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Profile: The future for Tim Ryan
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: December 8, 2017
Congressman Tim Ryan’s 13th Ohio House district physically takes up about the same geographic space as the publishing area of the four Legal News newspapers—Summit, Mahoning, Portage and Trumbull counties in northeast Ohio.
Ryan’s national and international profile has expanded exponentially in the past calendar year, so the Legal News recently checked in with the seven-term Congressman to see how he is faring under this expanded recognition, what his plans might be going forward and what his vision for the country is.
Ryan’s challenge to Nancy Pelosi’s congressional Democratic Party leadership in November 2016 thrust him into the national spotlight. His appearances at party functions in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire, along with his constant presence on television programs from CNN to Bill Maher afterwards has local and national media asking him if he is considering running for president. He has told every publication that has asked that question, from Politico to the Washington Post to the Plain Dealer, that he “doesn’t know.”
Right now, Ryan is concentrating on helping his district, but sees that the solutions for local problems all have national implications.
Locally, Ryan has a strong relationship with the community and the Democratic Party.
“Tim Ryan is probably one of the best congressmen in the United States,” said David Betras, chair of the Mahoning County Democratic Party. “He understands the ethos of this area better than most politicians do. No one has done a better job with local economic development than Tim Ryan.”
Warrensville Heights--based Congresswoman Marcia Fudge’s 11th Congressional District also includes a substantial portion of the Legal News’ readership area in parts of Akron and northern Summit county. She has been a colleague of Ryan’s since she was first elected in 2008, and said that “Congressman Ryan is great to work with, particularly on issues that matter most to Ohioans. He is smart, creative and an overall really nice guy. Tim brings much needed energy to the entire Democratic caucus.”
Beyond his home district, Ryan said that the extra recent attention “is like everything else. It has its ups and downs. But I’ve been very busy, and I feel like we have been doing a lot of good stuff.”
But it is his journeys around the country since he challenged for the House democratic leadership position that has both gotten him more publicity and allowed him to appreciate an expanded view of the country. While still closely associated with his constituency, Ryan said that the country needs a national view to permanently fix local problems.
“I have realized over the past couple of years that a lot more communities around the country look like Akron and Youngstown,” he said. “They are having some successes, but they still need a national agenda to take these communities to the next level. The goal is to figure out how to get these communities around the country to see each other as allies.
“A lot of working class people haven’t seen the kinds of opportunities that they’ve seen over the last 30 or 40 years. We need to visit that diminishment of opportunity (by) building a national coalition around ideas that will plug these communities back in (to a successful economy).”
That national approach is necessary to fix every problem his constituents face, from the economy to the opioid crisis, he said.
“You know, I realize that a lot of these rubber and steel and a lot of other industries are not going to come back to the levels of 30 years ago, and a lot of people feel that the national government has let us down [in that area], he said. “[We need to] get them plugged into the next economy that is to come.”
Ryan said that he thought that the city of Akron “has done one of the better jobs in helping to reinvent itself—but there are still a lot of people who have been left behind.”
The congressman’s basic vision, he said, is of “a society where everybody has a certain amount of stability—economically, with health care, with getting the education you want, where kids have the opportunity to have a stable life for themselves.”
That goal, he said, will take “a coordinated effort” of all stakeholders.
For Ryan, the process of revitalizing these communities is to bring them back into the economy that globalization has left them out of, or “plugging them back in.”
Globalization and the burgeoning technology sector of the economy has “worked for a certain segment of society,” he said. “But it has left a large swath of the country behind, with many families barely keeping their heads above water.”
For instance, he said, “the technology sector is strong in only three states, while the rest of the country does not see much in the way of tech sector business.”
Ryan talked about some specific national policies based in revitalizing every hard-hit area of the country, including his district and beyond.
Ryan said that national industrial policy should support renewable energy business because it makes sense from a manufacturing, and therefore jobs, point of view.
“A windmill has 8,000 parts,” he said. “These are things that we have to make.” This segment is growing at over 25 percent a year, he said, and “should be encouraged to further expand.”
Another way to bring good jobs to the country, would be to move some federal government jobs out of Washington, D.C. and into the rest of the country.
“The federal government has 300,000 workers in the D.C. area,” he said. “Move 10-15 percent of them outside of the beltway.”
Another way to “plug in” rural areas is to make high speed broadband internet access available for everyone, he said adding that this not only creates jobs in and of itself, but connects the rest of the country together and helps ease the isolation that many of these communities feel.
Modern technology is something that “cuts both ways,” he said, noting positive and negative effects of modern technology on children.
“We are rearing kids with more information, but also with more ‘screen time.’ This brings challenges to how the brain functions, attention span, focus, thinking deeply and functioning in school.”
In hammering out details of his overall vision, Ryan said that it became obvious that the only way to pay for a permanent and growing economy in all areas of the country is through a very large and very dedicated national public-private partnership, comprised of all stakeholders in both government and industry.
This national public-private series of partnerships is “a broader agenda” than any current approaches, he said.
“This is the new space for a new political movement. It is the sweet spot for both interests and for society in toto.”
“We can’t have just public spending, although that is a key component,” he said. “We have to create an environment that attracts private sector, venture capital to regions like ours by creating reasons for them to invest here.”
Looking at the recent history of the flow of investment capital, Ryan said that “80 percent of venture capital investment is concentrated in the same three states that have the largest share of the tech business.”
Ending this imbalance through public-private partnerships that can help “plug in” every geographic area in the country together falls on leadership, he said. “Leadership is about culture. Leadership creates cultures. We need a culture in the United States that appreciates the idea that government and the private sector can pull together, and we need leaders who can help change the current culture away from ‘you’re in the in-group or the out-group.’ In this country, everybody gets to sit at the same table.”
The big question, though, still hangs over every profile of Tim Ryan: Will his interest in national politics and the national interest in him equate to a run at national office? He is not saying, and nobody else seems to know. But if he does, he will have a lot of support.
“If he so desired, he would be a viable national candidate,” said Betras. “He already has a national footprint.”
Congresswoman Fudge was direct when asked the question. “I don’t have any insight on Congressman Ryan’s political aspirations,” she said, “but I hope that he does have national ambitions. I think he would make a great candidate for national office.”