Ohio Governor John Kasich is offering himself to the good people of New Hampshire as a pragmatic, optimistic, kinda-centrist manager: a guy who can Get Things Done and Work With Others. His campaign schtick even convinced MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who called him “real and reasonable-seeming and relatable-seeming.” And:
If some voters up here are looking for authenticity in their candidate, well, just as a political consumer, a political observer who’s been up to New Hampshire for a lot of primaries and seen a lot of these events, I can see how New Hampshire voters see authenticity in John Kasich.
Yeah, well, not so fast. John Kasich is a veteran politician. He is presenting himself as relatable and reasonable, but his actual record in Ohio tells a very different story. His administration has been nearly as hard-right dogmatic as those of Michigan’s Rick Snyder or Kansas’ Sam Brownback. And just about as successful, too. When you open the attic of Kasich’s Ohio, there’s an awful lot of spiders up there.
“Out-of-state media are oblivious to the disgrace at the Ohio Department of Education.”
Those words are from the keyboard of Toledo Blade columnist Marilou Johanek. She’s writing about Kasich’s scandal-plagued education reform effort, which centers on that favored right-wing nostrum, school choice. His (ahem, former) school choice director, David Hansen,
… engaged in a fraudulent scheme to boost the evaluations of some charters. Mr. Hansen, whose wife worked as the governor’s chief of staff until she left to manage his presidential campaign, admitted scrubbing data on failing online and dropout recovery-charters to improve their standing in the state.
Wonderful. If charter schools aren’t working, then cook the books!
The Vermont Political Observer. 