Ohio voters deserve better from Ryan, Vance campaigns

Ambition can do terrible things to an Ohio politician. If you think otherwise, here’s Exhibit No. 1: The U.S. Senate campaigns of Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Ryan.

Ryan, of suburban Warren, implies that he and Joe Biden barely know each other. And Vance, a Middletown native now of Cincinnati, who once denounced Donald Trump, now all but pants for the ex-president’s approval.

Somehow, though, it seems impossible to believe that if Tim Ryan, age 49, becomes Ohio’s next U.S. senator, he won’t take calls from the Democrat who lives in the White House.

Of course, any Democratic voter who takes more than a passing interest in politics will brush off Ryan’s self-distancing with a wink and a nod: Hey, a guy can’t do all those great things for people unless he first gets elected – somehow.

Yet if Ryan were peddling his distance from the White House as a consumer product, it might well invite consumer advocates to ask some pointed questions: Ryan took his seat in the House 20 years ago – when Joe Biden had already been in the Senate for 30. That suggests the two Democrats are at least … acquainted.

Oh, well, as Vance’s campaign suggests, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, even if that requires humiliating climb-downs from intellectual honesty.

To get where Vance, age 38, has gotten in life – from a hardscrabble Butler County childhood to the U.S. Marine Corps, Ohio State and Yale Law, then to best-selling authorship – demonstrates Vance’s enormous grit and intelligence.

But to get where Vance has gotten with Donald Trump – from perceptive critic to fan-boy – speaks volumes about something else that isn’t in the Book of Virtues: Ambition so great that even crude belittlement by Trump at a rally is somehow worth enduring.

Ohio voters deserve better from Ryan’s and Vance’s campaigns, though voters are unlikely to get it. The U.S. Senate is supposed to be check and a balance, especially on an American president’s otherwise unlimited war-making power. That’s an issue. (Whether Trump holds a campaign rally on an Ohio State game night isn’t.)

Members of the upper house also have key responsibility for who gets to be a federal judge, most importantly who gets to become a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

And given the facts of dollars-and-cents life here, U.S. senators from Ohio have an additional special responsibility: To help, on a statewide basis, reverse or at least slow the state’s economic decline, because for every greenfield factory site, there are two brownfield sites that also need developing as job sites.

Crucially, politics-as-usual fails Ohio until the sons and daughters of Ohio parents can find reasons to stay in Ohio after high school or college and make lives for themselves here.

At this point in Campaign ’22, with Election Day next month, and early voting starting soon, the tone or the soapbox topics in this year’s Senate campaigns won’t change.

But Ohioans can hope for coherence in the next Senate campaign, in 2024, because unless Ohioans hear specifics – not slogans and jibes – the state can’t reset its compass.

Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University.