fortysomething conservatives, Kasich is not a self-hating baby- boomer. He seems — yikes — almost proud of it. “We were the last generation that thought we could change the world,” he says, “and you know what? I still think we can.”

He brings to the politician’s trade all the baby-boomer characteristics. He brags of his love for rock ‘n’ roll. “I’ve got my Counting Crows tickets already,” he says excitedly. “And we’re going to see Bush this summer. There’s a rumor that the Stones are coming to Columbus. I’ve got to check that out.” You might question our president’s sincerity when he speaks of his love for the Mamas and the Papas, but Kasich’s paeans to the greatness of, say, Deep Purple seem to reflect a genuine lack of taste. When I saw him in Westerville he’d just bought the new Depeche Mode CD. How’d he like it? “Oh, man,” he said. Words failed him.

But they don’t fail him often. “He is, bar none, the single best communicator the Republican party has — the best since Ronald Reagan,” says Frank Luntz, a pollster who advises most of the leading Republicans on ” communication techniques.” Luntz’s specialty is the soundbite — highly stylized chunks of verbiage designed to ring the bells and win the approval of focus groups. When you hear a Republican politician touting “common-sense practical solutions” or referring to the estate tax as the “death tax,” you’re hearing Luntz. But he freely acknowledges that Kasich does not need his advice.

“What he’s got, you can’t teach,” Luntz says. “The language and the message he uses is better than anything any pollster could come up with. I stopped doing language with him, because everything I told him, he just took and made it better.” Luntz has often screened tapes of Kasich’s speeches and TV interviews for focus groups. “The man just tests through the roof. Democrats, liberals, everybody. I’ll say, ‘They want him to run for president.’ And they say, ‘Yes!’ I’ll say, ‘Isn’t he too young?’ And they say, ‘I don’t care. I want him to run.'”

Luntz is right: Kasich tries hard to connect. For a man who has built his career on a mastery of budget arcana, he can be refreshingly colloquial. In a recent speech to Republicans in Iowa, where he met (incidentally) with the party operatives and donors who might form the nucleus of a presidential campaign, he explained the necessity of a capital-gains tax cut like this: ” Look, you’ve got to have rewards for the risk-takers in this country. If you take the reward out of risk-taking, only idiots will take risks.”

On welfare reform he is particularly artful. “I once told this roomful of rich people,” he told the roomful of rich people in Iowa, “Look, we didn’t reform welfare for you.” The Republicans looked disappointed, but only momentarily. “We did it for Joe. You know Joe? Maybe you’ve seen him when you forgot your briefcase one night and went back to your office on the 31st floor and there he was sweeping up and emptying the trash. And we did it for Carol, who’s pouring Starbucks coffee at the airport for just above minimum wage, and she’s wakin’ up at 6 a.m. to take her kids to day care, ’cause her husband left her, and when she goes to work she parks in a parking lot that’s closer to Mars than it is to the terminal where she works.

“So I tell you, we didn’t reform welfare for rich people. We reformed it for Carol and Joe. Because it is immoral — it is a sin — to take money from Carol and from Joe and give it to people who don’t want to work.”

This is a great applause line that never fails to deliver, not only for Republican audiences but every other kind, too. And no wonder. For while it sounds progressive and compassionate — liberal, almost — and therefore flatters its audience, there is lurking beneath it, in that phrase “people who don’t want to work,” the Cadillac-driving, vodka-chugging welfare queen of blessed memory. Maybe Ronald Reagan really is winning.

“My point of view basically comes from the underdog,” he says. “I guess I’m kind of obsessed with fairness.” This is another essential characteristic of the baby-boomer politician that Kasich perfectly exemplifies: overweening self-regard. But baby-boomer narcissism is deeper and more layered than the standard-issue narcissism of older politicians. Kasich speaks of his own singularity with an alarming insouciance.

“You know, I’ve been in politics 20 years,” he announced to the gathering in Iowa. “I got into this because I’m a doer. I’m a doer. I go out there and do. I’m not one of those guys who wants to talk about all the problems. I want to talk about what we can accomplish. I’m a risk-taker. I swing for the fences.”

“I’m just who I am,” he likes to say. “This isn’t an act. It’s not anything I’m trying to do. I’m just a regular guy.” But he’s not, of course, and he knows he’s not. For one thing, regular guys seldom talk about how regular they are. He is extraordinarily expert at selling his ordinariness, even as he refuses — simply refuses — to apologize for his own political courage. ” Back in ’89,” he says now, “there were three budgets. There was a Democratic budget, a Bush budget, and a Kasich budget.” In fact there were half a dozen budgets or more; devising alternative budgets used to be a cottage industry among members of the budget committee. “And I remember a reporter said to me, ‘Hey, you seem to be out there all alone on this thing.’ And I said, ‘I don’t care. I don’t care because I really believe this is the right thing to do for our country.'”

He is unapologetic too about his passion for bipartisanship. Hill Republicans were scandalized earlier this year when Kasich agreed to appear at a fund-raiser for his friend Gary Condit, a Democratic congressman from California. (Kasich later reversed himself and didn’t attend.) “First off, it wasn’t supposed to be a fund-raiser,” he says now. “It was supposed to be a meeting of his breakfast club. That was a mix-up. But let me tell you something. Gary Condit is a friend of mine. And my friendship with him means more to me than making a bunch of Republicans happy, okay?

“And I’ll tell you another thing,” he goes on. “Ron Dellums came to my wedding.” Dellums, of course, is the left-wing congressman from California, with whom Kasich led the fight to scuttle the B-2 bomber. “Ron Dellums gave me a beautiful wedding present. And Ron Dellums said to me, ‘John, I don’t know where I’m going to be and I don’t know where you’re going to be, but I want you to know when you look at that present how much I love you guys.” Now, that is a priceless treasure. Friendships are not to be taken lightly in this world.

“And you know what? There’s a lot of Republicans who watch what I do with the people on the other side of the aisle and they’re beginning to learn.”

They are, they are.

If there is a prototype for the Republican of the Late Clinton era — not to mention the post-Clinton era — it is John Kasich. “He’s a hero to the sophomore class of House Republicans,” Luntz says, referring to those House members elected in 1994 who are recasting the party’s identity. The revolutionaries of ’95 are the bipartisans of ’97; they value comity above all. And it was Kasich who brought the budget to the center of the Republican political debate, so that all issues were subsumed by it. Even defense, once a “bright line” division between the parties, is seen these days as primarily a matter of budgeting rather than national security — a question of “What can we afford?” rather than “What do we need?” We are all cheap hawks now. So too with tax cuts: The $ 85 billion in tax relief called for in the budget agreement is the maximum we can expect from the Republican Congress for as far as the eye can see.

But what now? If the budget debate is, as Kasich says, “kind of over,” what is the Republican message for elections to come? We’re back to the living room in Westerville, where Kasich is working on it.

“With the budget done, we can now move on to these other issues, which frankly trouble Americans more than the government’s finances.”

And those are?

“Well, look. There’s a sense of a loss of personal control, that the culture’s collapsing, that their kids aren’t safe, that they’re not learning, or that the country’s dangerous — this rise in gated communities and security systems. These are the things that are really gnawing at people. These things have to be talked about and they all get down to this problem of values and justice.”

From the evils of Big Government to the evil of gated communities: Such is the evolution of Republican doctrine in the 1990s. “My message is no longer that government is going to somehow solve these problems. What I’m arguing to people is that the solutions to your schools and the broken homes and the solutions to poverty don’t lie in the hands of government.

“My other pitch, beyond this values thing, is that you’ve got to defang government. I want to defang it at all levels and then set people free, and that, coupled with this set of values about decency and justice and compassion, it’s then up to them to begin healing society, right there in their communities.”

It might not be quite as precise as talk of budget recisions and readjusting COLA formulas. But Kasich’s message-in-progress certainly does sound bipartisan. Clintonian, in fact. Surely there’s very little in it that the president could disagree with. Which raises the question — a typically right-wing question, as Kasich says — of how you can engage in political debate when both sides are so busy agreeing with each other.

“Oh, there’s plenty of areas to engage,” Kasich says. “But frankly I’m a lot more interested in healing this country than in” — his voice suddenly drips with sarcasm — “than in engaging the enemy.

“Look: I’m not in this to be a Republican. I’m in this to fix my country.”