Want further evidence? See this 2014 video of Kasich meeting with the Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial board, in which Kasich is upset by people asking him about an amendment to the budget bill he signed preventing rape-crisis counselors from talking to patients about abortion. Kasich doesn’t just refuse to answer a question from Democratic then-challenger FitzGerald, he refuses to even acknowledge the man is talking. When a guy from the Dealer prompts him to answer FitzGerald, Kasich’s response: “Oh, did you have a question?” And it goes on like that for a bit.
Then there’s the time Kasich repeatedly told a crowd how a cop who pulled him over for a traffic violation was an “idiot.” The time he snapped at a woman over his Medicaid policies at a conference full of GOP donors. (“I don’t know about you, lady, but when I get to the Pearly Gates, I’m going to have an answer for what I’ve done for the poor.”) The time he told a group of lobbyists, “If you’re not on the bus, we’ll run over you with the bus”… the 2012 state of the state address wherein he impersonated a person with Parkinson’s disease… the time during his 2010 campaign when he mocked then-govenor Ted Strictland for having grown up poor.
When the Republican-controlled Ohio legislature refused to back Medicaid expansion in 2013, an angry Kasich went around them by appealing to the state’s Controlling Board. (This is basically the gist of why Vox writer Andrew Prokop called Kasich “the most interesting GOP presidential contender”). This June, unsurprisingly, Kasich vetoed a budget-bill item that would have limited the Controlling Board’s near-unilateral authority to accept federal grants for the state.
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