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• Mr. Kasich's official site
• Excerpt from Stand for Something
• Heartland on Fox
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Tavis: John Kasich represented Ohio's twelfth district in Congress for 18 years, where he was also chairman of the House Budget Committee. In 2000, he launched an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination for President. He is now the host of 'Heartland with John Kasich' on the Fox News Channel. His latest, soon to be bestselling book, I'm certain, is called "Stand for Something: The Battle for America's Soul.' Congressman, Mr. Host, nice to have you here, sir.

John Kasich: Thank you very much. And I'm the only guy that can have a bumper sticker that says, don't blame me, I ran against the guy. (Laughs) How do you like that one, Tavis? (Laughs)

Tavis: Speaking of which, do you ever miss it?

Kasich: You know what's, every once in a while, I'll get a pang. But no. I thank the good lord that I spent half my life in public office and around politics, and you would think I would miss it, but I don't. I don't miss it at all. I've moved on, and I'm so glad that I'm not sitting around saying, what am I gonna run for? Like with this book, everybody goes, well, what does this mean? What are you running for? I'm not running for anything. This was just something out of my heart that I thought about for 10 years, and I decided to put it down on paper.

Tavis: I recall, though, very distinctly, I can remember cases and press conferences when you were the house budget chair. That's a pretty powerful post. Being a talk show host ain't nothing to sneeze at, but that's a lot of power. You don't miss the power, even? The control?

Kasich: I never thought of it that way, to be honest with you. And look, I was the chairman of the budget committee, I spent 10 years of my life, I learned about leadership. I learned that leadership is saying more than it is, is doing more than it is saying. We were able to balance the budget for the first time since man walked on the Moon. But what's important about that is not so much the numbers or the accomplishment, it's the model.

The model was we believed in something; we climbed a mountain. It wasn't easy. We shut the government down. Then we had a sit down with the other side, the Democrats. We sat down with them; we agreed on the problem, which is it's irresponsible to pass bills on to your kids. We - unpaid bills on to your kids - sat down, and we negotiated something that was historic.

And so it's the model, that big things can get done, that you can stick to your principles. You can do some compromise. Don't sell out your principles. And Tavis, one thing most people don't know, the reason the government shut down is 'cause I said, we will not use phony economic gross statistics to dummy this up and lie to the people again. And some of my guys, including Newt, they were willing to make a deal.

And I said, you go ahead and try, and I'm gonna try to stop you. So the bottom line was, tell the truth. And my mom and dad were blue collar Democrats. My father was a mailman.

Tavis: Postal workers, yeah.

Kasich: Yeah, my dad was a mailman. And so, look, Tavis, at the end of the day, when I went to Washington, I was not there to make friends. I was there to do something. To change the world. And I'll tell you the other thing. I didn't know how long I was gonna stay. So the bottom line is, get up to the plate; see if you can hit it over the fence. Don't try to get hit by a pitch. So that's why I did what I did, and then I got out, really, on top, before I started to sink. (Laughs)

Tavis: Where the numbers are concerned, one could argue, I think legitimately, that your party screwed this up. We have a President now who's a Republican, obviously, who has never met a spending bill he doesn't like. You guys are the party of fiscal restraint. How much do you blame your party for screwing up what you think restraint? How much do you blame your party for screwing up what you think you guys got right?

Kasich: Oh, I, I blame them. Big time. I blame all the politicians today, because they're all so interested in reelection, partisanship, and they care about themselves. And you know what? That's not what we go there for. I was a Republican, I am a Republican. But it was my vehicle, not my master. Republicans got hooked on spending. They thought they could become popular by doing that.

But I like to say, Tavis, that God created Republicans to cut spending, cut taxes, and shrink government, and Democrats are supposed to come, come back and fix the things that we missed. And when Republicans start becoming big spenders, it means they lost their way. That's why the Republican base is depressed in America. That's why Republicans could have big trouble, come the November election.

Tavis: Let me challenge you on this, respectfully, though. When you say, you intimate, as you did a moment ago, that back in the day, here's how we did it. Don't get to start running a litany of things, which I could very well do, of when you guys weren't compromising, when you weren't together, during those Reagan years. Give me a break.

Kasich: Well, but Tavis, sometimes you don't compromise. Sometimes the principle's so big you say, look, we just have to...

Tavis: You were there during Reagan and Tip O'Neill. Those guys were like this every day.

Kasich: Yeah, but you know what? At the end of the day, they didn't hate one another. They sat down, they talked, and then sometimes problems have to sit and wait until we can see what the solution is. But the key is, you don't hate the other side. You don't try to destroy the other side. And you try to define big problems.

And I'll tell you, one of the biggest ones we have coming forward is the fact that when the baby boomers retire, there's gonna be a tsunami that's gonna hit this country if we don't figure out how to deal with the retirement of the baby boomers. We should at least define the problem. In Washington today, they don't even wanna discuss the problem.

Tavis: What would you say if I said to you, which I will now, that the problem isn't that people aren't standing for something. It's the something that they're standing for. In other words, people are standing for something. It's just that we're so polarized now around what we stand for.

Kasich: Well, see, I think the things that we have to stand for are character and integrity. And I think all the problems flows from the fact that when we don't exert character integrity, in all parts of life, we start to lose our way. Whether it's Barry Bonds using steroids to break records or whether it's businesspeople that rip off the shareholders, or whether it's politicians that worry about reelection.

Or whether it's a pop culture that puts somebody who makes a sex tape on the cover of every magazine, when we have other people like Bono, who we can admire, who are in the pop culture, who make a difference. And I maintain there's a battle for the soul of America. We can disagree on the nuances of things, or the side issues. But the main issues of character, integrity, humility, respect, personal accountability, personal responsibility.

We lose a major American city, and I'm still waiting, in New Orleans, and I'm still waiting for somebody to stand up and say, I screwed it up. It's like everybody's pointing fingers at everybody else. So, no, I think we're standing right now on self interest, rather than we are on what we know better. That little voice inside that says, do the right thing.

Tavis: Is it naïve or worse yet, just outright wrong to think that somehow, that battle for America's soul can be won? Even though it's fought, can it be won on political terrain?

Kasich: No. That's why I wrote the book. Politics is such a small part of this book, as you know when you read it. And I only use it as an example. Look, America is the sum of its parts. And if we, who are, let's take a lot of the people who are listening who have never been on television. They look at the big people, who seem to get away with things. They break the rules, there's no accountability.

They get discouraged. And what I worry about is there's a good virus and a bad virus. If you're good, if you're a good person, if you stand up, if you stand for something, if you have integrity, you spread a good virus. If you don't, you spread a bad virus. And I maintain the battle is being waged. And Tavis, look. I was haunted by this when I was in Congress.

Because what I realized is, you can't think, fix the things that bother you the most by writing a law. It has to do with, could you imagine what would happen if Barry Bonds stood up and said, either knowingly or unknowingly, I sort of cheated the game. And I'm gonna keep playing baseball. I don't want the record. Could you imagine the message that would be sent if he said something like that?

And what I'm saying is, there are people that stand up and do things. And for the people who have never been on television, the way you take the gift that God gave you, and you use it without cutting off the edges, you can change the world.

Tavis: Tell me about your parents. I ask that, because I'm always fascinated by people who have some kind of courage, some kind of conviction, some kind of commitment, even if I agree with them on political issues.

Kasich: Absolutely.

Tavis: I'm always amazed by people, or fascinated by people, I should say, who have that kind of character. And I always wanna connect it back to their parents. Your parents, we joke in the Black community about work at the post office. Here's a White guy whose parents, both of them worked at the post office.

Kasich: Right.

Tavis: Yes?

Kasich: Yes, absolutely.

Tavis: Tell me about your parents.

Kasich: Well, look. My dad, his father was a coal miner. He never went to college, because they didn't have the money. My Uncle George did go to college. He became a guidance counselor for 40 years, which is a miracle. My mother came from dirt poor; she was very smart, never got to go to college. But they always taught me these little values. Like, and my mother used to always say to me, Johnny, you can grow up and be anything you want to.

Stick to your principles. I'll tell you a good story. She used to love to listen to talk radio. And I was a young boy, and one time, she heard this debate going on on the radio. And she ran upstairs to say, honey, turn, Johnny, turn on the radio. And she opened the door, and it was me on the other end of the line, okay? (Laughs) So I learned from my mother to stand up and fight.

I learned from my dad how to get along with people. And so they were critical. But where did they get their values? They got it from the, frankly, from the Old and the New Testament. They got it from religion. And Tavis, that's another challenge we have. A lot of people in religion have given religion a bad name. Because some people have created religion to be a divider.

You study the life of Jesus Christ; it was to be a divider against those that were dividers. He was a guy that believed, God himself came here and tried to tell us that it's really about love and forgiveness and potential. And somehow, we've lost this. But religion is the, that is the focal point that is the lighthouse in a shifting sea.

And if we erode that as an important influence in our culture, then we lose respect, we lose personal responsibility and integrity and those things. And I got that all from my mom and dad, and they got it from the good book.

Tavis: All right, so tell me why a guy who is a truth-teller in this regard can't get elected President, telling the American people that?

Kasich: Well, first of all, I couldn't raise the money, and we have a major problem in American politics today, because there's only three things that matter, Tavis. It's money, money, and money. And it's less about the battle of ideas, and it's more about the money. Now, money should count a little bit, but frankly, the whole system is all skewed towards the money.

And we gotta figure out a way. In fact, I'm gonna work on something that's gonna change the whole way in which we fund political campaigns. Because it's harder and harder and harder for a mailman's son to get elected president. I give Clinton credit, coming from a one-horse town like Hope, Arkansas, and making it? That might be very much the exception to the rule. And we look at people who run, they're all wealthy and they're all connected, and they have a pedigree.

Tavis: Since you're a talk show host, you know how this works. That clock says I got a minute and 15 seconds. Can you tell me in a minute and 15 seconds the most fascinating story for me in the book, of how you meet with the college president, and end up in the Oval Office?

Kasich: Well, I get frustrated at Ohio State, and (laughs) so I demand a meeting with the President of the university. They wouldn't let me in. They finally let me in. I go in and see him. I say, 'I'm undecided at school, what do you do in your job? Maybe this is what I ought to do.' He tells me all of his responsibilities. He says, 'I'm going down to see President Nixon tomorrow.' I said, 'Can I go with you? I'd like to tell him a few things.'

Tavis: (Laughs) And you're a freshman.

Kasich: And he says - yeah - and he says no. And I said, 'Well, if I write a letter, would you give it to him?' He says, 'I guess I could do that.' So I went back and did a letter to the president about how I thought he was doing. And wrote, P.S., if you'd like to discuss it further, please let me know. He wrote me back and invited me to the White House, and I went down.

(Laughs) And after telling my parents this wasn't a fraud, I actually went and I did it. And spent almost 20 minutes alone with the president as an 18-year-old freshman. But look, Tavis, I gotta get to commercial. In "Stand for Something,' it's not about left or right, it's about right and wrong. It's good for moms, it's good for dads, and it's good for kids. And it's about something that comes from my heart.

Tavis: As if you couldn't tell, this guy's a talk show host on the Fox News Channel. (Laughs) He knows how to sell it. (Laughs) We report, you decide. "Stand for Something: The Battle for America's Soul.' The new book from 'New York Times' bestselling author and former member of Congress, from the Buckeye State of Ohio, John Kasich. Nice to have you here, sir.

Kasich: Thank you very much.

Tavis: I'm glad to have you on. Up next on this program, from the ABC hit series, actor, actor Harold Perrineau, I should say, from the ABC series "Lost.' We'll talk to Harold in just a moment. Stay with us.