The cavernous TV studio is dark except for the bright lights in the corner.
Tony Raimondo is sitting at ease in the glare, talking about jobs and trade and “getting America back on the move.”
And when the taped interview with Todd Andrews at KETV in Omaha is done, Raimondo heads to the Old Market to lunch on fish and chips at Upstream Brewing Co.
...
Sure-footed and on-message, no longer trailing off into undisciplined meandering, Raimondo is making the case that he’s the most experienced and best prepared Senate candidate, particularly at a time of economic recession.
“I’ve been creating jobs for 40 years and balancing budgets in good times and bad.”
...
Raimondo is in his element at mid-afternoon. He’s touring Tri-V Tool and Manufacturing Co. on Centech Road... One of the workers [there], Brad Bartlett, ... is a Papillion High School graduate who ... pursued the “Dream It; Do It” path mapped by Nebraska manufacturers to point youth at community college training for high-tech careers.
In 2003, Bartlett graduated from Southeast Community College at Milford. Today, he says, he’s earning nearly $60,000 a year, including overtime pay.
Raimondo is a leader of the coalition that’s promoting this effort to reduce the skills gap in Nebraska manufacturing.
“We’re creating good-paying jobs,” he says.
“And we’re helping young adults find the educational path to get the right skills.”
...
Even the reality of being fired as general manager of a Vickers plant in Omaha in 1980 for siding with workers in a union-management contractual dispute, Raimondo said.
“I was 40, and we had four young kids at home,” he said.
But, Raimondo said, he felt strongly that the company owed its workers a reasonable 15 cent-an-hour cost-of-living wage increase.
...
“We don’t talk about change in business. We do it.”
