Mon Feb 13 2012
This week’s Quinnipiac Poll showing incumbent Gov. Ted Strickland running neck and neck with challenger, John Kasich, the former congressman who has been out of the political limelight for eight years, indicates the Republicans, having lost all but one of the non-judicial statewide offices in 2006, are inching toward a huge comeback in the 2010 Ohio elections.
A fiscal conservative and a Christian who moved from Catholicism to Evangelical Christianity after his parents died, Kasich was part of the House of Representatives in Washington when it finally produced a balanced budget. He eventually chaired the important House Budget Committee. The Ohio State graduate made a short-lived bid for president and briefly worked for Lehman Brothers after leaving politics. He eventually moved to Fox News, where he hosted “The Heartland” show and substituted occasionally for the popular Bill O’Reilly.
A dynamic speaker with a talent for delivering punchy soundbites, Kasich will energize the GOP base with his conservative social values and business-oriented Republicans with his goal of reorganizing government and shrinking its size, outsourcing as much work as possible.
Also in the Republican lineup will be John Husted, a proven vote-getter running for Ohio secretary of state, and Mary Taylor, the incumbent Ohio auditor, the lone Republican to survive the 2006 election in which beleaguered Republicans were saddled with Tom Noe’s “Coingate” scandal and incumbent governor Bob Taft, a nice person but someone who often appeared uncomfortable with the political spotlight and as a result awkward.
Governor Strickland, switching his stances on gambling at least twice and sometimes fuzzy with numbers in his bid to be the education governor, has the misfortune to govern in a down economy and the prospect of two of his statewide officeholders, Lt. Governor Lee Fisher and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, fighting over who should be the Democratic nominee to vie for the U.S. Senate seat George Voinovich is vacating at the end of 2010.
A year is a long time in the life of politics, but the prospects currently should have Ohio Republicans rejoicing and Ohio Democrats pondering their future.
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