Kasich v Brown for POTUS: One is ambitious. One isn't

As Ohio media, especially Columbus statehouse reporters, mentally masturbate over the giddy improbability that the race for President of The United States in 2020 could pit two native sons against each other, that the odds of that happening are near equal with another dinosaur-eliminating meteor hitting Earth anytime soon.

But the brigade of Buckeye reporters, led by the always John Kasich-friendly Columbus Dispatch, will spare no digital ink in following the road ahead for the soon-to-be former governor and Ohio's senior senator, recently elected to a third 6-year term, Sherrod Brown.

Gov. elect John R. Kasich on Election
Day night in 2010.

For John Kasich, the Pennsylvania-born backer of Reagan-era supply-side economics that former Republican President, now deceased, George H. W. Bush called "voodoo economics," his life after governor rests on the media's continued gullibility in believing that he's the anti-Trump dancing bear who might, could, maybe but won't tell now (that is, until God tells him) whether he'll take on the President Donald Trump in the Republican primaries slated in two years.

Kasich, as ambitious and wylie as Aaron Burr ever was in the 1790s to elevate himself to president, thinks he can cherry pick the issues he wants to talk about, knowing he can rely on media to confine itself to his top-drawer topics: debts and deficits and proselytizing about a fantasy federal balanced budget amendment he claims will cure the ills of wasteful government spending.

Ever the showman, Kasich's time as a Fox News commentator will soon be revived as he desperately seeks another easy, high-paying gig as another partisan talking head on some 24/7 cable news show. Kasich's second showing as a presidential candidate in 2016 (his first was in 2000) ended in tragedy as he barely won one Electoral College vote (270 are needed to be POTUS). His politically motivated stubborn streak kept him in the race as the last man standing against Trump despite his laughable showing in one state primary contest after another. He lost 49, winning one, Ohio, but with less than 50 percent of the vote.

For John Kasich, the call to be president is his life goal as he puts his old one of being right with Jesus when his soul reaches the Pearly Gates in layaway. With little campaign cash to spend in 2016 compared to many of his better financed rivals, Kasich turned to financial help from Ohio taxpayers, who covered the cost of his salary and certain expenses, especially protection services by state highway patrolmen dedicated to protecting Ohio's governor while on the road. Kasich says he wants to keep his voice active while he wanders the political graveyard. The only problem with his voice is that it has a history of being wrong on most important issues, from health care to women's rights to voting to job creation and tax cuts and more.

Meanwhile, across the isle and ready to start his third 6-year term in the Senate, is Sherrod Brown

This reporter (left) interviews Sen.
Sherrod Brown in Columbus.

. Born a Buckeye, unlike Kasich who adopted Ohio, Brown has defined his persona and political leanings over 40 years in public office. Starting in the Ohio House, then as Secretary of State for two terms, then as Congressman and now as sitting Senator, Brown's recent win in a very red Trump state may appear more like a political anomaly than a slam dunk, given his alignment with progressive values that include defending workers' rights, which he's translated into his new catch phrase, "the dignity of work."

But with Brown's cruise to victory over GOP Trumpster Congressman Jim Renacci, Brown now finds a growing platoon of Democrats, and others more open to the new breed of Democrats who are making their own way against the traditional tide of establishment Democrats, who want him to run for POTUS. Kasich has to hunt and peck for his band of zealots outside the ranks of media, compared to Brown who finds himself on a list of more than a dozen Democrats whose names are touted as 2020 contenders.

The big difference between these Ohioans is that the former, Kasich, will spare no child to be president, while the latter, Brown, is being pulled along like the moon pulls a reluctant sea to rise to high tide.

Sherrod Brown, for his many decades in public office, isn't running forward to occupy the Oval Office in the same pell mell way Kasich is. Is Brown responding to the cheering crowd who wants him to run? Yes. He says crowd pressure is forcing him to take a look at a race he wasn't planning on making, unlike Kasich who's eyed the Oval Office going back to 2000, when he retired after nine terms in Congress to mount a pathetically troubled campaign for president that crashed before it took office as Republicans rallied around their real favorite, then Texas-governor George W. Bush.

The two do share common ground: both barely register blips on a list of 2020 candidates pollsters poll about. Brown registers just one percent by Politico, while Kasich's name and many others are totally absent.

As national and state media invest their time in wild speculation on whether one or both of these Ohio officials will actually declare their candidacy in early 2020, this reporter, who called the results of Ohio's 2018 elections nearly a year ago, before any candidates had actually declared their candidacy, can save them all some time.

Kasich will make a third run at it just to show his ego is as unbounded now as it has been since he first entered elected politics in 1978. Brown, a short-list contender for VP for Hillary Clinton, will not make the leap despite calls to run. And no matter whether Mr. Rumpled Suits gets haircuts on a regular basis, these considerations of appearance, which right now are all media has to hang on to, are not predictors that he'll essentially leave his job as full-time senator to run for president, even though he can do so in two years, lose, and still have a job for another four years, maybe in the majority if 2020 is as good to Democrats as 2016 was to House Democrats.

Term-limited Kasich, meanwhile, has no where to go but up after he retires from state CEO status. He will get a media job, so his twitchy face and strident voice will be seen and heard by the American public.

But the glib former governor should be forewarned that if he gets his wish, his voice on all the issues he's wrong on will resonate to his disadvantage, as wised-up Americans see through his false prophecy of claims he can "bring people together," when all he's done is try to triangulate the great partisan divide to his advantage.

Kasich versus Brown in 2020? The sun will explode first.

Opeditude: Enacting 'Heartbeat Bill' aborts Ohio's future

Head Republican Neanderthal, Ohio Senate President Larry Obhof, boasted to reporters that failure to override Kasich’s veto of the so-called "Heartbeat Bill" during this year's lame-duck session won't be repeated in the 133rd General Assembly.

“We will have a supermajority that is pro-life in both chambers and the next General Assembly that will be sworn in less than two weeks, and we have a governor coming in who has said he will sign that bill,” Obhof said, the Plain Dealer reported.

The PD reported that the vote in the Senate was 19 to 13, one short of the constitutionally required 20 votes needed to override a veto.

Gov. Kasich said in 2016 while 

campaigning for president that he 

would like to see Roe v Wade overturned

Why is Obhof so confident this stupid bill will rise again? Gov.-elect Mike DeWine, a Republican and staunch pro-life Catholic who chaired uber-conservative Rick Santorum's Ohio presidential campaign in 2016, said "on the campaign trail he would sign a heartbeat bill into law."

If that happens, Ohio will have effectively aborted its future, rushing pell mell in retrograde motion to claim it's a state of the past, not of the future. Media, especially the platoon of Ohio statehouse reporters, has completely missed the relationship between backward thinking social engineering and future economic development.

Women represent a majority of today's workforce, they represent a majority of voters, and they arguably represent Ohio's future workforce, as Buckeye youth leave for greener pastures in other growing states where jobs are far more plentiful or will be than back home.

Outgoing Gov. John Kasich, whose tenure is short-lived as Ohio's quirky if not Quixotic CEO who hopes God sends him a message to run for President of the United States a third time come 2020, in his heart of hearts would love to sign the Heartbeat Bill. Afterall, it represents his long-held, male dominated notion that abortion is a sin against God, because the Bible says so. A Bible thumper his entire life, Kasich retreats into sanctimonious blather, a political redoubt he hopes cannot be trumped.

Please recall, that on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, Gov. Kasich, who everyone, especially reporters should remember wanted to be a Catholic priest as a young boy, said he wants Roe v Wade overturned so states can be free to deal with abortion on their own terms. It comes as no surprise, then, that Kasich believes the tripe that Planned Parenthood, a group he worked to deny funding to, was selling baby parts. Good grief!

By using the clever red herring reasoning that signing such a monstrosity bill would trigger court challenges that would cost taxpayers a bundle to defend the backward measure in court, Kasich hopes to appear one shade saner than Obhof and like-minded Republicans who seem determined to force this terrible bill into law next year.

Kasich may earn some brownie points by vetoing the bill, although he squanders those same brownie points when he signed yet another abortion bill into law that limits the time a woman can exercise her constitutional rights to a procedure not sought, that nonetheless can save the life of a mother when performed.

Barely positive in population growth over the last ten years, Ohio is drifting older, less educated, fatter and, with Obhof's cock-sure crowing that the HeartBeat Bill will become law next year, dumber.

When a mega-corporation like Amazon looked at dozens of communities across the nation to expand its HQ2, Columbus and Cincinnati were among the contenders. Amazon selected New York City and Washington D.C, locations where social attitudes are far more liberal and saner to the social current and proposed landscape in Ohio.

There's no doubt that Amazon would have turned down Ohio's public largess in a heartbeat, simply based on backward social engineering like Ohio's austere climate for women's health options. What CEO would want to subject their female workforce, including the daughters and granddaughters of those female employees to the kind of harsh climate Obhof thinks Ohio needs?

Already struggling to create enough jobs for all the Ohioans wanting good-paying, full-time jobs, despite Kasich's easily disproved claims of how his super secret JobsOhio group is doing, Ohio's is ready to further abort its future with ill-conceived laws like the Heartbeat Bill.

While it may bring smiles to Ohio's Right-to-Life community, a slender slice of the population Kasich and other GOP officials love to court, the court challenges that are guaranteed to occur if the GOP-led legislature does what it wants to do will further shine a light on how Ohio, a once great state, has fallen into a severe state of mental disrepair.

The social climate and the jobs climate cannot be separated. One begets the others, so the sooner statehouse reporters understand this relationship the sooner they can push Obhof and company to confront their own cruel thirst for draconian bills, that if quenched with more monstrosity bills like HeartBeat, will foreclose on any serious job growth the Buckeye State hopes to garner from new growth states like Idaho, Arizona, Washington or old ones like California.

Ohio's future is a heartbeat away. But if bad bills are the vowed future agenda of nutty lawmakers like Obhof and nuttier governors like Mike DeWine, don't blame Amazon or any other company for saying thanks but no thanks to any tax giveaways the state thinks it can offer that offset the dire consequences from backward thinking people and their backward looking bills.

No surprise: Kasich exits 'stage right' with political posturing

Ohio's term-limited quack governor, John R. Kasich, has until January 14 to swagger, strut and posture before he wanders into the political graveyard brimming with so many over-the-hill politicians.

Gov. John R. Kasich

Shouldering a legacy of ignominious bills and equally bad policy initiatives, Gov. Kasich's eight years in office has left the once-great state wondering where its future greatness will come from?

How to make Ohio great again is a perplexing problem, one sure to elude Republicans who swept away their Democratic challengers just a month ago, and who mostly align themselves with Kasich's outdated supply-side mentality that favors pro-business policies that invariably result in anti-worker, anti-wage-growth.

With one foot out the door after two terms of bullying and berating local governments, public school districts and public workers, Kasich's first bonehead move was to try to gut public-sector collective bargaining with the passage in 2011 of SB 5. Had the bill remained law, it would have relegated collective bargaining for public union workers to the harsh whims of employers. Buckeye voters did something then they have failed to do again, rise up in mass to nullify a bill designed to hurt unions—and their historic support from Democrats to take up the causes of workers, women, minorities and seniors.

As The Toledo Blade wrote in 2014, Ohio voters should "consider whether to give John Kasich another four years as governor this November ... they might want to revisit his first year in office, when he promoted a series of extremist policies. Chief among these was the union-busting Senate Bill 5."

The quixotic, easily angered Kasich still thinks God has a plan for him that includes being President of The United States. Lashed to the absurd notion that the free market is actually free and a humane arbiter when confronted with massive social problems, Kasich's hope for his future is so glum that even he acknowledges that Trump would rub him out if the two were matched against each other again in 2020.

That was the ballgame in 2016, when Kasich and 15 other GOP candidates thought their "establishment" political credentials, honed over decades of polished, professional showmanship that sung the song of CEOs while forgetting the words to the song that average workers wanted to hear, were no match for a never-politico like New York billionaire and reality TV show maven, Donald John Trump. To this fraternity's great surprise, and greater chagrin, Trump blew Kasich and company away. The sanctimonious governor who always invokes God in his jabber, performed among the worst of the lot, but stayed in the race because he knew media would follow him.

No longer the state to go to—those honors go to Nevada, Utah, Washington, Texas and Florida according to recently released Census Bureau data—remaining Buckeyes are older, less educated and fatter. With a population that has grown over the last decade by barely enough people to fill Ohio State's football stadium once, Ohio lawmakers are doing their level best to give the world more reasons to stay away.

Not satisfied with the slew of anti-women's health bills he's already signed into law over the last eight years, Kasich added to his pathetic pile by signing another bill to limit abortion options. Signing SB 145 into law, which bans the dilation and evacuation procedure, Kasich cements his reputation as man ignorant of women's health issues.

He summoned the courage to veto the so-called "Heartbeat Bill," which bans abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. But not because he disagrees with the intent of the bill, but because he thinks it won't hold up in court, and defending it will cost Ohio millions. But Republicans who hate government intervention in general, think using it on woman's health rights is alright. Ohio's full-time legislature is controlled by a supermajority of Republicans, so Kasich's one act of sanity maybe overridden before the year ends. And if it isn't, Gov-elect Mike DeWine, a staunch Catholic, said he'd sign the heat-beat bill.

Thinking his voice will not be diminished once he leaves office, Kasich's future depends on gullible state and national media following his outbursts and flamboyant utterances—"rotten, stinking politics." As he migrates back to what he does best, blathering on about policies he helped enact (deficits, gerrymandering, income inequality) then turned against when that made news, it's safe to say The Columbus Dispatch, a life-long Kasich support whose editorials virtually always support his tortured, austere thinking, will continue to cover him as if he's still Ohio's leader and the savior of the free world.

Desperately seeking a high-profile media gig that pays him well to spew his long-held beliefs that tax

President Donald J. Trump

cuts create jobs, poor people should work harder and hurdle obstacles before they receive public benefits, and deficits are bad and should be adjusted with cruel corrections to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Kasich will continue his dependability as Trump's alter-ego dancing bear. Always seeing business from the viewpoint of CEOS, Kasich long ago sacrificed the plight of workers to balance sheet priorities, where the cost of workers, like overhead expenses like utilities and property taxes, are to be reduced.

His stump speech in 2016 centered on his unique ability to bring people together. The history of that claim is so false as to be funny. Anyone who cares to research it will find he's been unable to bring people together on anything that doesn't share his vision. Even his own legislature's frustration with his inability to do that will be manifested when his vetoes are overridden, as if he were an out-going  Democrat. GOP big game hunters have him in their sights and won't be afraid to pull the trigger.

The Catholic boy from western Pennsylvania gave up a life in the priesthood for the fame and fortune in Republican politics. He's enriched himself over four decades in politics to the tune of between $9-22 million. Playing "The Grinch" this Christmas, Kasich vetoed a pay raise for elected officials who had not had one in ten years. Posting budgets that set records as the highest in Ohio history, a strange phenomena for someone who harps on government spending and especially federal deficits, Kasich kicked his fellow Republicans in the teeth on the way out the door this year, as he searches for his next big payday on a 24/7 cable news network. 

His quirky personality and equally quirkier policies have made him a persona non grata among Democrats, a traitor to Trump Republicans and a false prophet to independents who think he sounds good until they examine his outbursts further, realizing they're in-line with Trump's policies. Despite the small difference in personal styles, with Kasich's being just short of The Donald's overt clownishness, Republicans of a feather gather together as was the case when Kasich remained silent of Trump's humongous tax giveaway to already rich business and absurdly rich individuals.

The National Chaplain is certainly older but not appreciably wiser. Planning yet another book that will re-plow the same furrows from previous auto-biographical books, John R. Kasich seems content to float along in the flotsam and jetsam of cable news shows that do more to divide the nation than bring it together.

To MOGA, China Should Annex Ohio

How to Make Ohio Great Again? It was once, for over a century and half from its statehood moment in 1803. Sadly, that run is over as population stagnantes and demographics drift to the old, the poor and less educated, as the next generation departs for jobs in greener pastures in other growing states where social climates are far more welcoming.

Plucked from "The Hard Truths of Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy," this New York Times article made a true statement: "No amount of tax incentives would have convinced Amazon to expand in a medium-sized city such as Columbus, Ohio, rather than Northern Virginia and Queens,which sit in some of the largest pools of talent in the country."

Outgoing Ohio Gov. John R. Kasich

After eight years of outgoing Governor John R. Kasich's reverse Robin Hood policies, many of which took from the poor and gave to the rich, he signed into law a host of obstacles to hurdle for many to secure public benefits, including a woman's Constitutional right to an abortion. 

Meanwhile, three of Ohio's big cities—Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo—continue to rank among the nation's most distressed, as defined by the "2018 Distressed Cities Index," compiled by The Economic Innovation Group, located in Washington D.C. Other small cities like Youngstown, where its economic backbone was made of steel, have stood helpless as half their populations left as the corporate tide of jobs and benefits receded to wash ashore elsewhere. When giant corporations like General Motors stiff one-time "beehive" again, as appears to be the case with shuttering the Lordstown, Ohio, assembly plant and relocating those jobs to other facilities far away, Ohio takes another economic hit it won't recover from.

Voting for Donald Trump for president over Hillary Clinton by almost nine points in 2016, rural Ohioans—comprised of the same group of fearful Republicans who hated Mitt Romney's "47%" because they are takers, not creators—seem to want their own handout under the guise of being the "forgotten man."  

Another view of the so-called forgotten man, that the forgotten man doesn't want to discuss, is that the forgotten men and women of Buckeye State farm county don't have and don't want to acquire the education or skills modern companies look for in workers (see Amazon above). They also won't or can't move to where 21st century job are migrating to (not Ohio) and think corporations acting in the best interest of shareholders, not government working in the public interest, is their free-market answer when reality shows business leaders (viz. Romney's job creator class) will abandon them without shame or regret, administering in the process great harm to communities who competed for their presence, often with tax incentives or public brides as some may see the practice of business attraction.

Kasich, Ohio's 66-year old term-limited state CEO whose tried and twice failed to become the GOP nominee for president, received help from a like-minded fiscal- and socially-conservative GOP-led legislature to cut taxes at every opportunity, thereby redistributing money upwards from the rural poor working at minimum wages jobs, if they have work at all, to already wealthy corporations and individuals who don't share the Christmas spirit of helping the forgotten and forlorn. 

The promise of more jobs from lower taxes has been a long-held urban myth by Kasich and his supply-side ilk. But as reality has clearly shown, it's proved to produce more fantasy than rising take-home wages. For reasons based largely on shifting demographics, and an obsession by state lawmakers to pass socially conservative bills that put Ohio among the nation's most backward looking states, corporations like Google or Apple or Amazon don't want to locate their growing ranks of female workers, and their daughters, in states with anti-women health measures. Kasich has signed about a dozen into law so far.  

Not letting up from its Medieval ways, the 132nd General Assembly will send two more Right-to-Life endorsed bills to him as the 2018 lame-duck sessions quacks to a close. Among them is the "Heartbeat Bill," a draconian measure that eliminates abortion when a fetal heartbeat is found and puts doctors involved in jeopardy of committing a criminal offense. 

When a historically strict Catholic country like Ireland where abortion was banned legalizes it by amending the Constitution, Ohio striving to be old Ireland is indeed a strange tale of backward thinking for seriously out of whack lawmakers who pass such bills and governors who sign them into law.

Kasich and company think they can avoid their real record of lost opportunity and unnecessary hurdles by talking about the peril of national debt. He argues for a balanced budget amendment to remedy government spending, but it's government spending in communist China—where millionaires and billionaires are born daily—that pushes the centuries old, dirt-poor nation forward as it becomes the largest economy in the world, where the Chinese Dream of an expanding middle-class is more viable today that the American Dream of middle-class status is shrinking by the day.

Shanghai Tower, the tallest building
in China, second tallest in the world.

Maybe one way Ohio can find its future is to have China annex it? By doing this, China's central government, which never shuts down as President Trump wants to do soon, can spend to rebuild bridges like the Brent-Spence, so important to commerce, and build a new 21st century version that includes high-speed trains that cruise along at 190-mph. In China today, spectacular feats of engineering are both amazing and commonplace. 

To Make Ohio Great Again, maybe some "Belt and Road" programs on the scale China's leader Xi JinPing is pushing for countries it wants to partner and do business with is just what the doctor ordered to drag an aging, backward-looking, former great state like Ohio whose political leadership has been corrupted by decades of faulty thinking into the modern world.

A Voter's Call To Arms: Limit Ohio's Legislature

The State of Ohio's wonder years date from its post-Revolutionary War land-of-opportunity allure to its post World War II prosperity. Growth in the Buckeye State was fueled by an expanding middle class, whose labor and taxes built robust public infrastructure and scores of competent public school systems. High school graduates from Ohio or elsewhere could attend a variety of affordable and admired liberal arts colleges and universities that helped the state hits its stride.

The Ohio Statehouse in Columbus

From its birth in 1803 as the Union's 17th state, Ohio has traveled from being the sought-after Northwest Territory newly minted Americans bet their futures on to today's modern Republican Party-driven state that prides itself on mean-spirited social engineering and regressive tax policies that benefit few except the already wealthy and corporations seeking public subsidy for their private profit-making.

Unlike the planet Mars that confused early astronomers who didn't understand why it periodically moved in retrograde motion, Ohio GOP political leaders have over the past quarter century consciously put it in reverse with laws that represent their extreme social- and fiscal-conservative thinking.

After 216 years of statehood, and now just weeks away from the start of 2019, Ohio finds itself inextricably caught in the grasp of modern Republican Party activists who pride themselves on passing laws that further push the one-time state-on-the-move toward being a dysfunctional state that's losing the race for the future by forcing government to be the handmaiden of corporate shareholders who relish shifting the burden of taxation from fat-cat business to lean-income individuals.

With moribund population growth that leaves those who won't or can't move to 21st century states of opportunity, including Colorado, California, Washington, or Oregon, Buckeyes are now older, fatter and less educated than ever before. The so-called "forgotten man" of President Donald Trump's base, who believed his incredulous fake-news promises of bringing back well-paying manufacturing jobs that will never return, cry for handouts when a giant, very profitable corporation like General Motors shutters auto assembly plants to move jobs out of state, and even out of the country.

Republican candidates have controlled the gears of government—occupying the state's five constitutional offices and both chambers of the legislature by mostly large margins—for a quarter of a century. With the exception of four years from 2006-2010 when Democrats occupied four statewide offices and ran the Ohio House of Representatives for a lonely two-year stint, the heartland battleground state, whose well-paying, middle-class job industries of rubber, steel, glass and a host of other attendant automotive supply chain business, now confronts a future made less bright future, as knowledge-based tech industries like Amazon, Google or Apple reject it for other states where leaders and lawmakers value government's role instead of trying to hobble it.

Ohio's slide from its once mighty manufacturing prowess may have started in the 1970s, but accelerated when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) became law in the 1990s. NAFTA greenlighted the dismemberment of communities, large and small, who suffered as manufacturers sought cheaper labor in countries like Mexico or China, where unions are weak if they exist at all.

For a state that has consistently trended red Republican—with 2016 demonstrating it could support a crooked real estate developer male over a seasoned and experienced female government leader by nearly nine points and 2018 demonstrating again that GOP candidates can sweep away their Democratic rivals—allowing its legislature to be in perpetual session runs counter to Republican beliefs that government that governs lease governs best. This notion was espoused early on in America by Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father who in 1776 authored The Declaration of Independence, who aligned with farmers and states over Alexander Hamilton's fondness for bankers, manufacturers and a strong federal government.

With a full-time legislature comes full-time employment for lobbyists, as the Buckeye State ranks among the top states with registered lobbyists whose job is to win special deals for their special-interest clients.

With the exception of its lone Democratic leader, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, winning a third term

Term-limited Ohio Gov. John Kasich

in Washington this year, Ohio continues under GOP control. Years of scandal under out-going Gov. John R. Kasich went virtually challenged by Democrats and their candidates despite the low-hanging fruit their scandals offered.

In the 40 days between this year's November elections and the swearing in of lawmakers early next January, Ohio's lame-duck legislature is doing its best to pass a posses of bad bills that will further earmark the state as a state to stay away from, especially if you're a woman seeking your health rights as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Legislators can be expected to do some or all of the following in the coming weeks: raise their pay at will, pass more anti-women bills related to abortion that criminalize participating doctors and cater to National Rifle Association demands for loser gun laws.

With statewide Democrats held captive by their low numbers to the resolve of majority Republicans to have their way on core issues, the last hope of citizens to change how their government work is through citizen initiatives. But Ohio GOP leaders are working to keep citizens at bay by raise the bar for thresholds to let all Ohioans have a say on any single issue. Once issue that might well work, if sold to voters who think government spending is always bad, is to limit the time the legislature can be in session in any year. Much like a state like Maryland, where the legislature comes in for a few months to do its work, then sends elected officials back home to do something else, Ohio should take control of their government by enacting a constitutional amendment to turn a year-long legislature into a very limited session.

It's precisely during lame-duck sessions when the goblins of greed come out to insert provisions into bills that may have languished in committee or never received a hearing at all, only to rise from the dead as their next life as an addition to another bill is assured by leaders of one party who make the ill-tasting sausage they are famous for.

Retrograde motion comes from retrograde thinking, and Ohio stands second to none on this score. Gov. Kasich, a performance showman who wants a gig in the media to keep him alive for two years when he'll get schellacked again if he makes a third run for president, believes that low taxes create jobs, despite decades of his belief not working out in real time. He's done his best over eight years to exacerbate income inequality by lower taxes across the board, enriching the rich while expanding those who struggle to make a living at minimum wage jobs that often come with no benefits, especially healthcare.

America's National Chaplain, Kasich turned a blind eye to billions in wasted government funding that went to for-profit charter schools, that almost always underperform the worst public schools. Outrageous fees charged to pension funds for little in return, was a fruit ripe for the picking, but Democrats were oblivious to how to tackle this scandal to their advantage. Signing more than a dozen bills that put Ohio among the states with the harshest anti-women's health measures will be among Kasich's most harmful actions.

Former President Barack Obama

speaks at a "Vote Early" rally at The

Ohio State University in Columbus

Ohio media, from its newspapers to electronic outlets including TV stations, chose again to chase the stick of political press releases and contrived comments instead of asking candidates questions that would have put their feet to the fire. Questions about policies and programs, and who will pay for them, were absent from discussions and debates. Until Buckeye media grows a backbone strong enough to confront candidates with tough questions, the he-said-she-said, ping pong of daily talking points will further confuse those voters who bother to vote.

It was a point of pride this year that voter turnout was over 50 percent. It was seen as proof citizens were engaged. The sad reality is that 48 percent of registered voters didn't vote. And more discouraging democracy is that, of the 7-million-plus registered voters, many more who are eligible to vote are not registered. Gov. Kasich won his re-election in 2014 by a 2-1 margin, and while that sounded impressive, he received fewer than one in four votes from registered voters.

Republicans want to run government like a private operation instead of public interest institution. The challenge for change now resides in the hands of ordinary voters. But voter apathy of voters, even during trying times like these when the nation's president lies every day with impunity, is the biggest obstacle to representative democracy.

Media could inform their readers with more than chase-the-stick reporting. But that seems a bridge to far for reporters who want access to officials and for editorial boards that seem to see the light only after elections are over.

Universal voting would make a 52-percent voter turnout seem terrible instead of the great turnout it was heralded this year. If Democrats ever want to win again in Ohio, they ought to be rattling the cage for a statewide initiative to amend the Ohio Constitution to provide for universal voting.

If everyone had to vote or suffer a significant civil penalty for not voting, Republicans would have to fear the will of voters, 99-percent of whom would not be millionaires because they scap along as best they can when GOP policies favor owners over workers.