Feingold Attacks Johnson’s Anti-Poverty Program

[Valin]

National Review/The Corner:

Alexandra DeSanctis

October 27, 2016

 

UPDATE: Johnson’s campaign released a new advertisement in response to Feingold’s attack on the Joseph Project, featuring a member of the Greater Praise Church of God in Christ and pastor Jerome Smith, along with men and women who participated in the anti-poverty program:

 

 

As the Senate race in Wisconsin tightens in the last two weeks before election day, Democratic candidate Russ Feingold — who served three terms as senator before being unseated by Republican Ron Johnson in 2010 — has lashed out at an unlikely target: Johnson’s charity work. On Wisconsin Public Radio, Feingold criticized the Joseph Project, an anti-poverty program that Johnson established last fall in partnership with pastor Jerome Smith.

 

As I previously reported at NRO, the Joseph Project — operated by Smith, Johnson, and Johnson’s staff with no government funding — has recruited and trained close to 200 impoverished people in Milwaukee. Bridging the gap between open manufacturing jobs and unemployed people looking for opportunity, the project connected these individuals with employers and transported them to and from their jobs every day an hour away in Sheboygan. As of early September, the project had expanded from Milwaukee to a second location in Madison.

 

But apparently this charity program isn’t up to Feingold’s progressive standards. “It’s not enough to pick people up in a van and send them away a couple hours and have them come back exhausted at the end of the day. That doesn’t make a community,” he said in a recent radio hit. He added that investment in minority-owned businesses, community policing, and public schools would be a better solution.

 

(Snip)