Man, I feel terrible. I had this whole thing planned out where I was going to formally introduce myself and my thoughts to everyone out there. But Ron Johnson just had to ruin it. The senior senator from our home state put on quite the speech over the weekend. Here’s an excerpt from this glorious display of oration: “Let me describe what we’re up against as conservatives, as patriots, as people who like freedom, as people who like this country... We are up against a strategy that is taking place by liberals, progressives, Democrats, whatever they call themselves nowadays, Socialists, Marxists... .” Now not only is this comparison offensive to Marxists, it also has absolutely no place in politics. It’s incredibly divisive and casts much doubt on whether he is fit to do what it takes to become an at least decent senator for our state. But this speech just underlines the larger problem with Ron Johnson, the fact that he might just be one of the worst senators in the history of Wisconsin politics.
Let’s just examine the way he got into Washington. He rode the Tea Party wave in 2010 and more alarmingly spent $8.7 million of his own money during the campaign. Not to mention the fact that outside money poured into the campaign and these ads were about three times more negative than Russ Feingold’s ad buys.
Okay, so he spent enough of his own money to supplement the annual senate salary (which is about $200,000) literally 43.5 times over. That’s not really too bad if he decided as a senator that he would work his way through and at least try to be willing to work with the other side to solve important issues. But nope, Johnson has decided to spend the last two years still in campaign mode. It seems like he’s doing things just for the press and publicity rather than legislating for the people of Wisconsin. Instead of being at the forefront of the issues that he says he cares about, he goes on CNN and FOX News bringing more negative attention to things that apparently he has little to no expertise on.
Take his jump to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which it seems he only did just in the last month to get his name in the papers over the Benghazi hearings. He left the Appropriations Committee, a committee that features what was thought to be a ‘core issue’ for Johnson in his 2010 campaign, pretty much because he had no influence on the committee. Not only that, he has repeatedly chastised the president over his foreign policy since joining the committee a little over month ago, calling it “a policy of diversion.” The sweet irony about this criticism being that one of his main criticisms against Feingold was that he criticized the president for the choice to engage in the Iraq War, saying that “when the U.S. military is engaged, senators shouldn’t be publicly criticizing the policy.” If he was really for improving the economic life of this country, he would have stuck it out in the Appropriations Committee to gain influence there and bring actual, much-needed change to the way that Congress spends our money. Instead he just quit and moved on to the next hot topic.
He’s operating under the guise of not having anything positive or constructive to say regarding how to fix this country, so he goes to the tried-and-true method of sweeping generalizations and vague exclamations, as displayed in his speech over the weekend. It’s almost a caveman-like “we freedom, they Marxist” sort of angle he was taking here. I mean, it got him the senate seat, so why should he stop doing it? Well I’ll tell you why he should stop doing it. He is a senior senator from Wisconsin, meaning that no matter how hurt he feels by people who have literally been in office 10 times as long as he has, he has to have the will to be able to collaborate with others whose opinions may be different from his. I mean look at Marco Rubio, the senior Republican senator from Florida. He is as right-wing as they come, the ‘Republican Savior’ in some circles. But he still found the time to work with the most fervent liberals in the senate to create an immigration bill that might just finally solve the problem of illegal immigration in this country, and he only took office two years before Johnson.
This problem is not limited to Johnson or the Republicans though. All over Congress, across party lines, you see politicians who would rather be in permanent campaign mode than, you know, actually getting down to solving the deep-pressing issues that might just well signal the demise of this country if not dealt with imminently. We as a political community value the sound bite over the fact. Political posturing has become a permanent fixture in our politics. It’s a shame that actual legislators, the people that put aside petty irrelevant differences in an effort to get things done for the people that they work for and elected them into office, are on their way to being a thing of the past. And we only have representatives like Ron Johnson and his ilk to thank for this.
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