I support Vivek Ramaswamy for the Governor of Ohio in any way possible.  I was all in before I had a chance to talk to him the other day, and after spending some time with him, I’m more convinced than ever.  For me, he’s like getting Trump to run Ohio.  But Vivek is great on his own, and he is what I would call the next generation of MAGA political candidates.  I have liked Dave Yost, the current attorney general.  But there are a lot of reservations that put him in the clear RINO category.  In a head-to-head matchup between Yost and Ramaswamy, I see it coming out like it did in 2016 with Trump against Jeb Bush.  And in the end, I think a political fight with Vivek Ramaswamy will destroy the career of Dave Yost, and I didn’t want to see that, at least until they sent me a nasty letter the other day complaining about my support of Vivek through a video I did.  I usually get a lot of hate mail, and I never come close to answering them all, but this one was different due to the content of the political fight to come, and it changed any sympathy I had for Dave Yost into primal aggression and a desire to see him destroyed.  I have been keeping thoughts about Dave Yost and what he did to the former Butler County Auditor Roger Reynolds tucked away, and this whole event resurrected it for me as a primary concern.  I’m not running for office, so I don’t have to be as nice as Vivek wants to be to his political enemies.  And as good as he is, he’s going to win the governor race of Ohio without too much difficulty.  But as I have done in regard to Trump, reporting things in context so people can feel good about voting for Ramaswamy when critics say otherwise is something I will certainly do for the future Governor of Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy.  

So the Yost Campaign insinuated that I’m some fraud for the video I did discussing the announcement of running for governor by Vivek Ramaswamy a day before the event occurred.  They thought that was a misleading tactic because I couldn’t have possibly known that the event would be packed with supporters on the day before the event occurred.  Now, I have a lot of experience with the media, and if I wasn’t good at so many other things, I would probably have carved out a career in media myself.  But to be truthful, and I know this from many friends in the media that I have who were major superstars, the pay isn’t that great.  So I do a lot of other things; media for me is for the good of it.  Not the pay of it.  But it’s common practice to pre-write articles before a deadline and even to shoot a promo video ahead of an event when you want the material to reach audiences near or right after the event you are discussing.  And that was the case here.  In West Chester, Ohio, at CTL Aerospace, we had a big announcement rally for Vivek Ramaswamy that ended around 6:30 PM.  My blog is read daily by many people who want to know my thoughts on the latest topic. It goes up every day at 7 PM.  So I had to have most of it ready to go to beat my deadline.  I could adjust any changes to the reporting beforehand.  But for that article and video, I talked about the things that I knew were going to be true.  And I would know because I was one of the organizers of the event.  

Before the weekend of Vivek’s announcement on the following Monday, the 24th of February, I knew that there were 1200 RSVPs who had gone online to indicate they were coming and to be put on the list.  I also knew the space we had set up for Vivek was only supposed to hold 500 people.  So, doing the video announcement I did for the event, I knew it would be very crowded.  And as it turned out, it was worse than I said.  There was a line down and around the building and as people were trying to get in I had more than 500 text messages and phone calls between the hour of 4 PM and 5 PM, which I couldn’t take, because I was talking to Vivek Ramaswamy along with a few other people about what was going to happen during his speech.  It took me two days after the rally to answer most of them.  I never got to some because I wasn’t sure who they all were. But the ones I did know, I eventually, at least, answered.  I was at the Dave Yost announcement for Governor when he did it at the Elks Club near my home in Liberty Township, and it was nothing like this.  Dave had difficulty getting more than seven or eight people to stand in line to get a picture with him.  There may have been a few hundred people who came; honestly, I felt sorry for him. To support him, which I planned to do until Vivek came along, I knew that Dave Yost would have a significant enthusiasm problem.  He just wasn’t very exciting.  He acted like an out-of-touch politician who put on a cowboy hat to appeal to the meat-and-potato people, but he had an assumption of doing the time and a pretention of entitlement that he deserved to be Governor and that the Republican party owed it to him.

There is a lot of good stuff to discuss regarding Vivek Ramaswamy, and I certainly will.  I’ve met him several times, and at this event, he had a good memory of some of our history together.  The reason he chose CTL Aerospace is because of a story he shares with me, and Nancy Nix, George Lang and a few others at the start of his decision to get into politics, which I knew before his speech, was why he was coming back to start his run for governor at that location.  So we had a good talk, and I got to know his wife a bit more than in the past, and let me say, she is solid goodness in every way you can imagine.  She is sharp and very friendly.  I like the Ramaswamys as a family and as people, and it is those kind of people, if they want to, who should be in tough jobs like the Governor of Ohio.  Vivek is the kind of political figure I have been looking for in these positions for years, so I’m going to get fully behind his campaign, and that’s why I was one of the event coordinators and venue providers.  I personally liked Vivek before his announcement, in a very personal way.  And I am more supportive after hearing his speech if possible.  And to my way of thinking, Vivek is a lot nicer than I am.  And I would say a lot more forgiving; anybody who gets in the way of him running Ohio must be destroyed.  And if Dave Yost wants to go there, or his not very smart people, then that’s on them.  They can deal with the aftermath. 

Not to get into personal details, I normally don’t talk about things I say in private with people, but this is probably important in regard to Vivek Ramaswamy.  When we were talking, he asked me, “Rich, what do you want from me?”  I said to him, “I want 16 years out of you.  8 years as governor of Ohio.  And 8 years as President of the United States.  And at the end of it, you won’t yet be 60.  That sounds like a pretty good life to me.”  And he said, “Yes it does, let’s see how all this goes.”  And to all that, I will do my part to help see that it all goes well.

Rich Hoffman

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