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Kasich devotes what free time he has to the weight machines and stair climbers in the House gym. Even there, however, he is working; the gym is where Kasich has cemented many important friendships, including that of Leon Panetta, the White House chief of staff. Divorced and childless, he refuses to discuss his private life--save one element of it, his religious faith, which deepened after his parents were killed by a drunk driver in 1987. ``My parents did not die in vain,'' he said. ``I think I saved my soul and preserved my eternal destiny.'' Kasich was raised a Catholic and now refers to himself simply as a Christian. He attends a variety of churches and most Thursday afternoons joins a Christian study group that meets in the family quarters just outside the House chamber.
Despite his admitted supply-side leanings, Kasich comes to his new job with extraordinary credibility as a deficit fighter. In 1990, discouraged by the deficit and Bush's budget, he and two aides cobbled together a proposal based on the idea of freezing most federal spending. But all he could muster on the House floor were 30 votes, mostly from congressional nobodies like himself. Still, the cocky young Ohio Congressman kept at it, and within two years his budget was getting more votes in the House than Bush's. By 1993, the proposal that he and like-minded Democrat Tim Penny had put together came within six votes of passing and torpedoing Clinton's entire economic program.
His earlier budgets contained such incendiary measures as adding a means test to the part of the Medicare program that pays for visits to the doctor. Kasich also was willing to forge unlikely alliances in the interest of deficit reduction--most notably in the successful campaign he waged with California's Ron Dellums, one of the House's most ardent liberals, to curb production of the B-2 bomber.
He also seems willing to butt heads with his own party. Nowhere is the battle between him and other powerful Republicans likely to be as fierce as over defense. Kasich, who likes to call himself a ``cheap hawk,'' is certain to resist the plans that other G.O.P. leaders are making for dramatic increases in defense spending. ``There's so much waste and inefficiency in the operation of the Pentagon,'' he said. ``We need to clean that up as much as we need to clean up any other department. Even the guys with stars on their shoulders will tell you that.'' In a vote last week, Kasich was one of two dozen G.O.P. lawmakers who broke rank and opposed moving ahead to deploy the costly version of the Star Wars antimissile defense system that had been called for in the Contract with America. In so doing, he helped hand House Democrats their first victory since Republicans took control. Later, Kasich said he had misunderstood the vote--an explanation that did not wash with many of his critics. The past few weeks have also seen Kasich engaged in monumental behind-the-scenes turf battles with the fierce Republicans who run the mighty Appropriations Committee.