We have a lot to think about.
Ron Johnson bought his senate seat. Russ Feingold, a hero to many, is out of office.
Corporate money rules in elections.
We have a Republican Governor. And two houses at the state.
Take a moment and think. How is this going to change our lives? Who do you know who will be losing their jobs? What is going to happen to what is left of our safety net? How far backwards will we slide?
And what are YOU going to do about it?
Ummm…
“Ron Johnson bought his senate seat. Russ Feingold, a hero to many, is out of office.
Corporate money rules in elections.”
Two words for ya… Herb Kohl.
‘Ol Herbie purely purchased his seat, Not Ron Johnson, but I understand how hard it is to lose, and you feel the need to justify it…
Um, actually, I’ve been pretty consistent here, I voted for, donated money to and probably volunteered a bit for Rae Voegler in 2006. Herb Kohl buying his senate seat isn’t any more acceptable to me.
You do realize Russ Feingold (with his out of state contributors) spent more on this race than Johnson did, right?
Candidate self-financing $8,238,465 (64%)
That costs the campaign a whole lot less in staff and volunteer time and hard dollar costs than going out there and raising money. It takes money to raise money, unless you just write a check for it.
While I am not excusing Herb Kohl as I did not support him there are two differences.
1. Before citizens United we knew where all of kohls money came from.
2. Herb Kohl is accessible to the people. He would of never run a campaign by saying ” I have a lot of good ideas on how to fix the economy, but I dont want to get attacked so I wont say anything until after the election.” That is inexcusable.
Didn’t the apex of Progressive Dane occur under a Republican Legislature and Governorship? 😉
Can we get back to the hotel by the water now?
There’s a problem with this scenario where Ron Johnson bought the senate seat. Russ Feingold had less than a 50% approval rating for the past YEAR (45% see Real Clear Politics.) That’s the kiss of death for an incumbent. Furthermore, Rassmussen did a poll on July 13th that had Ron Johnson beating Russ by 1%. Every poll done after that date also showed Johnson ahead, the margin just kept increasing. The problem is that on July 13th Ron Johnson had not secured the Republican nomination, had not run a single TV commercial and had less than 50% name recognition among voters. But he was already ahead of Russ.
Correction: Johnson had secured the nomination 6 weeks earlier.
Johnson never “secured” a nomination. He was appointed by the republican party heads…
Walker has said he will cut 4,000 state jobs, or about 4% of the state workforce. 100% will see a pay cut when they start paying towards pensions. The extra 4,000 will raise WI unemployment rate from 7.8 to 7.9. The rate was 8.8 a year ago, the decline all under Doyle, the Dems and Obama’s stimulus…
I went on a search to see how much each candidate, Johnson or Feingold, spent more. I figured it would be easy since I had seen so much writtn about Johnson’s deep pockets. But I couldn’t seem to find anything about how much Russ had spent. That should be your first clue. After tracking down their respective federal campaign finance reports, I understood. Johnson – $10.5 million, Feingold – $11.5 million.
Try opensecrets.org, you’ll get different numbers. Then also check this report out
http://www.citizen.org/documents/Outside-Job-Report-20101103.pdf
Final spending numbers aren’t due yet (later this month?) and you can’t forget independent expenditures (I was getting 3-4 indy pro-Johnson robocalls a day).
Scott Walker promised 250,000 jobs in four years.
That works out to Twelve hundred jobs per week. One hundred-seventy per day. Every day. For four years.
You were correct Brenda, those are different numbers indeed. They clearly indicate that Russ not only raised far more money than Johnson, he outspent him by 60% ($16 million to $10 million.) And I believe that six million dollar gap will not be closed by the outside expenditures nor changed significantly by the final tallys. Either way I would think this would put to rest the notion that Johnson “bought” the seat. And I notice that Johnson’s self financing is treated with much disdain. Funny, when Kohl did it, the spin was “I’m not beholden to anybody.” Remember “Nobody’s Senator but yours?”