Here & Now

Rebecca Kleefisch Running for Re-Election

Frederica Freyberg:

We continue our series of conversations with candidates on the statewide ballot. Tonight, the Democratic and Republican candidates running for lieutenant governor. The Republican incumbent is Rebecca Kleefisch. Her Democratic challenger is state senator John Lehman, from whom we'll hear in a few minutes. But first, we welcome the incumbent, Rebecca Kleefisch, who joins us from Milwaukee. Thanks for being here.

Rebecca Kleefisch:

Thanks so much for having me, Frederica.

Frederica Freyberg:

Well, in this dead heat race for governor, why are you as candidate for lieutenant governor a help to the ticket?

Rebecca Kleefisch:

Well, there’s no question that the governor and I have developed a really terrific partnership over the last three and a half years. And we’re going to continue that for the next four. But in the meantime, it really helps in campaigning. The governor understands my expertise as a messenger. Kind of in our C suite, where he is the CEO, I am the CMO, the chief marketing officer, which makes campaigning a lot of fun for me.

Frederica Freyberg:

Well, you’ve also described yourself and early on as kind of the ambassador for jobs in Wisconsin. So why is it, do you think, that you and Scott Walker have not been able to meet the promise of the 250,000 jobs?

Rebecca Kleefisch:

I’ll give credit where credit’s due there. The governor came up with that idea.

Frederica Freyberg:

Not your promise?

Rebecca Kleefisch:

–I was going to be the jobs ambassador.

Frederica Freyberg:

Oh, okay.

Rebecca Kleefisch:

But I will say this, I’ve gotten terrific opportunities to hold small business roundtables around the state of Wisconsin. And after holding those, folks, 10, 30 folks in a room talking about small business and the challenges they face, we decided it would be a really great idea to unite them in one big event and do a small business summit. The governor loved the idea. We just completed our fourth one in Racine County after being in Green Bay and Stevens Point. And we’re really, really excited, La Crosse was another one, about the small business growth we’ve seen over the last three and a half years. In fact, Wisconsin has the best small business survival rate of any state in the Midwest. About 41% of our small businesses are still active after ten years. That’s a great number. But an even better number, I think, is the fact that we have created or seen the creation of, I should say, 25,000 new small businesses in this state in the last three and a half years. And 100,000 brand new jobs after losing 133,000 in the Doyle years. It was a shame. You know, going through the recession when folks had anxiety every single day about whether ends were going to meet and whether they were going to keep their jobs, to see Wisconsin on a comeback right now is a really gratifying thing.

Frederica Freyberg:

So not to press too hard on that, but I don’t think I heard your explanation as to why your administration has not been able to meet that goal as promised.

Rebecca Kleefisch:

Couple things. So we have a great deal of uncertainty and instability coming out of Washington DC. Vanguard, big investments firm, came out a couple years ago and said the exact number on that is about $261 billion in unspent investments in the American economy because of the uncertainty coming out of Washington. If you think of it, small business owners and large business owners, even families, need some sort of predictability in order to do their budgets. If you look at what’s been coming out of DC, we’ve had sequestration, the fiscal cliff, the milk cliff which was invented, the government shutdown. Folks don’t really know what to expect and so they’re holding on to their investments. And that means, unfortunately, those dollars don’t necessarily go into small businesses to create jobs at the rate we would want. Here’s the other thing. If you go on our totally free jobcenterofwisconsin.com website, you’ll see that there are about 76,000 open jobs in Wisconsin today. I just told you that we created 100,000 new jobs. Those 76,000 aren’t added to that, because in Wisconsin we don’t count a job as created until a job is filled. So what the governor and I are doing right now is working very, very hard on pressing fast-forward and getting folks into the work force so they can take those 76,000 open jobs that are currently available but employers can’t find folks with the right skill sets in order to take them.

Frederica Freyberg:

I want to move to a different topic and that is education. A recent PolitiFact rates as mostly true' the fact that Scott Walker cut public school funding more than any other governor. What’s your response?

Rebecca Kleefisch:

Well, you know that a lot of that had to do with Act 10 and the fact that we asked our state employees and our teachers and administrators, folk who work at school districts, to pay a little bit toward their own health insurance and a little bit toward their own retirements. So that’s where that number comes from. But in this last budget you probably also know that we put $380 million new dollars into public education. Now that’s really important to me because I have a 3rd grader and a 6th grader in our great k-12 system in Wisconsin. I could not be more proud of our k-12 schools because they’re some of the finest in the nation. That’s reflected in the fact that our 3rd grade reading scores are up, something really important to me as a mom of a 3rd grader, and our ACT scores are second in the country. We want to not only have one of the most globally competitive work forces we’re raising up in our k-12 schools, but we also want a bunch of really smart kids.

Frederica Freyberg:

You’d like to expand vouchers even more. Is that right?

Rebecca Kleefisch:

Yes.

Frederica Freyberg:

And why is that?

Rebecca Kleefisch:

Well, because we want to empower parents. It’s a parent’s job to be a child’s first teacher. And they know better than politicians in Madison how each child in the state should be educated. Moms and dads know their kids and how their kids like to be taught far better than any politician ever could. So we want to empower parents and give them the opportunity to educate their child in the best way for that child. Creating kind of an educational ecosystem makes us more globally competitive. When you think about the fact that 95% of the world’s customers live outside the United States of America, we need to compete globally, and that means we need to be raising up an internationally competitive work force with today’s kids who are tomorrow’s workers.

Frederica Freyberg:

We want to move to the issue of the environment. The iron ore mine in northern Wisconsin symbolizes, it seems, kind of the division between open for business and protector of the environment. Do you think that Wisconsin can have both?

Rebecca Kleefisch:

No question about it. I say often, especially in discussing mining, that we have kind of a scale, where we have to weigh public policy. On one side is protection, protection of people, protection of families, protection of the environment. And then on the other side is progress, assuring that the environment and the people in Wisconsin can move forward and that we have more opportunity and greater opportunity every day. So in every public policy debate you need to reach a steady balance. In this case, we have provided for wonderful environmental protections at the same time we’ve provided for the possible creation of between 3,200 and 5,200 new Wisconsin jobs. You know, we’re not known as a mining state for nothing. But unfortunately there are no iron ore mines active in Wisconsin today. This means a tremendous amount to the people of northern Wisconsin. We need to respect their wishes as we move forward in progress and protection in Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:

We leave it there. Rebecca Kleefisch, t hank you very much for joining us.

Rebecca Kleefisch:

Thanks so much.