Tag: tim ryan
Lesson For Democrats: How Alpha Tim Ryan Dominated J.D. Vance

Lesson For Democrats: How Alpha Tim Ryan Dominated J.D. Vance

At least one Democrat has started to figure out how to exploit a GOP weakness. He's Tim Ryan, who is running against J.D. Vance for Ohio's open Senate seat.

What has Ryan figured out? He's calling out Vance as a beta male.

Look, in a different world — say, the planet Vulcan — where the inhabitants, like Mr. Spock, were unburdened by primitive passions and instincts, everyone would make decisions about political candidates based entirely upon rational policy choices. But that's not how humans operate. Part of politics is about policies, of course. But beneath the surface — and these days, not very far beneath the surface — political combat partakes of the dog park. There are rituals of alpha dominance and beta submission.

Recall that in July 1988, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was running 17 points ahead of Vice President George H.W. Bush. Nothing crashed his numbers more surely than his response to a debate question. CNN's Bernard Shaw, noting the governor's opposition to the death penalty, asked whether, if Dukakis' wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered, he thought he might change his view. Dukakis responded: "No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life."

Now, granted, it was a bad question, because all of us would respond with rage if someone we loved were raped and murdered, and that's not the best way to make policy. So Dukakis' answer was perfectly appropriate as a policy matter, but it was a disaster as a political matter. Voters thought he was some sort of machine bereft of human feelings and betraying his role as manly wife defender.

Candidates have long performed at two levels in debates, parrying and thrusting about issues but also asserting dominance in mammalian code. In 2000, Al Gore and George W. Bush were seated on chairs without lecterns for a townhall-style debate. At one point, as Bush was speaking, Gore strode over to his side of the stage and right into Bush's personal space. Bush looked at him and gave him a curt nod as if to say, "I see what you're doing, and it's not working."

So voters want their leaders to be assertive and commanding. That has always been the case, and in recent decades, before the Trump era, it was kept within reasonable bounds. Trump, of course, made the subtext the headline, proclaiming, "I alone can fix it," and claiming to be the smartest, toughest, wealthiest, savviest, most capable leader the world had ever seen. Like his hero, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who posed shirtless on horseback and with big game "kills," Trump took the alpha posturing to absurd lengths. Actually, if Trump had merely pretended to kill tigers, it would have been less offensive than his promises to commit war crimes (such as targeting the families of terrorists).

It remains a mystery that these absurd boasts by the most obviously insecure manchild in living memory were not met with the ridicule they deserved. But here we are. Trump's image as some sort of Rambo persists with his most perfervid followers, and even non-MAGAites continue to see him as strong.

Most Democrats have responded to the Trump alpha gorilla routine by reminding voters that he's dangerous and unhinged. It's all true. But in the process of strutting as cock of the walk, Trump has emasculated every other Republican. He may look strong, but he demands that every other Republican become weak in his service.

Men like Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have abased themselves to remain in Trump's good graces. Cruz performed one of the most humiliating kowtows, tamely accepting insults to his wife's appearance, to say nothing of Trump's lunatic assertion that Cruz's father had a role in the Kennedy assassination. They all hold their manhoods cheap. And because Trump is vindictive, petty and cruel, he couldn't resist reminding an Ohio audience that J.D. Vance, the candidate he had come to support but who had once been a Trump critic, was "kissing my ass."

At their first debate on Monday, Ryan took the shot. Reminding viewers that he had stood up to leaders of his own party including Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, he noted that Vance was such a Trump lackey that even Trump had described it in those terms. Pressing the point, he recalled that even after Trump had "taken his dignity away from him," Vance had returned to the stage to shake Trump's hand and smile for the camera. Hitting the everyman theme, Ryan offered, almost with pity, that "I don't know anybody I grew up with, I don't know anybody I went to high school with, that would allow somebody to take their dignity like that and then get back up on stage."

Ryan thus simultaneously elevated his own alpha status while reinforcing Vance's weakness. Every Republican who has bent the knee to Trump — male or female — is vulnerable in this way. Ryan has taught Democrats something.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

J.D. Vance Dragged Over His 'Fake Nonprofit' That Failed Opioid Victims

J.D. Vance Dragged Over His 'Fake Nonprofit' That Failed Opioid Victims

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) faced off against Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance during a live debate on Monday night as both candidates vie for the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH). At one point in the debate, Ryan dragged Vance over his anti-drug nonprofit “Our Ohio Renewal,” which Ryan said took advantage of Ohioans struggling with drug addiction.

“You know what I haven’t done?” Ryan asked during the debate at WJW Fox 8’s headquarters in Cleveland. “I didn’t start a fake nonprofit pretending I was going to help people with addiction like JD Vance did — literally started a nonprofit and didn’t spend one nickel on anybody.”

“In fact, he brought in somebody from Perdue Pharma to be the spokesperson for the nonprofit,” Ryan continued. “The same drug company, Big Pharma, the big drug company, that had all the pill mills going, got everybody addicted. One million people died, JD. One million people died. And you started a nonprofit to try and take advantage of people in Ohio. And you know what? All you did with it was launch your political career.”

In August, the Associated Press reported that “the charity’s most notable accomplishment — sending an addiction specialist to Ohio’s Appalachian region for a yearlong residency — was tainted by ties among the doctor, the institute that employed her and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin."

According to the AP, the nonprofit — which Vance founded the day after the 2016 presidential election and closed “shortly after clinching the state’s Republican nomination for U.S. Senate” — hired Dr. Sally Satel, whose writings “sometimes cited Purdue-funded studies and doctors” and “[questioned] the role of prescription painkillers in the national opioid crisis.”

The American Enterprise Institute, where Satel was a resident scholar, “received regular $50,000 donations and other financial support from Purdue totaling $800,000,” the AP reported.

You can watch a clip of the debate below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

GOP Fears Its Mediocre Senate Candidates Will Ruin Midterm Campaign

GOP Fears Its Mediocre Senate Candidates Will Ruin Midterm Campaign

After months of sharpening their knives in anticipation of the midterms, Republicans' glee has turned gloomy as the election cycle's contours shift.

That is particularly true in the Senate, where a several-point post-Roe bump for Democrats in the generic ballot is perhaps the least of Republicans' worries. The main problem is that Republicans are saddled with subpar, Trumpian candidates in the most critical Senate races at a time when Donald Trump's star appears to be falling.

On background, one GOP strategist warned of "massive problems on the candidate front.” On the record, veteran GOP operative Kevin Madden offered a more tempered view: “There are warning signs that some of these candidates are not as strong as they could be given the opportunity at hand."

Take Trump's hand-picked candidate in Georgia, the verbally challenged former football star Herschel Walker, where the National Republican Senatorial Committee is already trying to perform an intervention, according to TheWashington Post.

The Senate GOP campaign arm recently installed several trusted Republican operatives to help right Walker's ship, including veteran strategist Gail Gitcho as a senior adviser, Chip Lake as a consultant, and Brett O’Donnell, the party’s "most celebrated debate prep strategist," according to the Post.

O'Donnell's in for a treat with Walker, who is making a strong bid for the most consistently incoherent candidate on the trail in modern memory.

Walker's latest triumph was dumbing down the climate change debate by 'splaining how America is cleaning up China's air quality.

"Since we don’t control the air, our good air decide to float over to China bad air. So when China get our good air, their bad air gotta move. So, it moves over to our good air space. And now, we gotta clean that back up," Walker clarified. Got that?

It doesn't help that Walker's staff was reportedly blindsided by the discovery that the candidate fathered three children he had never publicly acknowledged. But Walker's biggest deficit appears to be that his campaign doesn’t trust him to ... well ... talk.

When Georgia conservative radio host Erick Erickson invited Walker on his show for a one-on-one, hour-long chat, the campaign declined because aides didn't want him going "free form" for an entire hour, per the Post.

“I don’t know anyone who has confidence in the campaign including people on the campaign. He doesn’t have standard candidate discipline,” Erickson said. “He just doesn’t have a deep grasp of the issues nor really the desire to learn those issues."

Senate Republicans are also haunted by flashbacks from the 2010 and 2012 cycles, when wackadoodle GOP candidates doomed their chances of regaining control of the upper chamber.

In Ohio, Trump-backed GOP Senate nominee J.D. Vance has compared abortion to slavery, saying they had both "distorted" American society.

“There’s something comparable between abortion and slavery, and that while the people who obviously suffer the most are those subjected to it, I think it has this morally distorting effect on the entire society,” Vance said in an interview with the Catholic Current last October. “I think that’s one of the underappreciated facts about abortion," Vance added.

Vance's Democratic challenger, Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, called the comparison "absolutely disgusting" in a tweet about the remarks.

“We cannot let him anywhere near the Senate," added Ryan, who has pledged to end the filibuster in order to codify abortion protections into federal law. On Friday, the Ryan campaign announced that it hauled in an eye-popping $9.1 million in the second quarter.

In Pennsylvania, TV huckster Dr. Mehmet Oz quickly fell behind the Democratic Senate nominee, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who has been recovering from a stroke he suffered in mid-May. Early polling last month showed Fetterman leading Oz by 9 points.

Fetterman is expected to return to the campaign trail within weeks. In the meantime, Fetterman has been pounding Oz for being a carpetbagger from New Jersey.

Even GOP incumbent Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin isn’t exactly on a glide path to reelection this fall.

Though some election analysts have just begun to recalibrate their predictions in this post-Roe environment, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg doesn't view abortion as the only driving force favoring Democrats.

For the past two cycles, he says, nothing and no one have galvanized a coalition of voters to vote against Republicans more than Trump and the MAGA movement have. Rosenberg expects November to follow in similar fashion.

“The question is, are there forces in the election more powerful than the disappointment in Biden?” posited Rosenberg. “The answer is yes, and that is opposition and fear for MAGA, which is the thing that has driven the last two elections.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Despite Calls For Change, Pelosi Keeps Her House Leadership Post

Despite Calls For Change, Pelosi Keeps Her House Leadership Post

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi was re-elected to her post on Wednesday despite a challenge from a Rust Belt congressman who said the party needed new leadership after a disappointing showing in elections this month.

Pelosi, 76, a Californian who has been in Congress for 30 years and led the party in the House for 14 of them, defeated 43-year-old Tim Ryan, a seven-term representative from the Youngstown area of northeastern Ohio in a 134-63 vote, aides said.

U.S. voters elected Republican Donald Trump to the White House and Republicans kept their majorities in the House and Senate in the Nov. 8 elections.

Ryan, in challenging Pelosi for the leadership job, said the party needed to do a better job of reaching out to the working-class voters who backed Trump in large numbers, and complaining about the Democrats’ track record under her guidance.

Ryan said the Democrats have only been in the majority in the House of Representatives for four of the past 18 years. Ryan and other Democrats are angry the party did not do better on Nov. 8, when Trump won the White House and Republicans gained only about a half-dozen seats in the House, when some had predicted double-digit wins.

Ryan told reporters that Democrats came out of the election united. “We got the message out that we wanted to get out, and that’s that as Democrats we need to talk about economics,” he said. “If we’re going to win as Democrats we need to have an economic message that resonates in every corner of this country.”

Pelosi, a San Francisco congresswoman, had claimed the support of two-thirds of the caucus before Wednesday’s leadership election. Only about a dozen Democrats publicly supported Ryan ahead of the vote, which was held by secret ballot.

(Reporting by Susan Cornwell; Editing by David Alexander and James Dalgleish)

IMAGE: U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) holds a weekly news conference at the U.S. Capitol in Washington January 7, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst