Pushing Teabags In Ohio

Republican John Kasich is running for Governor here in Ohio, and TPM has a run-down of his greatest Wingnut hits.

A lot of Republican candidates are trying to find alliances among the various tea party movements this year. The attempt at wooing the insurgent conservative movement usually goes like this: The tea partiers challenge candidates about why they didn't vote for a spending bill, social program, or revenue plan way back when, despite claiming to be part of their movement.

Kasich may be the first mainstream Republican candidate for whom the conversation is reversed. Faced with his skill at sounding like the most extreme of the tea partiers, it may be mainline Republicans in Ohio who find themselves wondering if Kasich's really one of them.

Speaking on a Columbus radio show last October, Kasich described the tea party crowds packing town halls last year. "I went to one meeting where I thought they were gonna hang two of the Republican speakers that were up there from the nearest tree," he said.

Kasich does love himself a hangin'.

Kasich's probably safe from the noose himself, having had a career that should already put him in the tea partiers good graces. In Congress, he was known as one of the GOP's toughest fiscal hawks. Human Events recently called Kasich's tenure as a Representative "the embodiment of a small government-low tax conservative." Kasich's additional tea party bona fides come from his time with Fox News, where hosted a show called "Heartland" and frequently filled in as a guest host for Bill O'Reilly.

Kasich has put his fiscal policy where his mouth is in the governor's race, where offering a plan to eliminate Ohio's state income tax. In short, in many ways, he's tried to be exactly the kind of Republican tea partiers are looking for, as he said at the rally yesterday.

"I think I was in the Tea Party before there was a Tea Party," he told a crowd in Columbus.

Eliminating the income tax in Ohio of course means even larger spending cuts in Ohio programs to go with it.  As it is, the state has a Democratic House and a Republican Senate, and nothing got done last year save kicking the can down the road into 2010.  The state, like many others, is facing government employee layoffs in the thousands and a 2010-2011 shortfall in the billions...and should Mr. Teabagger here win, it's going to get truly ugly.