A day after Republican John R. Kasich accused him of going to Washington "on his hands and his knees with a tin cup begging" for federal stimulus money to fix the state's budget woes, Gov. Ted Strickland fired back with a challenge:

What would you have done?

Strickland, talking to The Dispatch, was making his first response to comments Kasich made Monday as the former congressman from Westerville officially launched his campaign for governor.

"OK, so you don't like what I've done or what I'm doing," Strickland said of the $8.2 billion in stimulus funds he sought for Ohio. "What would you do under the circumstances we face? How would you come up with a few billion more dollars?"

Kasich said that if he were governor, the state would have been restructuring government and not be in a position to need that much in stimulus money to balance the budget.

Pressed in an interview about whether he would have refused to accept any stimulus money, Kasich said he would have taken only enough "to fix temporary problems" -- and not use it to delay tough choices for later budgets.

"The first thing we've got to do is stabilize the patient," Kasich said. "The patient is in the ditch, and Strickland wants to give him an aspirin. That's not going to work."

The 2010 governor's election still is a year and a half away, but the back-and-forth yesterday between Strickland and Kasich, the expected matchup next fall, offered a taste of a spirited campaign ahead.

Strickland criticized Kasich's comments about phasing out the state income tax, noting it accounts for 34 percent of all state revenue. He challenged Kasich to say what state programs or services paid by the tax he would cut.

Kasich said he never suggested that he would phase out the tax immediately and said eliminating it would be part of an effort to "skinny down" state government and to get rid of the so-called "death tax" to encourage entrepreneurs.

But Kasich said he doesn't yet know how long the phaseout would take and won't discuss details of his plan until he is ready.

Strickland also echoed criticism from state Democrats of Kasich's tenure as a managing director of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street firm that collapsed last fall, as well as Kasich's stint as a Fox News Channel host since leaving Congress.

"I have a record, and while I've been doing these things, John was a Fox News commentator and a managing director of Lehman Brothers," Strickland said. "And so I will take what I've done over the last 2 1/2 years to provide leadership to this state and compare it to what my potential opponent has been doing with his time over the last 2 1/2 years."

Kasich said he was part of a two-man office in Columbus and made no upper-management decisions.

"Blaming me for Lehman Brothers is like blaming a car dealer in Zanesville for the collapse of General Motors," Kasich said. "It's patently absurd."

mniquette@dispatch.com