RUTHFULLY YOURS

Johnson: From plastics to policy. AP View Enlarged Image

Election ’10: When the Founders envisioned our government, they saw a lawmaking branch of citizen legislators. Today’s Senate is a pack of professional politicians. It needs the diversity a Ron Johnson can bring.

Johnson is the likely Republican challenger to Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat who’s made a career of setting public policy, first as a state senator (10 years), then as a member of the U.S. Senate since 1993. As are many of his colleagues, Feingold is a lawyer by education. His business experience is largely limited to a few years of law practice that preceded the beginning of his political career.

Feingold makes no apologies for dedicating his life to “public service.” That’s a statement which should make every Wisconsin voter nervous. Those who say it is their goal to serve are typically serving only their political ambitions and personal interests. The greatest service that a politician can provide the public is to leave office.

The 55-year-old Johnson is the un-Feingold. He didn’t plan a career in politics from an early age. In fact, as columnist George Will noted last spring, it took what Johnson called the “jaw-dropping” events that have defined the Obama White House — TARP, the stimulus, Government Motors, the mistreatment of Chrysler’s creditors and ObamaCare — for him to consider elected office.

Johnson has also told at least one other journalist that he became fed up with “what change we got” and finally left the sidelines and moved into politics when ObamaCare was forced onto the country.

Of all the compliments directed at this insta-candidate, maybe the highest came from Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial columnist Patrick McIlheran. Johnson, he said, “lacks glad-handing instincts” and has “the look of a guy who didn’t plan his life around winning office.”

Though now a politician, Johnson is at root a businessman. And he knows how business works from his years of running a company. The Oshkosh resident owns a firm, Pacur, which he helped start in 1979, that makes plastic products. His experience has given him a unique perspective, one that has led him to believe, he told McIlheran, that the Democrats’ agenda has created “a high level of uncertainty” that is intimidating business.

Feingold, 57, can’t know about business. He’s spent too many years “serving” the public in the insular world of Washington, where the political class doesn’t start businesses that create jobs, doesn’t expand businesses that generate even more jobs, and apparently, as it is currently made up, has no idea how either is done.

In the Senate, where members serve an average of 12 years, Feingold’s meager business background isn’t rare. Only about one in five of his colleagues can point to real business experience in which a payroll has to be met, a sales quota reached or productivity raised to keep a shop from closing or a job from being lost. To Wisconsin’s credit, its senior senator, Democrat Herb Kohl, is one of them.

Most U.S. senators are lawyers, and most of them are out of touch with the majority of the country. They live privileged lives and have long forgotten, if they ever even knew, what is required of the average American just to muddle through the day. The longer an elected official remains in the swamp of Washington, the farther he floats from the mainstream.

As Roger Sherman of Rhode Island warned during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, “By remaining at the seat of government” rather than returning home to “mix with the people,” lawmakers “would acquire the habits of the place, which might differ from those of their constituents.” The same can be said of those who move right into “public service” and those who stay too long.

If he wins his party’s Sept. 14 primary as expected, and then beats Feingold, with whom he is running neck-and-neck in the latest Rasmussen poll, Johnson will be one of the citizen legislators envisioned by the Founders.

He and other Senate candidates with business backgrounds, particularly Carly Fiorina in California, would give that insular chamber some practical experience, as well as a perspective, that it sorely needs.