Kasich Campaign Press Release - Boston Globe: Kasich is Finally Getting His Moment

Boston Globe

I've long thought that John Kasich was a New Hampshire kind of guy — and now the Granite State seems to be deciding the same.

Since the turn of the year, Kasich has generated real traction here with his folksy, optimistic, mild-mannered approach. And you can see it now in the interest voters are showing in a candidate whose brand of politics is unlike anything his Republican rivals are offering.

The tonal difference that separates Kasich from his more rancorous, to-the-ramparts Republican rivals was on display in the dueling speeches he and Marco Rubio gave to the New Hampshire House of Representatives on Wednesday morning.

Kasich was upbeat, low-key, and funny, telling stories about his own days as a legislator, such as one about a senior Republican who was annoyed when he failed to offer a second for an amendment he didn't understand.

"Young man, you'd better learn to fly by the seat of your pants,'' the man said. "And I've been doing that ever since," Kasich joked.

He also stressed the accomplishments that can come when elected officials think of themselves as Americans first and Republicans and Democrats second.

Speaking in a language legislators appreciate, he talked of the way he would push power and funding away from Washington and back to the states.

States shouldn't have to ask for federal permission to let welfare recipients count training programs as part of their work requirement, he said. Federal education money shouldn't come with so many encumbrances, he asserted, but rather be consolidated into four basic buckets.

The way it works now, he noted, federal gas tax revenues flow to Congress, where it is doled back to the states according to schemes settled on by Congress's transportation committees. As he sees it, the states should retain most of those funds, sending the federal government only the amount needed to maintain the interstate highway system.

Who, really, would be against that, he said, before adding, drolly, "the committee and the lobbyists."

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