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Jewish World Review Nov. 1, 2010 / 18 Mar-Cheshvan, 5771 New GOP star on track to defeat Dem legend Russ Feingold By Byron York
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Neenah, Wisconson —While much of the political world has been obsessing over the troubles of Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, or the sparring over Rand Paul and "Aqua-Buddha" in Kentucky, or the controversies surrounding Sharron Angle in Nevada, another Republican newcomer has been running a quiet, direct, and devastatingly effective campaign. Here in Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, a businessman who has never before run for public office, appears poised to pick up a Senate seat for Republicans, defeating Democratic legend Russell Feingold and becoming the first GOP senator elected from the state since 1986.
Johnson has been ahead of Feingold for months; the Real Clear Politics average of polls puts the margin between seven and eight percentage points. In this time of voter unhappiness with Barack Obama and the Democratic agenda, Johnson is on the leading edge of what Wisconsin state Republican chairman Reince Priebus calls "the biggest D-to-R shift of any state in the country." And he's doing it as a businessman and would-be citizen legislator running on an elegantly simple platform.
"I've got two major items in my platform," Johnson tells a group of Chamber of Commerce members gathered for lunch at the Best Western hotel here in Neenah. "I want to repeal health care [reform], and I want to bring every ounce of my accounting background, my business background, my passion, my dedication, my seriousness of purpose, to do everything I possibly can do to control federal spending and debt, to limit the size and scope of the federal government."
A lifelong Republican, Johnson was appalled by the big-spending measures Obama and Democratic leaders enacted in the spring and summer of 2009. But it was the campaign for national health care that pushed Johnson into action. As he watched Senate Democratic leaders desperately making deals with Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and others to win support of a health care measure the public opposed, something in Johnson just snapped. "When they passed that bill on Christmas Eve, with the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase, that was the final straw," he tells the Chamber of Commerce.
When Johnson talks about his seriousness of purpose, he means it. As he sees it, Obamacare is not just designed to lead to a government takeover of the health care system, bringing with it rationing, lower-quality care, and less innovation. It's not just a long-term budget-buster. It also undermines something that is fundamentally good about America. Johnson was personally offended when he saw Obama attacking doctors, accusing them of performing unnecessary procedures out of greed. "That outraged me," Johnson says. "It's in America that medical miracles are created." Speaking to his fellow businessmen and women, he recounts a medical miracle in his own life, when his first child, Carey, required emergency surgery to correct a congenital heart defect. Johnson has never forgotten the doctor who got up in the middle of the night to save his daughter's life.
As the health care debate was raging, a friend asked Johnson to speak at a Tea Party event in Oshkosh. The request was for him to speak on government over-regulation of business, but Johnson instead chose Obamacare as his topic. The speech was so well received that people began to tell him he should run.
He said no. "I always watched politics, but I was never involved in it," Johnson tells me after lunch, during a meet-and-greet at Kitz & Pfeil Hardware in Oshkosh. "I'm a Grover Norquist, leave-us-alone kind of guy. But they didn't leave us alone." By the late spring of this year, he was in the race.
Johnson has run a smart, sharply-focused campaign, hitting Feingold as "the deciding vote" for Obamacare. It's no surprise he's doing well. What is surprising is how poorly Feingold is performing in a state that has voted him into public office for nearly 30 years. He's a hero to many Democrats and the author of campaign finance reform legislation that appeals to Wisconsin's progressive tradition.
But this is a nationalized race, and in national politics, times have changed. Feingold is on the wrong side of that change. "The race in Wisconsin is all about the national mood," says pollster Scott Rasmussen. "Russ Feingold was not hated the way Harry Reid is, and I think he still visits every county in the state every year. But this year he is part of a team that people want to vote against."
At the Chamber of Commerce lunch, one man tells me he voted for Feingold in 2004 because he thought Washington was crooked and Feingold could help clean it up. Now, he thinks Feingold is part of the problem. That's Feingold's situation in a nutshell. If Feingold had been up for re-election in 2008, he'd be safely in his seat until 2014. Now, it appears he's on the way out. The Democrats have sent their biggest guns — President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama — to Wisconsin to try to rescue him, but nothing has worked.
The two candidates are from the same generation — Johnson is 55, Feingold 57 — but they could not be more different in how they approach politics. Feingold, who went to the University of Wisconsin, won a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a law degree at Harvard, practiced law for just a couple of years before running for the Wisconsin state senate in 1982. He's been in office ever since, and the U.S. Senate since 1992. Feingold doesn't like to be called a "career politician," but that's what he is. He's a man of government.
Johnson went into business immediately after earning an accounting degree at the University of Minnesota. He's all about companies and commerce and, especially, work — "The greatest compliment you can pay anybody is that they're a hard worker," he tells the Chamber. He celebrates people who make things, "producing products, exporting products, creating real jobs."
Some of Feingold's supporters have attacked Johnson as simply a rich guy who wants to buy a Senate seat. (Johnson's campaign is mostly self-financed; he had put in nearly $7 million as of September 30.) And there's no doubt that Johnson, head of a plastics-manufacturing company called Pacur — pronounced "Packer," which is not an accident in football-crazy Wisconsin — has certainly done very well in business. He doesn't claim to be a self-made man; his wife's father, who runs a hugely successful plastics company, helped set him up in the company. But Johnson has worked in every part of Pacur for 31 years. He believes deeply in free enterprise and the work ethic.
He also inspires loyalty. At the Chamber lunch, one man, a longtime friend of Johnson's, tells me of a time he lost his job and had difficulty keeping his house. Unbidden, Johnson wrote him a check that saved the day. Others describe Johnson as a generous and charitable man who doesn't look for a lot of public credit.
But now he's squarely in the public eye. And he's using his unlikely prominence to pursue a campaign based on a few core values. "This is not my life's ambition, not by a long shot," he tells the Chamber. "But the fact is, I'm 55 years old. I grew up in America that valued hard work, that celebrated success. Remember that? We weren't demonizing doctors. We were putting them up on a pedestal. We were telling our kids, 'Look at that person, emulate them.' Work hard, this is the land of opportunity, you can be anything you want to be. And unfortunately in my lifetime, what I have witnessed has been a very slow but sure drift, and I would argue in the last 18 months just a lurch, toward a culture of entitlement and dependency. It's not an America I recognize. It's not an America that works."
"America is exceptional, and that's being squandered," Johnson concludes. "So if there's one little phrase that tells you why I chose this path, I decided to run for the U.S. Senate because I think we're losing America. I don't think that's overdramatic. I don't think I'm overstating the case. And I'm just a guy from Oshkosh, a husband and a father. We're a group of people who refuse, absolutely refuse, to let America go without a knock-down, drag-out fight."
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