Ribble joins race to unseat Kagen

A Kaukauna roofing contractor with no experience in politics says his dissatisfaction with Congress and the rising national debt has forced him to enter the GOP primary to unseat two-term Democrat Steve Kagen in 2010.

Reid Ribble, 53, says he filed nomination papers Tuesday, a week after he visited Washington, D.C., where he met with the National Republican Congressional Committee, members of Congress and other groups and got a “lay of the land” in the 8th Congressional District.

“I’m a bit of a reluctant warrior here,” said Ribble, explaining his frustration with federal lawmakers, including Kagen, who he feels cannot pass legislation without loading it with pork spending.

“At some point somebody has got to go to Washington, D.C., with enough common sense to say, ‘No.'”

Attempts to reach Kagen for comment were unsuccessful.

Like Kagen, Ribble is a Fox Cities native. He is the president of the Ribble Group Inc., which operates two roofing businesses in Kaukauna. Three generations of his family are now in the business.

He plans to make a formal announcement of his candidacy on Monday and commits to bringing to the office a level of statesmanship, the kind that draws people to a different path and rises above partisanship. He says former U.S. Rep. Mark Green, who also served as U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, is a political role model.

“I’m not a career politician. I don’t have huge alliances with the Republican Party … the Democratic Party, the Libertarians or the independents,” he said. “I’m just a regular person who has a business background and understands budgets and numbers and realizes what it takes to make an economy move.”

He says the recent passage of the stimulus bill has done nothing to jump-start the economy. Americans continue to see unemployment escalate.

“The national debt today is over $11.5 trillion. With the current budget that the president passed, it could balloon to $13 trillion within the next 20 months. I’m profoundly concerned about the economy being able to move forward and grow under the weight of that awesome burden,” Ribble said.

Ribble faces an early obstacle in his House bid. To vie for the job, Ribble will need to move into the district.

“All my business is in the 8th. I work and live there. The only thing I do in the 6th is sleep, and I live right across the water,” he said of his Sherwood home in the reliably Republican 6th Congressional District. “It doesn’t make sense to run in the 6th; the government impact is on my business and my livelihood.”

He and his wife, DeaNa plan to put their house on the market. They have been looking at homes in Appleton, Green Bay and Kaukauna and expect to have a move-in date before the end of the year.

With 16 months to go before the midterm election, the field of Republican challengers to Kagen, an Appleton allergist who self-financed his campaign in 2006, is becoming more crowded.

Ribble is the third candidate to announce he’s in the race. The two other candidates are Door County Supervisor Marc Savard and Brown County Supervisor Andy Williams.

“There’s no reason that I wouldn’t be successful at this,” Ribble said.

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