Ron Johnson plans to remain an outsider

[Geee]

Politico:


In this anti-establishment year, Ron Johnson is perhaps the only member of his freshman Republican Senate class who can truly lay claim to the Washington outsider label.

Wisconsin’s newly elected senator has never served in public office. He didn’t benefit from family political connections, as did Rand Paul of Kentucky or Mike Lee of Utah. He funded most of his campaign with his personal fortune, keeping special interests at bay.

In fact, the 55-year-old Oshkosh plastics manufacturer recently boasted that he’d never set foot in Washington before launching his Senate campaign just six months ago, the start of an improbable journey that led to the defeat of a liberal icon, 18-year Democratic incumbent Russ Feingold.

In Washington this week for orientation, Johnson is trying to stoke his own personal narrative as the “citizen legislator.”

How long that lasts, as he is pulled in different directions by the Senate Republican Conference, remains to be seen.

Johnson has already aligned himself with tea party hero Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who successfully pushed a ban on earmarks Wednesday in his caucus and has taken a hard-line stance against raising the debt ceiling. And Johnson speaks with a certain pride about a campaign ad in which he scribbles numbers on a dry-erase board, illustrating that the Senate is dominated by lawyers, with only one accountant and no manufacturers — not the team he envisions for the nation as it struggles to balance the budget and create jobs.