You might ask, "What's the hurry?" Well, in the Dispatch's case, it's never too early to safely ferry home its politician of choice in a major editorial - long before anybody even knows the name of his eventual Democratic opponent.
Actually the paper's enthusiasm for Kasich, the fellow it endorsed the last time, covered so many positives that we can only conclude that it would take the Wright Brothers to invent any new ones that would rise to greater heights. Rather than wade through a series of exclamatory compliments in the Dispatch's stargazing passages, you can quickly get the point in the opening paragraph:
"For Ohio and the governor, 2012 has been a transformative year. John Kasich sped through his second year with his trademark zeal for getting done the big and difficult things, hardly skipping a beat after his 2011 reforms stabilized the state."Also,
"The man who once balanced the federal budget, line by line, took a scalpel to the Buckeye spending plan and erased the deficit without raising taxes. He launched reforms of Medicaid, prisons and job-killing red tape."It goes on with goose-bumping accolades for Kasich's education reforms and initiatives for roadbuilding, job growth and balanced budget.
On that last point it was never mentioned the teeniest that part of the balancing act was the convenience of stripping the school budget by more than $1 billion and, reports Plunderbund, cutting 50 pct. of the local government fund in his 2013 budget. Public school cuts in teaching staffs, and local school tax levies, have become commonplace.
Finally, the greatest excision from the governor's fanfare for his jobs record is acknowledgement of any credit to a growing national economy and the Obama administration's revival of the auto industry that saved saved thousands of jobs in Ohio.
The Dispatch did concede that none of the governor's good deeds rank as highly as the fact that his "most critical accomplishment...rests in the hearts of the many Ohioans who again have hope" that happier days are here again.
Is it gross to mention that the Dispatch also endorsed George W. Bush and Mitt Romney?
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Harking back to the administrations of James A. Rhodes, the Kasich budget strategy resurrects the 1960s-1970s policies that impoverished public schools (leading to the bankruptcy of a number of them) and that passed on heavier tax burdens to local governments. It's the same old shell game that Ohio's GOP governors have played for a century, enabled in large part by Republican control of the state legislature. In a way, this could be characterized not as trickle down economics, but as "trickle up'' in which the state puts the squeeze on schools boards, counties and cities to effectively balance the state's budget.
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