CLEVELAND — House Speaker Paul Ryan handed out plaudits to many members of the Ohio congressional delegation Wednesday morning, praising them as “thoroughbreds” rather than “show horses” the day after his speech to the Republican National Convention.
Ryan lauded the work of Sen. Rob Portman, whom he called the “hardest working guy I know,” and Rep. Pat Tiberi, praising him for his work on health care and the budget.
The House speaker also spoke highly of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, with whom he served a single term in Congress. The Ohio governor and former presidential candidate continues to be a topic of discussion among the delegation as he continues to hold out on endorsing Donald Trump.
“I was really focused on economics, and I thought the federal budget was screwed up — this is back in the late ’90s … so I wanted to go learn from the best,” Ryan said, referring to when he was elected to Congress.
“The best of budgeting, the best who really was a passionate person who I could tell got things done. One of those folks who took not just an idea and said good things, but actually got things done. So I went and learned from the best of the budgeters — the ‘budgeteers’ as we call them in Congress — and it was one of my great honors to serve on the Budget Committee under Chairman John Kasich, now your governor.”
“This guy is a good man,” Ryan added about Kasich, who has been under fire from the Trump campaign most of the week for his continued refusal to support the real estate mogul. Earlier in the week, campaign chairman Paul Manafort argued that Kasich was “embarrassing his state” by doing not endorsing Trump.
Overall, Ryan’s speech Tuesday night speech before the delegates was well received, during which he laid out the vision for the GOP’s House majority moving forward and repeated that a vote for anyone other than Donald Trump is a show of support for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“He’s such a gifted communicator and has done such a good job of putting our team in a really good place moving toward the election,” Tiberi told reporters after the event. “I continue to hope that he’ll have influence with the RNC and with the presidential campaign and the senate campaign, and we can have a unifying message that Speaker Ryan has been so good at communicating.”
The news of the day still revolved around Kasich, who held an event on Tuesday and is set to speak to the New Hampshire delegation on Wednesday afternoon. Kasich was supposed to be speaking before the Pennsylvania delegation on Wednesday morning, but backed out due to a scheduling issue.
“I’m not going to coach Gov. Kasich on how he should go forward,” Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted told reporters. “The governor has a lot to contribute to this discussion. Paul Ryan, today, had a lot of very substantive things to contribute to this discussion. We have a great team.
“It’s not a united team, and if we can take the best of what guys like Paul Ryan and John Kasich and Donald Trump have to offer, then the Republican Party will be strong going into the future. But if we don’t, if we just continue to have everybody in their own lanes focused on their point of view and not how we can bring everybody together, then we won’t.”
“But Donald Trump is the one who’s the leader in this case and Donald Trump is the one who has to be the healer — that’s what leaders do,” Husted added. “Leaders have to be the ones that bring people into the fold and if he wants to win, he’s going to have to figure out how to do that.”
