WI-Sen: Did Feingold lose to a corporate financed campaign?
If you were at Netroots Nation last week, you heard Russ Feingold speak with force and passion on the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics.
And while Democrats can enjoy a vigorous debate about whether or not Feingold's fervor on the issue (particularly on the issue of not utilizing so-called "SuperPACs"), it is hard to deny the basic concern Feingold has about the health of our democracy when it is awash in so much corporate cash.
His choice of topics, as it turned out, might have been a touch ironic. Little did he know, as a report in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported on Wednesday, that there may well have been a corrupting influence of corporate money in the campaign that defeated Senator Feingold in the 2010 midterm elections:
After dropping nearly $9 million from his own pocket to win a seat in the U.S. Senate, Ron Johnson didn't have to feel the pain for very long.
Johnson's plastics company paid him $10 million in deferred compensation shortly before he was sworn in as Wisconsin's junior senator, according to his latest financial disclosure report.
The first-term Republican declined to say how his Oshkosh firm, Pacur, came up with a figure that so closely mirrored the amount he personally put into his campaign fund.
"You take a look in terms of what would be a reasonable compensation package, OK?" Johnson said this week. "It's a private business. I've complied with all the disclosure laws, and I don't have to explain it any further to someone like you."
Of course, who decided what would be a "reasonable compensation package"?
Unlike most deferred package deals, however, it appears that the company had not set aside a specified amount annually that would be paid out when he left the firm. Instead, Johnson said the $10 million payment was "an agreed-upon amount" that was determined at the end of his tenure with the company.
Agreed upon with whom?
"That would be me," he said.
There are two ways that this can be interpreted. Perhaps we take Johnson at this word: this was a simple deferred compensation package, based on the fact that he hadn't taken a salary for years.
Or...perhaps Johnson ran in advance, knowing that the corporation he co-founded (and has benefitted from government cash in the past) would pay him back after the fact.
In this scenario, the corporation basically paid for his campaign. And, it is worth noting, in return they replaced one of the most steadfast Senators on the cause of curbing corporate influence in politics with one of the most ardent suck-ups to corporate culture in the Senate. A very nice trade for the corporate world, and one that would probably be worth a $10 million investment "deferred compensation package."
Even if we take Johnson at his word (and given what an ass he is, that's incredibly hard to do), even the most fervent GOP apologist would have to agree that the optics of a corporation dropping eight figures on a newly-elected Senator are incredibly ugly. And, to echo the words of several Wisconsin "good government" groups, probably worthy of some investigation.