The flurry of one-minute answers during Friday night’s U.S. Senate candidate debate are unlikely to change many voters’ minds.
There was Republican Sen. Ron Johnson in his dark blue suit and white hair looking senatorial as he glibly explained that the government is wasting money on silly climate change initiatives and reassuring voters that, despite his many published comments to the contrary, he wants to “save” Social Security and Medicare.
There was his Democratic challenger, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, looking young and a little nervous in his open-collar shirt and no tie, saying that he doesn’t mind the recent barrage of attack ads calling him “different” since, as someone who grew up in a working class family, he would be a different kind of senator from millionaires like Johnson.
Barnes came armed with a lot of facts, including Johnson’s description of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme,” his support for overturning Roe v. Wade, his praise of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, which, Barnes pointed out, runs counter to his posture as a big supporter of the police — as do his repeated votes against funding for local police departments.
But somehow Johnson manages to let these factual attacks roll off. Part of his secret is that he seems totally at ease, whether he’s blaming climate change on sun spots or talking about the the COVID-19 vaccine killing people or, in Friday night’s debate, explaining that Roe v….
