Tim Ryan comes to his senses, aborts gubernatorial dreams

It was a smart business decision that Ryan only came to this week, according to multiple sources.

Former Congressman Tim Ryan made a business decision on Friday when he announced he would not, in fact, enter the Ohio Democratic gubernatorial primary.

It was a somewhat shocking development, considering Ryan had refused to speak definitively on his plans for two months after missing his original, self-imposed deadline of Sept. 30 to decide.

It’s a fitting end to what, by any rational standard, had become an almost comedic botched campaign rollout. It was a decision that Ryan reportedly came to in the past few days.

As The Rooster reported on Oct. 31, “all signs” pointed to Ryan entering the contest in the following “two to three weeks.”

With filming his campaign launch video already an open secret, Ryan was, according to multiple sources, set to meet that timeline by launching on Monday, Nov. 17.

Ryan, however, missed that deadline as well.

According to one source who recently spoke to Franklin County Commissioner John O’Grady, Ryan received a call from one of his major business clients on Monday morning, telling him that they faced nuclear pressure from the Trump Administration to drop Ryan as a client if he declared his candidacy.

Ryan’s current cryptocurrency and methane paymasters indeed belong to two industries where Trump could exert that kind of extracurricular pressure.

It would strike at the heart of the original question about Ryan’s potential return to politics: Would he abandon a lucrative post-Congressional career for a chance at becoming a Democratic governor, who, even under the most favorable circumstances, would face united Republican supermajorities in both legislative chambers?

Still, it could also be a convenient excuse from O’Grady, a longtime ally of Ryan’s, to cover for the fact that Ryan’s team had realized what The Rooster opined on Nov. 5: That the undercurrent of the General Election’s results indicated that Ryan faced a massive uphill battle against Dr. Amy Acton in a primary where the base was increasingly less concerned about the undefinable notion of “electability.”

Ryan’s team was smart enough to understand that they would have to circumvent the Ohio Democratic Party (and its kingmaker, Sherrod Brown), which was all but officially in the tank for Acton.

In my opinion, Ryan’s team likely planned to solicit support from the methane and cryptocurrency industries to underwrite an independent expenditure campaign to circumvent traditional party channels.

But in many ways, overcoming Dr. Acton in a Democratic primary, where Ryan’s Congressional career, his failed Senate campaign’s blatant pandering to Trump voters, and his current flak work for Republican-coded industries would have been baggage he would have had to spend political capital explaining to skeptical voters.

Ryan would have also faced another problem in overcoming Dr. Acton’s sky-high favorability ratings. He wouldn’t have been able to attack her without seeming like a sexist pig, nor would it have earned him any love from Democratic bosses if those attacks only served to damage the party’s branding before Acton faced the notorious conman Vivek Ramaswamy and his swollen campaign war chests.

Party leaders will no doubt praise Ryan for abandoning a campaign that nobody outside of his political consultants was clamoring for. They have avoided what, even in the best-case scenario, would have been a costly and annoying primary regardless of its result.

Acton’s team can also send a hearty thanks to Sherrod Brown, who legitimized Acton as a statewide political candidate to serve as a faithful subordinate who won’t complain about her campaign being second fiddle to the whims of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and his national campaign apparatus in the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.

In Brown’s defense, he will be able to cope with mild criticism from the state’s premier sewer blogger on the journey to what should be a maximally favorable electoral environment for Democrats.

We can only pray that Acton does better atop the ticket than that bizarre nerd Rich Cordray, another Brown-picked selection, who, it must be noted, ate shit at the finish line despite his Republican opponent Mike DeWine facing political headwinds thanks to the unpopular presidency of Donald Trump.

Until then, we can at least look forward to the next 12 months of the Republicans shrieking about Dr. Acton, then-working under the appointment of the popular outgoing governor, being a “medical tyrant” because she wanted tried to mitigate the novel coronavirus that eventually killed over 40,000 Ohioans—with Republican voters playing an outsized role in that death toil thanks to the party’s denialism of basic scientific facts.