“Look, I’ve been saying for a long time — and not just here — when I saw $5 trillion being blown, I never thought it was possible,” Kasich told reporters after the speech. “I’m just making a statement that we need a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution to control everybody who gets elected because the pressures are enormous always to spend.”
Kasich, who retired from the U.S. House at the end of 2000, insisted he was not delivering “a veiled swipe at anybody.” But it was clear he was chastising President Bush, who is expected to campaign in South Carolina Monday for his brother Jeb, who is one of Kasich’s main rivals for the GOP presidential nomination.
Bush and Kasich will join New York billionaire Donald Trump, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Dr. Ben Carson in a Republican presidential debate Saturday. South Carolina will hold its primary on Feb. 20.
Even though Kasich told the Hilton Head gathering he is “sick of negative campaigning,” his comments were yet another example of the sharp words he has exchanged with Jeb Bush. The former Florida governor Wednesday attacked the Ohio governor for accepting hundreds of millions of federal dollars to provide low-income people with health coverage.
Kasich also was reminding voters of his role in 1997 as chairman of the House budget committee in crafting a compromise with President Bill Clinton that cleared the way for four consecutive years of federal budget surpluses from 1998 through 2001. But the federal government has run annual deficits every year since 2002.
President Bush pushed through major tax cuts in 2001 and 2004 which cost the federal treasury billions of dollars and helped erase the surplus. But the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and suburban Washington dealt a major blow to government finances.
When asked if the terrorist attacks exacerbated the budget pressures, Kasich dismissed it by saying “you have to manage everything. We get crisis in our state. But when you blow $5 trillion; that’s pretty hard.”
Kasich reproach of President Bush and fellow Republicans took place even his campaign has taken a rightward turn in this conservative state. Kasich employed a more moderate message to attract independent voters and finish second Tuesday in the New Hampshire Republican Primary.
Kasich unveiled two new TV commercials in South Carolina aimed at assuaging conservative Republicans. In the first commercial, he pledged to “cut taxes to create jobs, freeze regulations,” and outline a plan to balance the federal budget within the next decade.
In the second, Kasich made an overt appeal to religious conservatives, by saying the “Lord put us on this Earth to use the gifts that we’ve been given.” There was no word on how much money the campaign was paying to air the commercials.
Except for his speech in Columbia and a stop in Orangeburg, Kasich has focused on the eastern side of the state along the Atlantic Ocean where scores of retirees from the Midwest have settled in Hilton Head, Charleston and Myrtle Beach.
At those events, people often wear T-shirts or sweatshirts blazing the names of Ohio State University, Otterbein University and the Cleveland Indians, although one man showed up at a rally Thursday wearing a blue University of Michigan sweatshirt.
Because Kasich is leaving South Carolina to campaign in Michigan Sunday, the governor joked, “Only because I am going there, sir, am I going to call on the guy with a Michigan sweatshirt on.”
In addition, Rex Elsass, a longtime Kasich media adviser who was working for the presidential campaign of Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, has joined the Ohio governor’s campaign.
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