Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist in Cleveland and author of "...and His Lovely Wife."

Ohio Republican Party Chairman Matt Borges mulls the question: Could the Tea Party derail Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s potential bid for president in 2016?

“The Tea Party?” he says. “Let me tell you a story.”


Two years ago, around the time Borges became chairman, he scheduled separate meetings with two Tea Party activists in Cincinnati. Both men had garnered their share of headlines—too many, some Republicans privately griped—and Borges wanted to reach out to them.

First, he met with the guy who’d been a vocal critic of Borges.

“He had been saying terrible things about me and we had never met,” Borges says. “We sit down at lunch. He tells me Christian conservatives are the voice of the Tea Party and they’re A-OK with John Kasich and fine with helping him. But they were going to do everything they could to defeat [U.S. Sen.] Rob Portman.”

Next week, Borges met with the other Tea Party activist.

“He tells me John Kasich will never get elected president and no one will support him because of the Medicaid expansion,” Borges says. “But they will support Rob Portman. He’s fine.”

Borges laughs at the memory. “These self-appointed leaders of the Tea Party? They were not on the same page.”

It is hardly a revelation, of course, that the Tea Party has never been a monolithic group—not nationally, and certainly not in Ohio. For many Tea Partiers, the issue that moves them is strictly the size of government. Others trace their Tea Party affiliation to abortion and same-sex marriage. Still others embrace a “secure our borders” mantra.

What is far less clear, on the eve of the 2016 presidential primary campaign, is whether John Kasich or other establishment GOP figures can win over enough of this multifarious movement on the right to take both the nomination and the election. The Tea Party, in all its configurations, has brought diversity to a party that wasn’t looking for the disruption. Will this diversity be the Republican Party’s undoing, especially if the GOP candidate goes up against a Democratic juggernaut like Hillary Clinton?

For someone like Kasich, who is poised to trounce his Democratic opponent for reelection in this crucial Midwestern state—the latest poll shows him up by 22 points over Democrat Ed FitzGerald—these are important questions. With his burnished conservative pedigree and past congressional experience as chairman of the House Budget Committee, the governor is in an enviable spot: that of the overlooked guy everyone should be watching.

In April, Daily Beast writer Myra Adams made a big deal of billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s summoning Kasich to his “Sheldon Primary,” along with governors Chris Christie of New Jersey, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Adelson has made no secret of his intention to shower millions on the one Republican candidate he thinks can win the White House in 2016. The headline for Adams’ story: “Is John Kasich The Most Formidable 2016 GOP Candidate You Don’t Know?”

In July, a Gallup Poll ranked by popularity the top 11 potential 2016 Republican presidential candidates: Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, Paul Ryan, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum.

Missing from that list: John Kasich. But with Bush on the fence, and Christie and Walker damaged by legal scandals (or pseudo-scandals, depending on your point of view)—not to mention the likelihood that Kasich will run up a huge margin of victory over FitzGerald, the fiscally conservative Ohio governor could be the savior the Republican establishment is desperate to anoint.

Kasich has won, praise, too, for balancing Ohio’s budget, and for bouncing back from a resounding defeat after voters rejected his attempt to eliminate public workers’ right to collective bargaining.

Today, however, some Kasich supporters are nervous that he’s getting attention for the wrong reasons—being known, for example, as one of nine Republican governors to accept the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare (two more are considering it). Ultraconservative activists tend to talk about Kasich in terms of betrayal. By their lights, he is the man who started out as a Newt Gingrich acolyte but has moved so far from the base who elected him that New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel last year described him as a guy who “occasionally sounds more like an heir to Lyndon B. Johnson than to Ronald Reagan.”

Kasich, if he is to run a successful race for president, will have to run the gauntlet of the Republican primaries first. He will have to connect the dots between his early years as one of the Young Turks of the proto-Tea Party movement—the Gingrich-led takeover of the House in 1994—and his tenure as governor. He must do this in a way that makes the trajectory appear not only natural, but ideal to conservatives.

***

As personal stories go, John Kasich’s roots reflect the experience of many old-school Democrats, which would include his parents. He grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania. As he never tires of mentioning, he is the son of a mailman and the grandson of a coalminer and immigrants.

He refers often to his parents, Anne and John, who were killed in a car accident in 1987. Their deaths “helped me to jump-start my faith,” he wrote in his third book, Every Other Monday: Twenty Years of Life, Lunch, Faith, and Friendship . “I wanted to know if this ‘God thing’ was real,” he wrote. “For several years, some of my Washington friends had been trying to get me to attend their weekly Bible study reform group, and I’d always resisted. The last thing I wanted was to sit in a chapel with a group of politicians talking about God, because I worried we’d say one thing in there and then go back out and do the exact opposite. But when I returned to Washington after my parents’ death and tried to cobble my life back together, I started to look on this group as a possible lifeline. I was devastated, shattered, and desperate for any tether.”

Kasich’s bio tracks the political ambitions of a working-class kid determined to improve his station. He graduated from public high school in McKees Rocks, a hard-luck steel town outside Pittsburgh, and crossed the state border to Ohio, where he earned a political science degree at the Ohio State University. Four years later, in 1978, he became the youngest person elected to the Ohio Senate, at 26.

He was a young man in a hurry. After serving one term in the Ohio Senate, Kasich was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. After the Republicans took the majority in 1995, he became chairman of the budget committee, shepherding the legislation to balance the federal budget by 2002.

That experience became a pillar of Kasich’s political autobiography. In 2010, PolitiFact Ohio took a look at a Kasich ad touting him as “the architect who balanced the budget, cut spending, created a surplus, igniting record job creation.” The fact-checker ruled that Kasich could rightly lay claim as the bill’s chief architect and played a crucial role in its passage. The story quoted Gingrich, the House speaker in the 1990s, praising his protégé Kasich as “a historic figure. More than any single man, he is responsible for balancing the budget.” But PolitiFact wrote that “the ad overstates his role.”

In late 1999, after serving nine terms on the Hill, Kasich decided not to run for re-election and launched a brief, lackluster campaign for president. Fundraising faltered, and he pulled the plug after a few months. He endorsed George W. Bush and took a job as a managing director of the investment banking division of Lehman Brothers on Wall Street. “I had reached the top of the mountain in D.C.,” he told the New York Observer in 2001, after boasting that he’d passed a multiple-hours securities test. “And I didn’t want to head down the other side.”

Kasich commuted to New York several days a week to and from Columbus, where he lived with his wife, Karen, and their twin daughters. He stayed with Lehman Brothers until the firm’s collapse in 2008. The Columbus Dispatch reported during his 2010 race that Kasich made $182,692 in salary in 2007, along with a $432,000 bonus paid on January 31, 2008.

During that time he spit-polished his conservative credentials by hosting two shows on Fox News and often served as guest-host for The O’Reilly Factor. He left Fox after he decided to take on Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland.

The 2010 governor’s race was a high-heat contest covered widely by national media. (My husband, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, campaigned for Strickland.) The entire Democratic statewide ticket lost. Kasich beat Strickland by 77,000 votes.

Shortly after he took office—in what was to be a decisive inflection point in his journey from hardline conservative to centrist—Kasich made good on his promise to take on collective bargaining rights of unionized public workers. The Ohio General Assembly passed a bill to remove such rights—and it was an even more aggressive version of a similar bill in Wisconsin, which had excluded firefighters and police officers.

But the victory was short-lived for Kasich. Seven months later, voters overwhelmingly rejected the law in a public referendum. The reigning narrative is that, following that debacle, Kasich quickly learned his lesson—and that he became a much more complex leader. “My view is when the people speak in a campaign like this, a referendum, you have to listen when you’re a public servant,” Kasich told reporters at the time. “There isn’t any question about that. I’ve heard their voices. I understand their decision.”

Since then, journalist Chris Kardish wrote in Governing magazine in June, “There is no shortage of evidence for those on either side of the ‘Who Is Kasich’ argument. The governor has presided over new abortion restrictions, limits on voting participation, curbs on food stamps, income tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, and large cuts to local government and education. He has also passed the state’s first earned-income tax credit, reformed prison sentencing, mandated insurance coverage for autism, commuted death sentences, boosted funding for food banks and proposed tax hikes on energy producers.”

Friends and associates say that the governor’s job has tempered Kasich’s budget-cutting impulses.

“I’m not quite sure at what point you become ‘compassionate,’ says House Speaker Bill Batchelder, a Republican who’s known Kasich for four decades. ‘I know he wants to have a legacy that shows he provides for citizens who have difficult circumstances, and more importantly for young people who need the opportunity to work.’”

Democrats have consistently mocked such depictions of Kasich as a moderate. Clinging to claims of working-class roots while cutting food stamps and trying to guy workers’ rights is the height of hypocrisy, they argue.

After voters defeated the collective bargaining ban, there was period of time when Kasich looked politically vulnerable. In a December 2012 Quinnipiac University poll, more than a third of registered voters had an unfavorable view of Kasich. His favorability was at 40 percent, his lowest. By the following June, though, a new Quinnipiac poll revealed soaring popularity numbers for Kasich. The university declared it “an all-time job approval high mark” of 54 percent.

Yet, early this year, polls showed the race tightening between Kasich and FitzGerald, a former FBI agent and suburban mayor who is currently the Cuyahoga County executive. In February, Quinnipiac showed Kasich up by only 5 points, down from 14 points the previous June. Kasich’s fundraising far outpaced FitzGerald’s, but news coverage overall depicted the campaign as competitive.

Then FitzGerald’s campaign imploded. First, he was explaining an unearthed 2012 police report detailing how he’d been questioned for parking his car at 4:30 a.m. in an abandoned lot with a female companion who was not his wife. She was a friend travelling from Ireland, he said in a news conference, and he was giving her a ride to her hotel after an event and pulled over when they became lost.

A close aide disputed FitzGerald’s account of needing directions, but his campaign may have survived that story. Soon, however, FitzGerald started bleeding staff after another round of reporting revealed that he had not had a valid driver’s license for a decade. Between 2002 and March 2008, he didn’t even have a learner’s permit.

In mid-September, Kasich was refusing to debate his opponent. The message was: Why bother? In some recent polls, his lead has been as high as 30 points.

Kasich’s soaring popularity emboldens his supporters to dismiss any threats of mutiny from the right. “John speaks at a Tea Party rally, he gets elected, he cuts taxes and balances the budget,” says Borges. “John Kasich is the Tea Party. The Tea Party already won.”

Kasich’s conservative critics say that narrative won’t sell—especially outside of Ohio. Expanding Medicaid is just one example of Kasich’s betraying ways. He supports the Common Core, the education standards that are anathema to much of the right, and, after signing the anti-tax pledge, fought for a tax hike on fracking for two years and joined Cleveland’s Democratic mayor Frank Jackson to champion a successful $15 million school levy. “Matt Borges is an idiot,” Tom Zawistowski, a Tea Party leader in northeast Ohio, shouts into the phone when I ask for his response to the idea that Kasich represents the Tea Party. “It’s laughable, it’s so ridiculous.”

Zawistowski, who tried unsuccessfully to recruit a Tea Party primary challenger to Kasich in this year’s governor’s race, says Kasich has lost all Tea Party support in this year’s gubernatorial election. At last fall’s “We the People” Tea Party convention in the state’s capital, he says, “there were 350 Tea Party leaders there representing 45,000 activists and 600,000 members. We asked, ‘How many voted for Kasich in 2010?’ Everyone raised their hands. Then we asked, ‘How many will vote for Kasich this year?’ One hand went up.”

He concedes that Kasich will easily win this year’s reelection bid. But president? Not happening, Zawistowski says. “We will tell our story. We will get our message out. We know him better than anyone else. Once we start talking about John Kasich’s record, about all his betrayals, he’s not going to look very good because he’s not a conservative.”

***

Running for the GOP nomination, of course, is about far more than appeasing the Tea Party in all its configurations. A run for the presidency invites scrutiny of a candidate’s character and personality and intellect – and charisma. There will be no dodging debates or reporters' questions on the national stage.

Kasich, in the past, has proved himself to be a worthy candidate on all fronts, says Timothy Hagle, a University of Iowa political scientist who chaired George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in southeast Iowa in 2004 and then worked for the Department of Justice.

“I’m keeping an eye on him, in part because I remember his brief presidential campaign in 1999,” Hagle says. “He was popular with students here. Back then he was younger than many of the other candidates, so there was that, but he was also very enthusiastic. There was an ‘aw-shucks’ quality about him.”

Since then, Kasich has steadily built a reputation for himself, Hagle says. “In Congress, he was chairman of the budget committee, so he already knew how to talk about the economy. Now he’s been governor and has that story to tell. Republicans tend to like governors.”

“John Kasich is the best-read political leader I’ve ever known,” says one of his closest confidants, Doug Preisse, who ran Kasich’s brief presidential run in 1999. “One day he’s reading an 18th-century philosophical track, and the next day it’s a biography or fiction. As governor, as an administrator, as father of a state with 11 million people, he’s had to show his heart, too.”

Hagle’s advice to Kasich is to come out to Iowa—immediately. “Right now would be a good time. Come out and campaign for other people running right now. It’s a good way to get your name out there, and you can call in those favors later.”

Last week, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz won the straw poll at the conservative Values Voter Summit with 25 percent of the vote. That was down from his previous victory in 2013, at 42 percent, followed by Dr. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal. Rand Paul came in sixth, with only 7 percent.

The coverage of Cruz and Paul at the summit telegraphed an over-the-top showmanship bound to make the wonkish Kasich uneasy.

The Times’ Jeremy Peters described Paul’s entrance against the backdrop of “a video of an ultrasound and the murmur of a beating heart played, accompanied by lines from Mr. Paul’s speeches like, ‘I will always take a stand for life.’”

Contrast that to Kasich’s late-night signing of a controversial abortion bill requiring a woman seeking an abortion to listen to a fetal heartbeat. Surrounded by men, he signed the bill and left, refusing to take reporters’ questions.

Kasich will need to start answering them to have any hope of competing in 2016, and without the signs of impatience that many Ohio journalists have come to expect. “Kasich’s base is corporate conservatives and social conservatives,” says Joan McLean, a political scientist at Ohio Wesleyan University. “What we don’t know about Kasich: What is his worldview? Can he articulate it in a way that comes across as nuanced?”

Nuance is not always Kasich’s strong suit. Days after he was elected, Kasich gathered statehouse lobbyists and made it clear where he stood. Either they were with him, or they were expendable. “If you’re not on the bus, we’ll run over you with the bus,” he said. “And I’m not kidding.”

In a public speech to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency five weeks after he took the oath as governor, Kasich launched a tirade against a state trooper who had pulled him over for "approaching a public safety vehicle with lights displayed" on a state route. He paid the $85, but he was fuming about it. “Have you ever been stopped by a police officer that’s an idiot?” Kasich asked the audience. He then proceeded to use the incident to inveigh against government overreach. “We just can’t act that way. What people resent are people who are in the government who don’t treat the client with respect.”

After a video of Kasich’s comments went public, he apologized to the state trooper in a private meeting.

McLean, who is also the former director of the Women’s Political Caucus, says this illustrates a larger problem for Kasich. “He doesn’t like to negotiate or compromise. He doesn’t like to be challenged. ... With women voters, in particular, an angry man probably isn’t going to work for them.” (No less than Arizona Sen. John McCain once said that Kasich has a "hair-trigger temper.")

But if he’s going to run, Kasich’s most immediate task will be to win back the national party base that he began to lose on Feb. 4, 2013. That was the day he announced he was accepting the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. At Kasich’s urging, the state’s obscure Controlling Board voted 5-2 to accept $2.5 billion in extra federal money for additional 275,000 of the neediest Ohioans.

Democrats sputtered, and Republicans exploded. Thirty-nine GOP state legislators signed a letter of protest. Six Republican legislators sued to reverse the decision. The Wall Street Journal’s influential editorial page accused Kasich of “abusing his executive power” with a “gambit worthy of President Obama.”

In a speech that month, Kasich drew from the Book of Matthew to frame his reasoning: “For those who live in the shadows of life, for those who are the least among us, I will not accept the fact that the most vulnerable in our state should be ignored.”

Months later, President Obama praised Kasich for his Medicaid decision, prompting conservative talk-show host Laura Ingraham to start a Fox interview with the governor by sniping: “Governor, you guys are tight now,” she said. “You guys are practically spooning, you and President Obama. I mean, gosh, that’s amazing. Are you BFFs for real?”

Kasich immediately mentioned Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who had also embraced Medicaid expansion.

The Ohio Supreme Court tossed out the legislators’ lawsuit, and Republican legislators moved on, perhaps signaling an acquiescence to their constituents. A Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati poll released in June 2013 had shown that about 63 percent of Ohioans – and 55 percent of Republicans — supported Medicaid expansion.. Tea Party activists, however, are still fuming—and they have long memories.

***

And what of Kasich? Is he running for the White House or not? About this he’s been cagey. “Honestly, I just don’t see it,” he told the Youngstown Vindicator editorial board in September. “I tried it once. You come with me. You can go with me out to Iowa. You wouldn’t believe it. You’d never go to Iowa again...”

Earlier this month, Kasich started telling the media that he may or may not be writing a book, at Gingrich’s urging. He said that he had rattled off a list of his accomplishments for the former House speaker.

“You think about this list, it’s pretty amazing,” Kasich told the Columbus Dispatch editorial board. “It’s pretty remarkable. ... It’s an amazing range of things.”

The Dispatch headline: “Kasich already looking beyond November election.”

Kasich’s persistent response: Not saying, not saying, not saying. He told the Dispatch he hasn’t discussed it with his closest advisers. He added that his wife didn’t want him to run. “I’d have to have some clarion call,” he told a crowd of college Republicans last week.

A popular set-up, that one. Anyone in politics or covering it for a living knows it doesn’t take much for a politician to swear on Tuesday that no, no, no, he’s staying put, and by Thursday he’s the reluctant hero answering the call. Your cousin says you should run, the dog barks and you’ve got yourself a groundswell.

Perhaps most revealing is Kasich’s refusal to sign a pledge to serve a full second term as governor.

Kasich’s explanation, after repeated pressing from Fox’s Chris Wallace back in March: “I mean I don’t know how many times I have to say this. I’m flattered about the fact that people talk about my running for president,” Kasich said. “You know, I tried to run for president in the 2000 election and nobody would pay any attention. Now all I’m focused on is Ohio and everybody wants to talk about something else. So, I’m here in Ohio.”

“All right,” Wallace said, “I want to talk about—”

Kasich interrupted.

“All the musings are great,” he said.

And then he smiled.