>> during campaign 2016, c-span takes you on the road to the white house, as we follow the candidates on c-span, c-span radio, and c-span.org. announcer: republican presidential candidate, governor john kasich of ohio, spoke on thursday at the new york city republican annual gala event. his remarks were about 20 minutes. [applause] gov. kasich: thank you. wow, i mean, what a dinner. and they are going to serve, because i thought it would be better to move the program

along. gave wanted to tell you -- me a round of applause for that, i know you are all hungry. [applause] so, i heard the donald talking about new york values, so i thought i would tell you at the beginning of this how i feel about new york values. first of all, i think i have eaten my way across the entire state of new york, and have eaten every type of food there is. and i really do believe that the folks in new york will forgive me for that big mistake i made when i had a scolding piece of pizza and took a fork, but i do know how to eat pizza. i want to tell you how i feel about this town. you know, there is nothing more important to you than your wife and your kids, to me. and my wife and i love to come to new york. but i have twin daughters, and

maybe some of you saw them on anderson cooper the other night. they did a great job, my wife and my children stole the show. of course, which we wanted. but my 16-year-old daughters, when we go on a special visit, when dad takes them on a trip, i bring them to new york city. and the reason why i come here is because frankly, you are so alive when you are in new york. and the fact is, you don't want to sleep when you were in new york. and the reason you don't want to sleep is because you are afraid you will miss something. and you know, things are always happening that are so fantastic . it just makes you alive. i have had a great time being here. as a candidate for the united states, what is so amazing to me, my father carried mail on his back. our homeered mail to u

for 29 years. my father was the kind of guy who knew everything that was going on in the neighborhood or ,. . when a son scored a touchdown, he would celebrate with the fathers, but if they lost somebody, he would cry in their homes with them. my father was the person who kept the neighborhood and the community together. his father was a coal miner, and my grandfather would go down in the coal mines, and work all day long. and he would bring his haul up at the end of the day, expecting a decent pay. but were turned out, they would say you brought too much peat and not enough coal, so my grandfather would not get paid the money he should have been paid. you know who we complained to? my grandfather could not complain to anybody because no one cared. my mother's mother could barely speak english, she was from yugoslavia, an immigrant.

and my mother was one of four kids. three of them never got out of the eighth grade. but my mother was a person who got her high school degree by walking over a foot bridge across railroad tracks to try to make something of herself. and my mother and father gave me these great values. my father was a democrat all his lifetime. my mother became a republican later in life. the town where i grew up, if the wind blew the wrong way, people found themselves out of work. so you should know that i am a candidate for president that really understands the anxieties of people who live in this country. because i have got dna, son of a blue-collar worker. and here is what i would like to say to you, what we have to think about. you know, there are anxieties

out there. people are worried they are going to lose their job. people are concerned that they are not getting wage increases. people are upset because they were told that if you give your money to a bank, you are going to get paid for the fact that the bank uses your money, it is called interest. and we have not been getting much of that, either. but i will tell you, i think mom and as the greatest worry, beyond their own job, is the fact that their sons and daughters have gone on to get more education. for everyone sitting in this room, you remember that your mother and father said you need more education. so these kids go off to college, they ring up the debt, and they are hopeful of the future, but we find many of them still living at home with their parents. this has created tremendous

anxiety in people. the job insecurity, the lack of wages, the fact that they are not getting a fair shake. we hear politicians talk about it, but i grew up with it. if the wind blew the wrong way, over in the rocks, people found themselves out of work. and that is how i have come to know that the most important thing a public official can do is to create economic growth and prosperity in the neighborhoods. [applause] so, folks, let me say a couple things about this anxiety. and i think it is something we need to pay close attention to in this election season. you see, you really have two paths. when you go into a room, and i have been doing this all across the country, and you realize people's anxieties, and you come to understand that their

anxieties, you have two choices. you can either go into that room and tell them how bad everything is. you can tell them the country is in decline, you can tell them that they have been ripped off, you can feed on their anxiety and cause anger and division, paranoia, and even hatred. at times. or, you can walk into that same room, and you can recognize the struggles and problems and the anxieties that people have, and you can talk to them about how we solve those problems. about how there are solutions that can give them hope, can improve their lives, and the lives of their children. we can do that by taking a positive approach. and i just have to suggest to all of you, when we live in the dark, when we practice politics in the dark, over time, people do not like it. people want to know that there are solutions.

you know, over the course of this campaign, many people said, why does kasich continue to talk about what he used to do? i will tell you why i talk about it. because i think when the public looks at a politician whose lips are moving, they figure that politician is line. lying. and i am a citizen myself, and when people come to tell me about what they want to do and why i want to be elected, they say what have you done in your life? how can i believe you? how do we know you can deliver the goods? and i just want to take a second to tell you, as a public official, and i have been in politics for a very long time, my mind's eye is about helping people where i grew up, or the people in brooklyn, or queens. you see, there are people searching for a fair shake, and they want to know that a promise can be kept. so, you know, i got to be a

congressman at the age of 30. i was the only republican in america that defeated an incumbent democrat that year. i will tell you what i did. i ran on the reagan agenda. nobody wanted to appear with reagan in 1982, and i did. i got to spend more time with him, and nobody wanted to associate, because reaganomics had not yet begun to kick in. and getting into congress, i spent 18 years of my career on national security issues. and six years into my term in congress, i got on the budget committee. and i figured something out as a very young man. we have $19 trillion now in debt, $225 billion goes to pay for interest on the debt. think about taking $100 billion of that and investing it into solving the problems of alzheimer's, dementia, pancreatic cancer, or childhood disease, [applause] and yet, the debt keeps rising.

and when i go to college campuses, i tell them to look at the rising debt. because we have a debt clock that shows us over $19 trillion. and i will tell you what i tell them. when the debt goes up, your opportunities to get a job goes down. when the debt comes down, your opportunities to get a job goes up. and by the way, if you think about bernie and hillary, by the time they are done giving away free stuff, it will be up to $30 trillion, and nobody will get a job. that is why we have to stop them. [applause] fought with my own party, spent 10 years of my life to get us to a balanced budget. and at the end of the day, i did. i negotiated the agreement with the clinton administration, we had a balanced budget for the first time since man walked on the moon.

we paid down half $1 trillion of the national debt, cut down capital gains, and the economy was growing like crazy, and there was no discussion of income inequality, or the problem of no rising wages, because the country used a formula to cut taxes, and strengthen the government, which gave confidence to job creators in this country. [applause] and then i left washington. i went out in the private sector, to learn about how it really works. and then i decided i needed to run for governor. and i got elected at exactly the right time. because our state could not get much worse. we had an $8 billion hold, most 20% of our operating budget was in the hole. we lost 350,000 jobs. the state was polarized, and had lost hope. i applied that old formula. common sense regulations, that

do not rate the backs of small businesses are what i promoted. particularly, incentives to grow, and a path to the balanced budget. and we went from a range of 50,000 lost jobs, to a gain of almost 420,000 new jobs. we cut taxes by $5 billion, more than any governor in the country. our wages are going up faster than the national average, and i want you to know, we have left no one behind. [applause] we have left no one behind. we do not believe that the betally ill ought to sleeping under a bridge or in prison. or that drug addicted lives ought to be ignored. we want a system for the working poor, where a single mom with a couple kids can actually get ahead with a pay raise, rather than losing her childcare and going farther backward. let us have a party that helps

people get out of poverty, not be stuck in poverty in this country. [laughter] i have solutions. and here is what i want you to hear tonight. because of my vision going forward of dealing with federal regulations and cutting business taxes and individual taxes and balancing the federal budget, because of the efforts to keep people together and remind people in this country they are americans before they are republicans or democrats, there have been a series of political polls conducted. i am the only candidate who beats hillary clinton on a consistent basis, every single time. [applause] every time. and yesterday, the electoral college had a calculation applied to it, and guess what happened? the two candidates who are running at the same time i am

got swamped by hillary clinton. and in that electoral college, i hillary clinton that survey done yesterday. now, i want to ask you something. i want to ask you something. if you feed on the negative attitudes of people, you will have high negative ratings. don't try to sell something when people do not like you and they do not trust you. or go and try to sell something when you have a positive record and a record of accomplishment. ladies and gentlemen, i am standing back here with the senate president. do you know what will happen if we nominate people who have high negatives and cannot beat hillary? we will not just lose the white house or the supreme court, but i will tell you what, there is a very good chance your senate majority leader will be the senate minority leader . because we risk losing

everything from the white house to the courthouse to the statehouse if we do not advance a positive, uplifting, message to this country. that is what we need to do. [applause] it is not pie in the sky. it is about a solid record. increasing -- improving the reputation and rebuilding the economy of the united states of america so that our greatest legacy which is our children will do better than the america that we were -- that we inherited from our parents. i am about done here. i just want to tell you this. i have enjoyed eating up cross this stage. i will be campaigning here. pataki, governor george endorsed me for president of the

united states and he will be campaigning across the state and the country for me. we will go to a convention. we are going to go to the convention. when we get to that convention, and when the delegates entered the hall. i was there in 1976. i saw a convention that was contested. the delegates will be thinking about who can win in the fall. this is not about who can win the nomination but rather who can win the white house and defeat hillary clinton. and because of the importance the delegates will inherit at that convention, they will also ask themselves, who at the end of the day has the experience and the record and the ability to bring this country together? who can be the best president? i will leave cleveland as the nominee. whether you believe it or