Rebecca Kleefisch is running to be the GOP’s nominee for Wisconsin governor against Governor Evers. She's radical in the extreme. But there’s another problem: You can’t believe what she says. Her record of dishonesty makes clear that you can’t trust #RadicalRebecca.
Kleefisch’s problem with the truth was on high display with the first moments of her campaign for governor. Her launch video starts with images of fires in Kenosha a year ago. No, she’s not calling out the vigilante teenager who killed two people. She’s pushing a debunked, divisive right-wing storyline—that ignores Gov Evers’s swift response.
And while Kleefisch has been one of the worst offenders of using Kenosha to provoke conflict, her *initial* response to the shooting of Jacob Blake actually echoed Gov Evers’s comments. Now, she’s changing her position to fit her radical agenda and political ambitions.
It’s not just Kenosha that brings out the two-faced dishonest side of Rebecca Kleefisch. It’s just about every major political issue of our time. Take, for example, the issue of healthcare—a core issue for Governor Evers, and something #RadicalRebecca constantly attacks.
In 2010, Kleefisch said in a TV ad with Scott Walker that the Affordable Care Act was “a government takeover of our health care.” Not true! And saying it over and over didn’t make it any less false. Her lie earned a “Pants on Fire” by PolitiFact.
Kleefisch also pushed the Republican lie about “death panels”—which is, and has always been, so thoroughly false that it was named PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year.
Here’s a 2010 video of then-Lieutenant-Governor-elect Kleefisch throwing around the “rumored death panels” to make a dubious joke about the government regulating carbon dioxide exhalation as a way to curb supposedly mythical global warming:
And here she is the year before on Twitter, pushing the “fear” that the government would prioritize young and healthy people in a “socialized health care line.” Now that the ACA’s been law for a decade, will she apologize and retract?
The Kleefisch-Walker ticket ran on the promise of creating 250k jobs. They missed that by a ton—delivering only half the promised jobs. That created a political problem for Kleefisch. So, did she apologize? Promise to do better? Take a guess.
Kleefisch’s strategy for dealing with her failed, broken-promise record on job creation was, once again, to say things that weren’t true.
In 2012, Kleefisch bragged that she made a cold call to FatWallet.com, a company that was based in Illinois at the time, and succeeded in persuading the company to move to Wisconsin. But PolitiFact, once again, found her claim to be “mostly false.”
A spokesperson for the company stated plainly, “We were already considering Wisconsin before she called.” PolitiFact concluded that “It’s clear from the chain of events that the state -- and Kleefisch -- played a minimal role in encouraging FatWallet to move to Wisconsin.”
And of course, Kleefisch played a key role in negotiating the disastrous Foxconn deal, the largest attempted government handout to a foreign company in American history. What’s more, she also misled voters on the price of the deal.
When the deal was first announced, Foxconn was supposed to get $3 billion in subsidies from the state to build a $10 billion plant and create 13,000 jobs. After the legislation was passed, it was revealed that Foxconn’s required investment dropped by $1 billion.
In fact, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s estimate published in 2018, the Foxconn plant could have cost the public nearly $4.5 billion, almost 50% more than the $3 billion that was *initially* cited by the Walker-Kleefisch administration.
In other words, Kleefisch touted a $3 billion taxpayer giveaway to generate a $10 billion economic investment. But her own deal—even if it had come true!—was a potential $4.5 billion giveaway for $9 billion. Higher cost, lower return. And then, of course, the returns evaporated.
Thankfully, Gov Evers stepped in and renegotiated this disastrous deal. His leadership saved taxpayers billions, while protecting the local investments already made in the project.
On jobs, healthcare, and her campaign-launch narrative of Kenosha, Rebecca Kleefisch has built a crystal-clear record of deception in pursuit of political power. You just can’t trust what she says.
Kleefisch’s credibility gap is the other side of the coin of her radical agenda. What she actually wants, and what she’s done, are out of step with Wisconsin. So she tries to have it both ways. But we can fight back by spreading the truth about #RadicalRebecca.
You can find more information about all of this, including her record, at radicalrebecca.com. Rebecca Kleefisch isn’t fit to be governor of Wisconsin. Spread the word.
