Dreamer on a caffeine jag

'I'VE sat here now for, I don't know, a good 45 minutes and you haven't seen me jump around," says Rep. John Kasich (R., Ohio), tapping his desk impatiently. This modest boast is his way of expressing irritation with claims that he's hyperactive. Every profile quotes an Ohio colleague who dreads fly- ing home with him when weary. A Northeastern Republican says, "He gives the impression of a guy who should ease up on the caffeine." Kasich's defense: "If you don't have energy, you can't move a mountain."

Kasich's energy has made him one of his party's most sought-after speakers. He infects gatherings -- of Republicans, Christian conservatives, Perotistas -- with enthusiasm. Their enthusiasm might in turn lead him to run for President in 2000.

A presidential campaign in 2000 would be the longest of shots for Kasich -- nobody has ever moved from the House to the White House --but it might also be the best chance he'll ever have. As former RNC chairman Haley Barbour notes, Republicans are going to have "the most open nomination contest since 1940." And Kasich is blocked in Ohio: the GOP establishment has already settled on candidates for senator and governor next year.

Kasich's following includes many young Republicans. "I think I've been given a gift of being able to communicate to young people. . . . I'm astounded by it at times," he says. He's 45, but he listens to the same music I do (I'm 22) and goes to rock concerts. Noting that the grunge band Soundgarden had broken up, he said, "I'm in semi-mourning about that."

The enthusiasm Kasich inspires is particularly impressive since he came to prominence by promoting detailed budget cuts -- hardly a crowd-pleaser. In 1993, he devised an alternative to President Clinton's budget that relied on spending cuts to reduce the deficit. Later he teamed with then-Rep. Tim Penny (D., Minn.) to propose cutting 1 per cent of federal spending; they came close to defeating the weakening Democratic establishment.

When the GOP took Congress, Newt Gingrich made Kasich chairman of the Budget Committee and thus leader of the crusade to eliminate the deficit by 2002. "I am the budget man," he told a Christian Coalition conference in 1995. In case his identification with the budget was in doubt, he treated himself as an item within it: "If I happen to be a program that the Republicans like, there shouldn't be any bias towards it . . ."

In his appeal to youth, his energy, and his quirky egalitarianism (of which more later), Kasich is reminiscent of that GOP golden boy of yesteryear, Jack Kemp. The comparison may seem inapposite: Kemp is a supply-sider and inter- nationalist, Kasich a deficit hawk with an isolationist streak. But just as Kemp defined the thrust of the Republican Party in his heyday, so does Kasich today. Both have received great press; both go the extra mile to curry favor with influential liberal reporters.

And both are bundles of contradictions. Kemp was the pro-union supply-sider, the economist jock, the "bleeding-heart conservative." Kasich is a fresh voice who's been in politics since college and a "compassionate conservative." Both are accused of being narrowly focused on one aspect of economic policy: Kemp on tax cuts for growth, Kasich on spending cuts to balance the budget.

As with Kemp, much of this criticism is unfair but not unfounded. Kasich's arguments about the immorality of debt and the stimulative effect of deficit reduction are "gibberish," says supply-side guru Lawrence Kudlow, who likes Kasich personally. Kasich has occasionally indicated support for raising income taxes on the rich. In the debate over the design of the Contract with America, Kasich opposed repealing the Bush-Clinton tax increases. After ini- tial hostility he came to favor a $500 tax credit for children, which sup- ply-siders disdain as social engineering through the tax code. And Gingrich sided with him against Dick Armey, who wanted to cut tax rates.

Supply-siders are also frustrated by the failure of congressional budget-writers to adopt "dynamic scoring," which would take account of the pro-growth effect of tax cuts. Kasich says, "You know, I'm the one who con- vened the meeting two years ago on the issue of dynamic scoring." True -- but the hearings were so stacked against it that a liberal Democratic staffer con- fessed that he wouldn't have changed a thing.

For all the criticism, Kasich has included capital-gains tax cuts in his budgets for years. He defends the child credit on non-economic grounds -- "Tax cuts to me are about values and about power." But he concedes, "If I had to do the child tax credit over again . . . I would probably try to make it a more growth-oriented tax provision."

He has critics on defense, too. Kasich describes himself as a "cheap hawk" at a time when analysts are worrying about the return of the "hollowed-out military." He was the leading GOP opponent of the B-2 bomber. He broke ranks to vote against missile defense, helping to hand the Contract its first defeat; that cause has languished ever since. (He later said he had misunder- stood the vote.) If Kasich's largely anti-interventionist foreign policy were to prevail, shrinking the military might be less dangerous. But troops were deployed to Bosnia over his objections. And he himself seeks sanctions against China -- which makes sense only if he expects or wants conflict.