Tuesday, January 13, 2015WARREN, Ohio -- U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan expects to decide in the next six to eight weeks whether he will run for the seat held by U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican.
Ryan, D-13 Ohio, said Monday he has spoken with several individuals who also have expressed interest in running for the seat, including his friend, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland. If Strickland decides to run, Ryan would sit out the race, but that isn’t the sole consideration for the congressman, who started his seventh term last week in the U.S. House of Representatives and will again serve on the powerful Appropriations Committee.
“So I think in the next six, eight weeks, somebody’s going to pull the trigger,” a timetable frame he also expects to follow as he weighs his options, he said.
“The new dynamic for me is I’ve got a 7-month-baby at home who is capturing my attention right now. That’s a new consideration I’ve never had,” he said.
Last week, Portman’s campaign committee announced that it ended 2014 with $5.8 million in cash on hand and identified more than 250 Ohio Republican leaders who support him. The senator expects to kick off his reelection campaign in February with an official campaign announcement tour.
"Over the course of the past year, I have crisscrossed Ohio, and despite the regional differences, one concern is the same -- people across the Buckeye State are in search of better jobs and the promise of a brighter tomorrow for their children and grandchildren," he said. "As your senator, I will continue to fight for policies to uplift our economy, empower people and ensure that America's best days lie ahead.”
In December, Portman, who had been the subject of sometimes intense speculation about whether he would seek the Republican nomination for president p announced he would instead seek reelection.
Ryan had $424,007 cash on hand as of Nov. 24, according to the Federal Election Commission website.
Because Democrats will try to reclaim the Senate majority in 2016, the campaign for the seat Portman holds will be a “marquee race so each side will have enough bullets in the gun,” Ryan said.
“Whoever the Democrat is will have substantial money to compete against Rob Portman. I don’t think any Democrat’s going to have as much money as Portman,” he added. “Rob’s been around a long time. He’s been in the Bush Administration. He’s rubbed elbows with major donors for 20 years now. So he’s going to have the money he needs and then some. The Democrat has to have enough to be competitive.”
As the focus shifts to the 2016 presidential election, Ryan said he wants to hold a discussion about which party has the best ideas for the country.
“I don’t want to talk about Benghazi. I don’t want to talk about Whitewater or Monica Lewinsky or the Iraq war. We don’t need that discussion right now,” he said. “We need the discussion that’s going to be about the next 10 years.”
Also, as candidates from both parties try to position themselves as populists, “We need populism in the sense that we better look out for middle-class families if we’re going to have a successful country,” he added. Any populist message must go beyond rhetoric to define the steps, investments and ideas that will help improve wages, pensions and access to health care for middle-class families.
With Republicans in the majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate, Democrats will make the argument if their GOP colleagues go too far to the right, they should still extend a hand to work with them, Ryan said.
“There are a number of issues that we can work on together,” including immigration reform and transportation, he continued. “We need to get the revenue and rebuild the country. There’s about $3 trillion worth of work that needs to be done in the country. That’s something we should be able to agree upon.”
Democrats will present ideas in the coming weeks on creating a national industrial policy. “We need to start making things here more and getting those good middle-class jobs that come from manufacturing -- and that should not be a Democratic or Republican issue,” he said.
“More than anything I think we need new ideas. We need to break this left-right dichotomy that you either got to be with the Democrats or you got to be with the Republicans and then somehow that there’s no way to create new ideas,” he stressed. “We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to be competitive as a country in the next 10 to 20 years.”
One area of agreement with Republicans Ryan foresees is reforming the tax code, which he says is “way too complicated,” particularly for small businesses.
“We need to lower the corporate tax rate for our companies -- big and small -- to be competitive globally. Our corporate tax rate is higher than most,” he said. “We need to get it in the middle of the pack.”
Copyright 2014 by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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