John Kasich: Why I believe Ohio's governor is running for president in 2020

I met Rep. John Kasich in Washington in 1994 with a group of my peers, editorial page editors who were in Washington, D.C. for a week of training.

He had a Justin Beiber haircut (or maybe Beiber had a Kasich haircut) and was the GOP's go-to guy to talk about Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America." He drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup and made balancing the budget and tax cuts sound interesting, necessary and urgent with an encyclopedic delivery that could light up Kendrick Lamar.  

This Kasich guy -- smart, hawkish and intense and the new House Budget Committee chair -- was going places. 

He left Congress, hosted a national political talk show, worked for a Wall Street brokerage firm and twice was elected governor of Ohio. 

And, oh, yes, he's running for president in 2020. Didn't you hear?  

That final State of the State address in Westerville the other night sounded presidential to me. I've heard plenty of them. They almost always call for shared sacrifice and to embrace that which is greater than individual selves. The best ones cleverly paint a portrait of the country with a broken system with do-nothing politicians who can't (or won't) fix it. And then the candidate tells how he -- with your help -- will make things better.

I was at the Old Statehouse in 1991 Little Rock when then-Gov. Bill Clinton officially introduced himself to America with such themes.

"We need a new spirit of community, a sense that we are all in this together. If we have no sense of community, the American dream will continue to wither. Our destiny is bound up with the destiny of every other American. We're all in this together, and we will rise or fail together," Clinton said. 

That's sort of what Kasich did the other night. He tested big ideas. He pondered his purpose. He quoted great philosophers, religious figures, and abolitionists. He attempted to inspire hope. He talked about God and the values everyone has "written on our hearts." Themes of love, compassion, humility, and forgiveness resonated through his speech.

He did not focus a lot on his accomplishments and only briefly touched on pressing Ohio issues like the opioid crisis, health care, education, and jobs. Those subjects seemed too tactical and unsolvable. Others will have to run with those balls.

This speech was undeniably aspirational.

"I could relate to his speech because it went to his core," said Rep. Alicia Reece, a Democrat from Bond Hill who worked with Kasich on getting funding for the MLK Exchange, the casino in Cincinnati other issues. "His personal struggles, his faith in God; that takes politics out of the picture."

Today, Kasich looks more like the guy who yells at you to get off his lawn than the boyish wunderkind I first met, then a figurative Saul of Tarsus before his Damascus Road moment. He was taking no prisoners as one of the leaders of the Republican Revolution. 

Former Ohio Republican Congresswoman Deb Pryce once told the Los Angeles Times she used to pretend to be asleep on the weekend plane ride home if Kasich was on the same flight.  "Do you know what it's like to be trapped on an airplane sitting next to John Kasich?" Pryce said. "Sitting next to all that intensity, after being around it all week?

Perhaps the 2018 version of Kasich is just wiser. Maybe he has learned the art of the control-burn with his rhetoric actions rather than lighting the forest on fire. He is the rare Republican who has defied President Trump, but it has come with a price. No one is banging down the door of Ohio's two-term governor for support. Trump's big shadow, you know.

Could Kasich have been sending a message when he said if you live by your values, you'll never live with regret? “It can come at a high cost when we act on the basis of these values because sometimes these values are at war with the world,” he said.

Perhaps. 

He also said "we have a world to change" and declared "the race isn't over for us. We can't even see the finish line it's so far in the future." 

Maybe he just wanted to leave us words of wisdom to live by. 

Nah. Probably not. 

He's looking at a White House run in 2020. That's what I read between the lines.

Enquirer Columnist Byron McCauley is also a member of the editorial board. Call him at (513) 768-8565. Connect with him on Twitter: @byronmccauley. He writes about people and places behind the news and other things that strike his fancy.