Ron Johnson Has Found A Creative Way To Recoup His Campaign Investment
by Jason Linkins
06/24/11
Back in 2010, Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold lost his Senate seat in dramatic fashion to Republican Ron Johnson, an Oshkosh businessman-turned-Tea Party mantle-wearing political insurgent. Johnson's win came after a late-summer surge in the polls that had elite election-watchers baffled, given Feingold's long history and solid reputation in the state. Johnson, for his part was best known as one of the 2010 election cycle's many self-funders -- and one of the few successful ones.
Throughout it all, Johnson cast himself as a self-made businessman and Tea Party outsider. But if you were willing to look past the self-mythologizing, it was readily apparent that his candidacy was built, in part, on donations from businesses and individuals who were showered with taxpayer money. And now, Johnson has lucked into a very creative way of earning back the millions of dollars of his own that he sunk into his campaign.
Looks like 2010's biggest bailout baby is all grown up.
One of the more amusing features of this particular election is that it ran against a piece of conventional wisdom that everyone in the media said governed the thinking of those who comprised the membership of the Tea Party: their antipathy to bailouts. Maybe this wasn't clear to everybody, but Feingold never voted for the Troubled Asset Relief Program in the first place, twice voted to end it and was the author of a piece of legislation that would have forced unspent TARP money to be directly applied to paying down the Federal deficit.
On the other hand, Johnson was showered with largesse from a lot of institutions that should have struck TARP-opponents as ironic. As The Awl's Abe Sauer reported in September of 2010: "Now campaign finance filings found by The Awl show that despite his vigorous denouncement of the bank bailouts, Johnson's campaign has received funding from many of the same banks who received bailouts."...
For the full article, go to:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/24/ron-johnson-wisconsin-senator_n_884049.html
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