Despite telling Politico that you would see the real Ron Johnson after the election, in turns out that at the Rusk County Republican Party meeting in August he slipped up and let us in on why he's running:
I do like putting why I'm doing this (running for Senate) in a slightly larger context. I'm 55 years old. I grew up in an America that valued hard work... that celebrated hard work-- remember that? Remember when someone was successful you could tell your kids, "Hey, see that person? You work hard, you achieve, you can be like that. Emulate that person." Now what do we do? We demonize them. We bring them down... they had to cheat somehow to get there. That's class warfare. It's not going to work. It's not an America I recognize. It's not an America that is going to work. OK? So, I really do, I've got a very, very strong sense.
First of all, Ron, you have never been "demonized" in this campaign for being rich, but for being untruthful about why you are rich: You started the campaign by telling everyone that you were a self-made man that "started" your company from the "ground-up," when, in fact, the company you now own was started by your gazillionaire father-in-law, plastics titan Howard Curler.
Now, even after he's been outed as getting rich the old fashioned way (marrying into it), he's continuing this rich-people-exceptionalism meme that they get rich because of their hard, hard, hard work. While that's certainly true for many rich people, the truth is that most rich people are rich by inheritance (like Johnson) and most of us in the lower 99% work just as hard as Johnson and the rest of the top 1%.
But, since Ron, brought it up-- the wealthiest 1% aren't demonized in this country, but they should be, at least, scrutinized. The wealthiest 1% have been hoarding wealth in this country for the last 30 years to the point that they are wealthier now than at any point in American history. During the same time the middle class has been decimated. Talk about class warfare!
As economists have pointed out, longterm, having this much wealth concentrated at the top 1% hurts the overall economy and is even bad, longterm, for the wealthiest 1%. So, Ron, we're not demonizing you, we're actually trying to help you.