Kasich’s team — Don Thibaut, Ben Kanzeg and Tod Bowen — worked simultaneously between 2001 and 2005 for multiple New Century entities and collected salaries from each.
No campaign laws were broken, but the now-dormant New Century Project shows how Kasich kept his campaign team in place for years through wealthy people who were investing in the former congressman long before his formal return to politics.
Among those who contributing to the tax-exempt groups were John McConnell of Worthington Industries, Mal Mixon and Joseph Richey of Invacare, and Jay Schottenstein of Schottenstein Stores Corp. The four men and their spouses gave a combined $116,667 to the groups, according to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks political contributions.
Kasich serves on the corporate board of directors of both Worthington Industries, a steel processing company based in suburban Columbus; and Invacare, a maker of medical equipment based in Elyria. Schottenstein Property Group also hired Kasich, paying him $61,538 a year in 2008 and an undisclosed amount in 2009.
Dave Levinthal of the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington, D.C.-based non-partisan group that tracks money in politics, said donors give because they are ideologically aligned with the candidate or they want to stay close in case he returns to political office.
“This basically was an opportunity for all the folks who were really, really close to him to maintain those connections, to maintain that political energy,” Levinthal said.
University of Akron political scientist John Green added that it’s not uncommon for businesses to employ future or past political officeholders because often their interests and agendas align.
The fact that Kasich established three entities to keep his hand in politics while he was out of office illustrates how political organizations and careers develop these days, said Green.
But it is unusual, he said, for members or former members of Congress to set up such entities unless they’re running for President of the United States.
Kasich made a short-lived run for the GOP nomination in the 2000 presidential primary but quickly backed out and endorsed George W. Bush.
Kasich’s name has long been mentioned as a possible candidate for governor, but it’s likely governor wasn’t the office he had his eye on when the New Century Project was set up.
In 2000 he told the Columbus Dispatch: “I will run for president again. I have made it clear to everybody my plan is to spend the next six years basically doing other things and being in a position to be able to make another run at some point.”
Kasich is currently leading in the polls in his race against Democratic incumbent Gov. Ted Strickland. Early voting for the Nov. 2 election begins Sept. 28.
Green said political action committees and 527 groups that are privately financed and publicly disclosed are more transparent and perhaps less susceptible to abuse than past methods of compensating key aides.
“If one has a good political team, there is an advantage to keeping it together,” he said. “It’s perfectly legal and a lot of people do it. It’s very, very intriguing. It’s interesting because 100 years ago the same sort of thing would have been done but it would have been done through patronage appointments. Those were the days of the great party machines where a rising candidate could park his key people in, you know, the post office.”
Archives of the New Century Project website show it contained newspaper stories about Kasich and a timeline of his political career. In later years, it included links to research done by other think tanks and posted a handful of short, staff-produced opinion pieces on issues such as tax reform and school choice.
Contact this reporter at (614) 224-1624 or lbischoff@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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