I just had a quick conversation with John Loughlin, who is the Republican candidate running for the seat Patrick Kennedy currently holds. He learned the “surprising” news of Kennedy’s decision not to run for reelection while in a Rhode Island emergency room last night where his 21-year-old was having an emergency appendectomy.

Although surprised by the news, Loughlin says that he doesn’t expect the news of Kennedy’s retirement to change much for him or his campaign strategy. “We have been pretty consistent,” he says. “The way I see it is we have been campaigning since April and we’re halfway to change.”

At issue for Rhode Islanders, whoever the Democrats run, will be, Loughlin says: “Who has the better ideas to grow our economy and stimulate jobs?” And the Democrats don’t get high votes on that front in Rhode Island, he believes.

The other question he believes will be key to his victory is that Rhodes Islanders in the First Congressional District want someone representing them “who is not going to be another vote for Nancy Pelosi.”

Besides “jobs” and “fiscal responsibility,” Loughlin mentions the Speaker twice during our brief conversation. When I ask him if he is running against her and the national party, he brings it back home again: “I think it comes down to more a rejection of policies that clearly don’t help Rhode Island.”

Loughlin also takes issue with the idea that electing a Republican in Massachusetts is even more impossible than in Massachusetts (Larry Sabato called Rhode Island more Democratic than Massachusetts in an interview with me earlier in the week): He points out that Patrick Kennedy succeeded a Republican, Ronald Machtley, who Loughlin argues would have been reelected had he not opted to run in a Republican primary for governor; Providence has had Republican governors for most of the last two decades. And right now Loughlin argues, Rhode Islanders “get it.” And it’s about policy.

While he focused on the economy in our brief conversation this morning, in both his announcement speech and an interview with NRO earlier this week, he points to national security and health care as issues on which Rhode Islanders have had it with the Democratic party.

Loughlin’s 21-year-old is fine, by the way. And she e-mailed her father this morning advising him to not make her appendix an election issue after hearing him talk about last night on the radio this morning.

She must have watched Scott Brown with his daughters on election night. The Loughlin household was, in fact, watching that night. And considering one of his children is ten, their availability definitely won’t be an appropriate part of his former stand-up comedian’s shtick, he notes.

But John Loughlin saw things he liked that night and in that campaign — and he’s now working with the Brown campaign team’s senior advisers.