Is it important . Will it make a difference . If jeb bush and scott walker decide not to play in that early ballot, that will he telling. We saw last time that Michele Bachmann was the winner of that stroll poll. She flamed out pretty early on in the race. It is a big fundraising opportunity, and the chairman talked about the importance of having it. Its not an essay going to give us a direction as to who will come out on top. As you look at february, its conceivable that you could have four different winners in each of those four states, correct . There are a few different lanes that they are competing for. There is enough to have a couple in each different camp. To your point about how long this will go on for, i think you will go on for a while as they compete within the party. It also raises the importance of fundraising. If this raises one there are several candidates who when this it will be all long race and they will need the resources. Thank you for your questions and commentary. Thank you for joining us on newsmakers. Announcer tonight on q a, air force and on his new book, debt wake, the Last Crossing of the lusitania. Erik it gets a complicated. What ultimately happened . Why was the lusitania allowed to enter the sea without escort . Without the detailed warning that could have been provided . This has led to some interesting speculation on whether the ship was set up for attack by churchill or someone in the admiralty. Its interesting, i found no smoking memo, and i wouldve found it if it existed. There is nothing from churchill or somebody else. Lets let the lusitania go into the irish sea because we wanted it to get some. Nothing like that. Announcer tonight at it 00 p. M. On cspans q a. Announcer john kasich visited manchester, New Hampshire. He was speaking at a politics breakfast series. He previously served in the house of representatives from 1983two thousand one. He ran for president towards the end of his final term, but lost the nomination to george w. Bush. This is just under an hour. [applause] gov. Kasich it is great to be here. This is back when Congress Actually worked. He is a terrific guy and worked closely with one of my great friends. I love him. He was on the Budget Committee with me. You know chris. I always said john sununu was the smartest guy i have ever worked with in the house and senate. Do you agree with that . Yeah. Now that youre in hampshire, you better or you wont get out of the room. What can you say about judd gregg . What can you say about i am honored with the fact that he would come here this morning. These are my comrades in arms. These were people who made the Congress Work and helped to make america work, so would you give them a round of applause. They are my friends. [applause] this is my first time back in New Hampshire. Bruce burkey said it was 16 years when i was here last, and i have to tell you that when i was here 16 years ago, one of the most profound times was that i did these coffees. I was a young man, really young, a member of the house, i figure the way i could get known was to show up in peoples living rooms and let them talk to me and asked me questions and get to know me and all that kind of stuff, so we have this one coffee towards the end of the campaign. I was in a kitchen with this lady. I did not know her really. We were standing at the sink and we were just going on and on about this and that, and im thinking to myself, this lady is absolutely going to be for me if i can actually run for president , i have got her. She looked at her watch and said, i really enjoy this conversation. When do you think the candidate will get here. [laughter] yeah. Thats when i knew the fix was in, chris. It was all over at that point. Thats when i kind of knew that i had to leave. I have a lot of fond memories of New Hampshire and the people here were really, really nice to me. The message that i took home was that they like me, its a little early, come back another time. It was really terrific. My wife said how much she enjoyed coming to New Hampshire, where people really understand the issues, and this is a great place. I am thrilled to be back here. After that conversation with that lady, i knew was time for me to get out, so i not only said i was not going to run for president , and then i endorse george bush, but i also did not want to be in congress anymore. I was done. I had been there for nine terms. Basically, i decided to leave because i had accomplished the biggest things that i had wanted to achieve. Number one is i spent 10 years of my life fighting to balance the federal budget. Some of my early votes, the first vote i ever took on the budget, you have to remember there was a bush budget, a democratic budget, a black caucus budget. The vote was 40530. They flash all this up on the board when they count all the reds and all the greens, and was almost all reds. Some of my democratic friends came to the floor and voted for my budgets because they did not want me to be embarrassed. I remember walking back to my office and my staff was really down. I said, this is fantastic. There are 29 other people that think we know how to run america, so were just getting started. It was year after year after year, and chris, youre one of the ones who voted for me and not budget year to make a statement that we need to get our fiscal house in order, not because of numbers, because budgets are not about numbers come in there about the people the future, the principles, the values. So each year we kept at it and got more and more votes. I became the republican leader on the budget. We went through a Government Shutdown because the administration wanted to cook the books. I did not want any part of it. After a while they understood our determination in we had a lot of meetings working with my colleagues on the Budget Committee, the leadership. We actually were able to pass the first outline for a real balanced budget and we not only looked and reviewed all the spending but we cut taxes at the same time. We cut the Capital Gains tax. What happened resulted in the first balanced budget since man walked on the moon. I was able to declare victory for all the work that i put in. At that point we had a 5 trillion budget surplus. At the same time, i had become a military reformer. I was a part of one of the early Reform Efforts of spare parts. I was involved with procurement reform all of my career. I was even involved in the way in which the pentagon operated. You might remember that services werent very independent with each other. In the war in lebanon our marines could be on the beach and see a navy ship in the ocean, but they could not communicate with each other. The radios did not work. So we went to work. A lot of the senior members including me, and many of them were democrats as well. We put together what was called the goldwaternichols bill which created special forces command and got the forces to Work Together. Because if you dont Work Together in the time of war, you have the problems you have with lebanon. The helicopters the crash in the desert during the carter administration. It was the most are matted change in the military operated in modern history. I was glad that the a part of that. Finally i was a member of the political odd couple working with a liberal democrat from california to limit the production of the b2 bomber. They cost 1 billion of fees. They wanted to buy 132 and its mission was to fly in the middle of the soviet union during a nuclear war to drop more bonds. I said we should limit its production and take the savings from that and put it into advanced weapons so that pilots dont have to fly over targets and we can use these weapons at a distance to accomplish our goal in a much less expensive way. Johnson knew knew worked with me on that. At the end of the day, we went from 132 b2 bombers down to 20. I think it is important that when we build systems to meet the threat, we dont build systems just to be in a position to have some sort of job creation program. I believe that the fence ought to be what it is all about having systems to meet a threat in the country. With accomplishing that, i decided to leave. I went out for 10 years to work for lehman brothers. I worked really in a twoman office in ohio and traveled the country. I learned so much. One of the things i was able to do was work with Sequoia Capital out in california. When i first started doing out and going out there, people were so successful and what got me so thrilled was that they created the future. I am a person who loves the future. I dont like to think in the past and only momentarily in the present. To be out there, and i was in the offices of Sequoia Capital and this guy comes running in the building with a ponytail and torn up jeans. Im sitting in one of these glass offices. And my friend says you should have met him. He has this company you have never heard of. I asked what the name of the business and he said it was this little thing called youtube. Being out there and understanding venture capital, ideas, how to bring things to the fore, was thrilling for me. And of course i was a giant Television Star at fox news. I was the star heartland. I know you remember that. I know you want them to bring it back, but i am not available at the time. And i served on boards of companies and made speeches all over the country and wrote a book and i was having a great time in the private sector. As chris shays was saying, i love the fact that im not a government anymore. But for the young people here the lord has created us, each of us, special for a special purpose. We are made unique and we have a job to do on this earth. For those that hear that and answer the call, in my opinion that is how you find meaning in life. I have this nagging feeling that the lord had been good to me throughout my life. My father carried mail on his back. My mothers mother could barely speak english. And yet i had a terrific career. It was like, john, time to saddle up again. I floated in 2006 about running for governor, but i havent been out long enough. I wanted to breathe the fresh air. Then in 2010, the call was pretty clear, so i decided to run for governor. My wife wasnt all that thrilled, but she said i given so much of your life to Public Service why dont you just do more for charity . I said i really need to do this. So i ran and i won. It was a difficult race incumbents in ohio dont lose. I was able to eat out a victory. When i won, i had no time for politics. And when i won, my job was to do political calculations and build a political career. My job was to step up to the plate, gather group of people, and solve problems. If i won again after serving four years, great. If i dont win, great. Let me go do my job and fix my precious state. We were dying in ohio. They talk about the flyover state people didnt even look , down when they flew over ohio. We were 8 billion in the hole when i came in. We worked with members of the ohio house to try to address this problem. 8 billion in the hole of our budget. He calculated about 18 were in the hole. People said you need to raise taxes. I said that if you have a restaurant and dont have any customers, you cant raise prices. You have to cut prices and change the menu. We started digging into the entire budget. We kind of put the band back together. There were people who had worked for me for well over 20 years who said they wanted to be part of this. So we reengineered the state of ohio. And i saw some folks this morning from the aarp. You know what we did . We provided some of the most robust Home Health Care in the country and said that if you are able to stay in your own home, you shouldnt be forced into a nursing home. If you need one, great. If you dont need one, stay in your own home where will be less expensive. We reengineered everything in the state. That eight billiondollar hole started to disappear. We also lost 350,000 jobs. I think about our ohio stadium that basically holds 100,000 plus. That means that stadium was filled three times and people walked out of that stadium and they went home and told their kids and spouse at dinner, i lost my job today. Where i come from, when the wind blew the wrong way people lost , their jobs. I understand the pain of unemployment. It is personal. It creates uncertainty in the mind of the person who loses their job. It creates fear in the lives of children in the family. 350,000 jobs in our debt was hanging in balance. We were getting ready to have our debt downgraded. I went to new york and i said, we can fix all this. I said, just watch. Where are we today . We are no longer 8 billion in the hole. Frankly folks, you need to know. Almost half of the states in this country or in structural imbalance. Did you know that . Some of them are run by republican governors. They cant figure out how to balance their budget. We are completely and totally structurally sound in ohio and we went from 8 billion in the hole to where at the end of this budget cycle we will have a 2 billion surplus in a period of about four years. [applause] and we were down those 350,000 jobs. Now we are up about 340,000 jobs to the good. Think about that turnaround in a period of just a little more than four years. And taxes we have cut taxes by more than anybody in the entire country. We are going to have at least another 500 million tax cut in this budget. Right, Senate President . I have to check with him because he is kind of the boss. 3. 5 billion in tax cuts including killing the death tax in the state of ohio. We are very proud of all this. And what it shows is that tackling problems can lead to Economic Growth. The things we have always known managing your government. Look, when you go to balance budgets, dont think about slashing and burning. Think about google, think about yahoo , think about paypal think about amazon. You see the key in the 21st century is how you reengineered things to give you more value at a lower price that brings more customer satisfaction. What that requires is, you dont Pay Attention to the special interest groups. They all have their particular point of view. They want to cling to the status quo. Think differently, think big think creatively. That can make such a big difference. What we found in ohio as removed to eliminate the deficit and build surpluses, people are pretty happy with what is going on. A Pretty Amazing situation. So folks, as we created this Economic Growth, some conservatives and some republicans believe that Economic Growth is an end in and of itself. I believe it is a means to an end. And you know what we have done in ohio . We have reached those people who have unfortunately lived in the shadows for far too long, the mentally ill, the drug addicted, the working poor, people who have been imprisoned. Of course we put a lot of , emphasis on raising the prosperity and opportunities for minorities in the state. We brought some of our money back from washington. Weve been able to put more resources into our local community. Let me just tell you a little bit about this. We have 50,000 people in our prisons. We have one of the lowest recidivism rates in the country at 27 , as opposed to 50 because we give people a chance to rehabilitate themselves in given a chance to get their lives back together. 20 of the people that sit in our prisons have some form of Mental Illness. So you are bipolar and what we are going to do is lock you up in a prison and then we release you . To where . To who . So we can put you back in the present . It is immoral. Dont you think, ladies and gentlemen . It is immoral. We made a promise to the mentally ill in our communities. Once we deinstitutional them we would take care of them. , but they are so easy to run over. Not in ohio. The National Association of Mental Illness is holding ohio up as a model state. With the proper medication proper guidance, proper oversight, people can get their lives back. We cant afford to have 10,000 of these folks in our prisons. It does not make sense. Drug addicted . 80 of our prison population has one form of addiction or another. We are about helping people in the prisons get over their addictions and to take them from the prison setting and move them into the community with the same kind of rehabilitation. What we estimate is that we will have a 10 recidivism rate for who we are able to treat. Give them their lives back. For the working poor, you work hard and you try to get a little raise and they take your child care away from you. We have a bigger problem we talk about marginal rates for the rich, think about marginal rates are for the poor. How do you work yourself out of a situation where you are a single mom with kids and the minute you get a raise you lose your childcare . We are changing that in ohio. We are working be a child cap to 300 of poverty so that you can become independent. That me tell you another thing. We talk about the family. You realize that under federal law that a dad living in the home they loses their benefits. Either dad has to leave or lie about who he is and what hes doing. What we are to be doing is trying to keep families together. We should not be having federal laws or state laws that break down the family. We know the stronger the family is, the better off the future of our children is. With minorities, we do have set aside programs. I want entrepreneurship in our minority communities. That is what is really all about. So ladies and gentlemen, we do , treat these folks who have the Mental Illness and the drug addiction and the working poor. There are debates in all the states about what we should do. But we move quickly beyond that excuse me and now we are involved in welfare reform. I was involved in welfare reform in congress. But now im involved with welfare reform 2. 0. Folks, one of the things that we have to do is to make sure that when somebody is down, we not only give them the temporary help to get them up, but that we need to give them the tools that they need to become fully successful in life. We are now proposing, and this will be accomplished through the legislature, a welfare reform plan. Heres what it says. If you are on welfare and you go and are on food stamps or medicaid or any of these things, you can go into a Welfare Office and have four or five caseworkers. You dont even know four or five . What we are telling the local welfare people are, you get one caseworker and coordinate all activities. And not only you find out the needs of the person that comes in the office but you find out , why they have needs. Once you know what their needs are, you must address those needs. We are moving the Business Community into the Welfare Office so we can train these folks for jobs, get them on it their feet, and in poverty. In what i have told the Welfare Offices, if you do not do this i will take your money away and give it to somebody who will do it. There is no excuse for not getting people are chance to get up on their feet and be successful, independent people again. [applause] i want to just give you a couple lessons and then take a couple questions. First of all, this is why love judd and chris, because i work with them. Leaders dont take polls. You know i tried to tell my , colleagues in the legislature. You do your job. If you worry about election or reelection, you are doing your job. If you do your job, you are likely to win. It would be not fun to do your job and forget all the Political Considerations and lose election. Thats not good. But think about if you dont do your job and play politics in lose your election. We dont have time for regret in political life. Get your hands on the wheel drive the car. In my first year, in the middle of doing all these budget efforts and a whole idea of variety of things, including reform of public employees, i got to the skyhigh Approval Rating of 31 . [laughter] its not that funny. You want to know something folks . I thought it was 29 . Governor kaisich you know what, it didnt bother me. I didnt look at the polls because i wasnt in it to be popular. I was in it to try to fix the state. When you lead without poll taking, you know what happens . It is contagious. Then people who work with you feel empowered. They feel like they can do things that are different and they are not chained to the status quo. That they are free. In the first year i was at 31 , approval. Last year, we had an election in ohio. I won 86 out of 88 counties. Cuyahoga county, which president obama won by 40 points, i carried. With 26 of the africanamerican vote, and 60 of the vote from women. You know why it happened . People felt better. They felt ohio was heading in the right direction and they responded to the leadership. Readers should not be paying attention to the polls. I look at d. C. Leaders and when i left there was a surplus. I have been on a crusade calling for a balanced Budget Amendment to the u. S. Constitution. Im going to tell you something [applause] i have been doing this since i was 26 years old. Our children are at risk. Our grandchildren are at risk. We keep ringing up debt and Congress Seems to have no intention of being able to deal with this. If we didnt have a balanced budget requirement in ohio, we would be in the hole. Exception for war or calamities, it would change the culture of washington. President s, and president s go in the debt keeps rising. We know across the country that if you dont manage your debt, it will kill you. I am going to continue to travel all over america to do what i can to get a balanced Budget Amendment. You know what is interesting . It is the republicans who are trying to kill it. They say that if we have a convention, god only knows what will happen. I say that im not sure if congress would pass a balanced budget if we got close to a convention, but coming out of a convention, 38 states have to ratify. Im not sure 30 states would ratify mothers day these days. But saying i have to stay in a building that is on fire because i walk outside i might get hit by a meteor. This needs to get done. Earpt you sick of all the divisions until america . Rich and poor. Black and white. Republicans and democrats. Im right. Youre wrong. You dont know what you are doing. I got all the answers. I didnt say that. You know what the fact is . You think america is strong when all we do is fight with one another . America is strong when we are together. By the way, the only task force i know of in the country with community and police relations. I have a democratic africanamerican who is the cochairman of this task force along with our head of public safety. They have conducted meetings around the state about the issues of police and communities. You cant sweep this under the rug. When a majority of americans think that the system works against them, it cannot be ignored. We need to unite the country. We need to stop picking on one another in going into our own silos. They say that no house divided divided can stand. It is up to each of us to unite this country and and polarization by listening. We need more empathy, more understanding of somebody elses point of view. My great friend ron bellows who i worked on the b2 bomber with, we couldnt agree on much, but we found two items to agree upon. And we are great friends. My friend chris shays, always viewed as a moderate or liberal republican. He had his point of views and we accommodated it, didnt we chris . That is what America Needs to be. America is to understand that they have a chance. It is up to the leaders in our country to communicate that every single human being regardless of their circumstance has an opportunity to be successful. To be able to live the american dream. And that takes effort on the part of leaders to sometimes cross their own certain philosophy to put it this way, to cross their own interest groups. That is what we are all about. You dont have to give up your principles in the course. My feeling is, being able to give people a chance to become entrepreneurs is fantastic. If you dont like it, that is your problem, not mine. I am going to do it because i know that uniting people will work for our country and our state. Finally, we have to restore these values that i call foundational values in our country. What are they . Im not talking about the hot button issues. One, personal responsibility. The dog ate my homework doesnt get it in america. Personal responsibility. Being able to accept that we all make mistakes, but accept personal responsibility and you will get better. Resilience. Everybody should get a trophy just because they show up. You have a big soccer team, they have more trophies than they have kids. Thats not the way life is. It is a rude awakening when you find out, wheres my trophy . You call home and ask your mom why you didnt get a trophy today. They knock you down, you get back up again. I was so glad this morning to see my kids grade cards. They did great. They struggled with some subjects and they didnt lay down. Hey girls, you did great. Resilience really matters. Empathy. There is a real attack on welfare. Just dismiss these folks pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Do you know what would be like to live in a singlefamily home with a couple kids where you get up in the morning and you dont want to leave your house because you hear gunshots . You never really knew who your father was. You never had a role model that you can fashion your life about. You dont know anything other than poverty, trouble, violence, drug dealers, the person who is mentally ill or drug addicted. It is across our country. It is not in one little area of our country. Understand the challenge of coming back. Understand the pain that somebody else has. Walk in their shoes for a while and it will open your mind and allow us to be united. Teamwork. They got off the barge, right . Ill do my job, you do your job, we will rush the beach and save the next generation. That is what america is about. It is about teamwork. Is about figuring out a way to be part of a great mosaic. Family. Is there a more important value than family in america . We have to stop kids from having kids. And finally, faith. Faith is about the dos, not the donts. The lord has a purpose, find it, use it. Those values are critical to restoring america. They have been critical to restoring ohio. People say, why are you here . I think it may be worth you hearing this from a guy that has been around for a long time. I love my state and i love my country and i want it to do better and better. Not just for me but for my kids and my kids kids. My country, we will be fine. Host the governor has agreed to take some questions. I would like to start off this morning. He spent some time with our students in the first question that came up was about Foreign Policy. I would like to ask you to give us his thoughts on Foreign Policy. Gov. Kaisich what kind of question is that . Give your thoughts on Foreign Policy . First of all, i think we have to recognize that america is a special country with special values. If we dont want to recognize that, you can forget it. Because we are a special country with special values, i think is very important that we are able to let the world know about our values. And i think what has been happening here over the last few years is the fact that we have retreated in the world. When we retreat, it creates a vacuum. When we retreat, what does that mean . It means our friends are not sure who we are in it even confuses our enemies and emboldens our enemies in a lot of ways. I think it is really important that we dont try to travel around the world remaking every country in the image of america. But it is important that we can assert ourselves. I think i was the first meeting republican that i know of in the country to say that if you want to fight isis, you cant just do it from the air. We have to drive a coordinated effort and if it meets u. S. Boots on the ground are necessary, so be it. We are not there to change the way these countries work, we are there to restore order. We are there to assert a lot of the values that we have that anybody has a right to live free. So if that is will we need to do, we do it, we go, and we get out. And we have to decide where we go based on u. S. Interests. In my career, i had a chance to vote on the civil war in lebanon. I voted not to have troops on the ground. It is not an area where the United States should place themselves. I supported the first gulf war which was critical to us. I have a hard time understanding let me tell you something i think about. I have a hard time convincing legislators of what i do and i can only imagine how difficult it is to work with the french, british, spanish, italians, to say that we need to have very tough sanctions against a guy that is trying to gobble up the territory of free people vladimir putin. It makes no sense. You have to assert your values and bring people along. You cant do it all by yourself. But we have the moral authority and standing to be leaders and bring people with us. And we have to do it and of course fight radical islam. That question, what do you think about Foreign Policy is like what you think about life . The United States has to be engaged in this world. Without us, the world is in chaos. All those books about america being out there and being arrogant, maybe that goes with the territory of being a leader, but we cannot slump in our job across this globe. Thank you governor very much for being here. Great job in ohio. I have to tell you, i never got a trophy either. My name is bob with aarp. I want to ask you a session on Social Security, not so much for myself, but for my children and their children. To strengthen Social Security or at least tell them they are paying every month, will it be there for them . Gov. Kaisich i once had a plan to deal with Social Security back when i was in the congress. It was to go to a wage based rather than a wage and a price based approach. That would put them in a position to be able to make such security sound. I think george bush had a plan similar to that. It was kind of rejected and now as you get farther and farther down the road, the challenges get greater and greater. I dont have a Social Security plan in front of me, but it is going to have to be changed. We should not look at this as a meat cleaver. We should think about a better way to design all of these systems. Medicare, for example. Let me tell you about what were doing in ohio for medicare or medicaid. Right now, the Health Care System is fundamentally run on the basis of quantity not quality. We had a program where we gave a Childrens Hospital money to deal with asthma. We found out that we were successful. Hospitals had fewer visits because they kept kids out of the hospital. So they had less revenue. The Insurance Companies didnt pay as many claims so they had more revenue. We were able to get the Insurance Companies and the hospitals to share the benefit so that we keep kids healthy and drive down the cost of medicine. Everybody is a winner. We had to think creatively in that way. Lets figure out this system. But it has to be changed. We cant say that you cant tinker with it, that is putting your head in the sand. Anybody who wants to be president ought to be asked this question and if they are not willing to deal with it, they are not fit for office. Should i decide one way or the other, i will have a plan for you. Let me just say one more thing about balancing the budget like with medicaid. The federal government should set goals. They should stop giving us prescriptions out here about how to do things. They ought to say, we have some goals and states, you go ahead and do it. When judd was governor, he could figure out exactly how to reengineer a program. In our job Training Programs which are vital to train people in the 21st century for new technology, you have to be unemployed to get the bulk of the money so that you can then get employed. Why dont they give the money that i need so that i can train people on the job and they dont have to lose their job to get another job. This is how confounded the federal government is. An