Don Roach: Jim Langevin Should be Very Afraid of Mike Riley

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Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Don Roach, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™

Some time ago I wrote how Michael Riley would give Jim Langevin a run for his money . Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to sit down with Riley, watch him during the GOP primary debate, listen to him talk with Buddy Cianci, and now he comes out with a $20 million dollar man commercial aimed at Jim Langevin. I can’t believe that both Congressional Rep races have credible GOP candidates.

Riley is still largely unknown but we should expect to hear more from him during the next month and a half as he challenges Langevin. If Rhode Islanders get a chance to hear his message, I believe it will be enticing. Back in July, I had an opportunity to sit down with Riley to see what he was all about. What strikes you about Riley are two things; he’s not a career politician and actually intends to stay in office six years if elected and second, he’s a businessman with an eye towards righting the economy.

For argument’s sake, we have seen businessmen tell us before that they were the answer to Rhode Island’s troubles, most recently Don Carcieri, and they have not always achieved the level of success that marked their private sector lives. There’s no guarantee that Riley won’t be another in a growing line of businessmen who were not successful politicians. However, Riley’s focus on the economy is definitely something we need from our congressional delegation.

In a word, our economy sucks. In two words, it sucks bad. And what politician is going to do something about it and what politician can we trust to have the skill set to make things happen? In my opinion, the right man for the job right now is definitely Michael Riley. He’s not to make a career out of being a congressmen and instead his focus is to leverage his private sector skills to improve the economy in our state.

As I have admitted, businessmen have tried this before and failed, but let’s take a look at Langevin. What has he done to help the economy in Rhode Island? I googled,”Langevin Rhode Island Economy”. The first thing that’s listed is something about an agricultural federal grant aimed at studying how to increase that sector of the RI economy. Clicking on Langevin’s issues, it’s curious that ‘jobs and economy’ is the last item listed amongst a dozen or so. Is that because Langevin has done little to aide Rhode Island’s economy? Is it because he doesn’t care about the Rhode Island’s economy? Or is it he’s had a dozen years to do something but simply doesn’t have the answers?

I tend to believe it’s the latter. Langevin is a nice guy politician, rarely ruffling feathers and trying to be on everyone’s good side. But the problem with that is he does not appear to have much political efficacy. After twelve years do we need the cliché’d “change candidate”? Yes we do, but Riley presents Rhode Islanders with more than just a change of scene but we can elect a candidate with the right experience and background to aide in the recovery of our economy.

My predictions have been piss poor this year and so I won’t predict the winner of this race, but if you take a moment and listen to Riley I believe you’ll find him a capable candidate that will do more for Rhode Island than Langevin has over the last twelve years.

Don is a member of the RI Young Republicans. Don can be reached at don@donroach.org .

During the summer I had a chance to sit down with Riley to see what he’s all about. I’m generally a skeptic but I had no idea who Riley was, his background, nor his reason for running. Within the first five minutes of meeting Riley, I realized what he was not and that’s a career politician.

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