Cordray: I'll fight for healthcare, job skills, restore local government funds

RELATED : Biden to rally for Cordray at YSU on Monday

By DAVID SKOLNICK

skolnick@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Rich Cordray, Democratic gubernatorial nominee, said he is the best candidate to move Ohio forward.

Cordray met Tuesday with The Vindicator’s editorial board for about an hour answering questions about his campaign. Attorney General Mike DeWine, the Republican nominee, is to meet today with the newspaper’s editorial board.

“What I hear from Ohioans around the state is they’re concerned deeply about economic anxiety,” Cordray said.

He added: “But knowing they’re going to have someone in the governor’s office who will fight to protect access to affordable health care, knowing they have someone in the governor’s office who will help them with workforce development skills and training that people need to get good jobs” and “knowing somebody in the governor’s office is going to be a voice for everyone around the state and help spread out opportunity more fairly across the state, that’s what people are looking for, and that’s what they want.”

Cordray said, if elected, he “will address these problems. We will find ways to work together. I’ve always been able to work with people – Republicans, independents or Democrats – in order to solve problems together, big problems together, and I will do that again as governor.”

Cordray said Ohio “cannot afford to become like North Carolina when that legislature started squabbling over who should go to the bathroom where. Businesses didn’t want to locate their workforces in an intolerant state like that. We need to be more progressive and more tolerant and more open and more welcoming. That’s the right direction for Ohio. That’s the direction Betty Sutton [his lieutenant governor running mate] and I will take.”

Cordray is a former state treasurer and attorney general who lost re-election for that latter race by 1.2 percent to DeWine in 2010. In 2012, he was appointed by then-President Barack Obama to head the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He resigned from that job in December 2017 to run for governor, winning the Democratic primary.

Cordray said if elected, he would continue to fight to protect the Affordable Care Act, so-called Obamacare, as well as the continued expansion of the Medicaid program.

While DeWine says he has always favored the coverage of pre-existing conditions, Cordray said that’s not the case, pointing to DeWine joining a Republican lawsuit against Obamacare on his first day as attorney general. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law in 2012.

“It shows clearly that actions are different from words, and you can’t trust Mike DeWine on health care,” Cordray said.

Cordray also said he would aggressively fight to keep the General Motors complex in Lordstown, including bringing an Ohio delegation to GM’s Detroit headquarters to personally lobby for the facility.

Cordray said he would restore the cuts made by the state government to the Local Government Fund that helped, in part, prop up the state’s rainy-day fund, which has a $2.7 billion surplus.

“It’s wrong,” he said. “I’m committed to changing that. Restoring the Local Government Fund is a priority to me.”

After meeting with the newspaper, Cordray joined local union officials outside the former RG Steel mill in Warren to criticize DeWine’s support of what he called “disastrous trade deals.”