Ricketts vows no term limits

Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Pete Ricketts said he wouldn’t impose an artificial term limit on himself if he beats Sen. Ben Nelson in November.

“We have term limits every election,” Ricketts said. “If people don’t like the job I do after one term they should vote me out. If I win in November, I will commit to two terms and then look at it again to see if I would want to run for a third term.”

Ricketts said that Nelson, a Democrat, is in a situation where he is being graded for his performance in the U.S. Senate.

Even though the latest statewide poll shows Ricketts trailing Nelson for potential voter support, Ricketts said he believes he is in a good position.

According to poll numbers from Rasmussen Reports released this week, Nelson leads Ricketts by a 55 percent to 32 percent margin.

“If you look at the poll figures I’m about in the same place Don Stenberg was at this time when he ran against Nelson six years ago,” Ricketts said. “But (Stenberg) ran out of money and still lost by a slim margin. We still have a lot of work to do. We’re going to get it done.”

Information on the 2000 U.S. Senate election shows that Nelson beat Stenberg by a 51 percent to 49 percent margin with the former governor replacing retiring U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey.

While spending almost $10 million of his own money on the campaign, Ricketts said he won’t run out of money by the Nov. 7 election, but he said he is battling a lot of misunderstanding about his family and its rise to wealth.

“That’s one of the reason I’m going across the state — so that people can understand who I am,” he said. “I had a very normal, middle-class upbringing. I had a newspaper route when I was a kid. That’s how I bought my first bicycle. My dad took me to get a loan to go to college.

“A lot of the success of Ameritrade happened after I grew up, went away to college and came back to Omaha,” he said.

Ricketts, a Nebraska City native and former chief operating officer for the Ameritrade Holding Corp., now serves on the company’s board of directors.

Information on Ameritrade’s Web site stated that the company was founded in 1975 after government deregulation of the brokerage.

The Republican candidate is spending the week traveling the state to speak to newspaper reporters about his national budget reform plan.

Ricketts said there are several problems with the current U.S. government budget system.

First, he would try to create a national bi-annual budget process similar to Nebraska’s bi-annual budget cycle, he said. During the off years, his plan would call for members of Congress to review national programs for effectiveness.

Ricketts said he also thinks the president should have line-item veto power and that “backroom pork belly” budget practices should be eliminated.

“The problem is that we have too many career politicians that are too worried about their next election rather than the next generation,” he said. “We need to curb the spending process. We don’t necessarily have bad people. We have a bad system. Career politicians don’t want to make the tough decisions because they’re worried about getting kicked out of office.”