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In his grand Statehouse office beneath a bust of Lincoln, Gov. John R. Kasich let loose on fellow Republicans in Washington.



“You know what?” he said. “The very people who complain ought to ask their grandparents if they worked at the W.P.A.”

Ever since Republicans in Congress shut down the federal government in an attempt to remove funding for President Obama’s health care law, Republican governors have been trying to distance themselves from Washington.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin schooled lawmakers in a Washington Post opinion column midway through the 16-day shutdown on “What Wisconsin Can Teach Washington.” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, with a record of bipartisan support at home, remarked after a visit to the nation’s capital, “If I was in the Senate right now, I’d kill myself.”

But few have gone further than Mr. Kasich in critiquing his party’s views on poverty programs, and last week he circumvented his own Republican legislature and its Tea Party wing by using a little-known state board to expand Medicaid to 275,000 poor Ohioans under President Obama’s health care law.

Once a leader of the conservative firebrands in Congress under Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, Mr. Kasich has surprised and disarmed some former critics on the left with his championing of Ohio’s disadvantaged, which he frames as a matter of Christian compassion.

He embodies conventional Republican fiscal priorities — balancing the budget by cutting aid to local governments and education — but he defies many conservatives in believing government should ensure a strong social safety net. In his three years as governor, he has expanded programs for the mentally ill, fought the nursing home lobby to bring down Medicaid costs and backed Cleveland’s Democratic mayor, Frank Jackson, in raising local taxes to improve schools.

In the interview in his office, he criticized a widespread conservative antipathy toward government social programs, which regards the safety net as enabling a “culture of dependency.”

Mr. Kasich, who occasionally sounds more like an heir to Lyndon B. Johnson than to Ronald Reagan, urged sympathy for “the lady working down here in the doughnut shop that doesn’t have any health insurance — think about that, if you put yourself in their shoes.”

He said it made no sense to turn down $2.5 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next two years, a position backed by state hospitals and Ohio businesses.

The governor argued all year that extending eligibility beyond poor mothers and children to include childless adults earning up to $15,860 will help thousands of the mentally ill and drug-addicted.

“For those who live in the shadows of life, for those who are the least among us,” Mr. Kasich said in a February speech, echoing the Bible, “I will not accept the fact that the most vulnerable in our state should be ignored.”

Ohio’s legislative districts have been drawn to create safe seats, a dynamic that increasingly pulled the General Assembly to the right. “So many of these legislators are really concerned about a Tea Party challenge,” said John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron.

The Ohio Liberty Coalition, a network of Tea Party groups, threatened a primary challenge to any lawmaker supporting the governor on Medicaid expansion.

As a result, Medicaid expansion never came up for a vote in the General Assembly. The budget that lawmakers sent the governor in June even prohibited the expansion of Medicaid. But Mr. Kasich vetoed the item, and last week he did an end-run through a special committee known as the Controlling Board, which approves day-to-day adjustments to the budget.

Tea Party leaders acknowledge that Mr. Kasich won the round. Although some grass-roots activists may refuse to help him next year, he seems unlikely to face a serious primary challenger on his right flank. “Our governor’s numbers among Republicans are very good,” said Matt Borges, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party.

The governor cast a cold eye on hard-liners in his party, especially in Washington. “Nowhere in life do we not compromise and give,” he said. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/us/politics/ohio-governor-defies-gop
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