- A closer look now at the governor's race and our
continuing series of interviews with democrats running in the
primary.
Tonight, we speak to Matt Flynn.
Flynn is an attorney in Milwaukee.
He is a U.S. Navy veteran
and former chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.
Matt Flynn joins us now.
Thanks very much for doing so.
- Good to be here. Thank you.
- So two of your compatriots have dropped out of this race as
of today.
What will you do?
- I'm in it for the long haul, and I think we're in pretty good
shape.
The Marquette Franklin Poll that just came out shows me in second
place.
I'm tied with two others in the rounding, but in the raw data,
we actually are in second place, and I think we're doing very
well.
- And yet those numbers in the Marquette Poll, what is it,
7% of the vote you garner, and 77% of those polled don't know
- Their name recognition polls.
The good news is that they know me a lot better than all the
others except maybe for Tony Evers, but we have a ways to go.
But with seven weeks to go, which is where it is right now,
our advertising campaign on television is about to start,
and I'm working hard, getting around the state and we're
picking up a lot of support.
- Among all the other candidates, albeit two fewer,
why do you think you should be the progressive voice for
Wisconsin?
- Well, there's a couple of things.
I was the chair of this party.
And I know the state and I know the government well.
I'm a Navy veteran.
I'm the only veteran in the race and getting good veteran support
around the state.
And I differ from them on a number of issues.
One of them is Foxconn.
I think it's a crocked deal that I will stop with litigation.
None of the others say they will stop it.
Tony Evers says he'll make them put solar panels on and the
others complain about it.
I will stop it because it's going to strangle our budget for
15 years.
- On what basis can you beat Scott Walker?
- Well, right now in that poll that we saw,
Scott Walker leads me but I'm within the margin of error.
He leads me 46-42, and I come to it with much less name
recognition than he does.
There's a hunger to replace Scott Walker in this state,
there really is, and I think out of all the candidates,
I was a lawyer for a long time, practicing complex litigation
with a lot of the same issues that it will take to stop the
Foxconn deal.
If I'm on the stage with him, it's going to be a different
kind of debate than it was the last couple of times.
So I think every indication is we can beat him.
- On the economy, one of the things you want to do
is reverse Act 10.
How does that help the economy?
- The way it helps the economy is several fold.
Teachers have been demoralized, they really have.
Act 10 was a taunting document.
If you read the actual act, they did it to basically insult and
demoralize teachers, and they've reduced their wages.
Now, there are certain things that you could do outside of an
Act 10.
I will repeal Act 10.
I will not compromise on it.
It's going to be totally repealed.
I think teachers' wages have to go up.
Now how to pay for that in an issue such as should they
contribute to their pension, healthcare,
my view is if they're going to contribute to their pension and
healthcare, they should be paid a wage that permits them to do
that.
So my wife is a speech pathologist in the Germantown
Public Schools for over 30 years and I saw the devastation it
did, so I will repeal Act 10.
- You also want to invest, you say,
in roads and infrastructure.
How would you pay for it?
- Re-indexing the gas tax.
I think it was a big mistake 10, 13 years ago to stop doing that.
Right now our transportation budget is 20% debt service.
In other words, paying interest on what we've already borrowed
and it's going up.
We can't have that.
So we're going to pay as we go and we're going to repair our
roads.
And I'm also-- there are 13 east-west roads from Highway 2
down to Highway 14.
Many of them, only Highway 29 is really four-lane.
I want to make them all four lane and as soon as we can do
that, it's going to revitalize rural and western -- northern
Wisconsin as well.
- On educate, you call for free two-year public college or
university tuition for every in-state student.
How do you do that?
- At in-state institutions, not outside.
The reason is very simple.
My proposal is not K-12, it's PreK-14.
I'll put more into early education, early childhood,
but for the first two years, there are a lot of kids in the
state when they turn 18 think they can't afford college or
trade school, they go off to Duluth, Minneapolis.
They go to Chicago.
We're losing a lot of good people.
If we get rid of Foxconn, if we take that billion dollars in
Medicaid supplements Walker turned down,
if we take the $800 million in train money he turned down,
if we get rid of the manufacturers' credit and
exemption, which is very unproductive and it's cost us
about a billion dollars, we can easily do it.
And other states have done it.
- So you just touched on the Medicaid money.
What else would you do for healthcare in Wisconsin?
- Well, long-range, I think federally we're going to have to
have Medicare cover everybody from birth to death.
And it's the cheapest way to do it.
70% of the people in this country already get some sort of
government-related Medicaid, Medicare, military, so forth.
But what I would do in the short run,
because I can't mandate that, even though Medicare is a real
cost cutter, I would open up BadgerCare.
In addition to getting the billion dollars back,
open up BadgerCare to anybody who doesn't have health
insurance and wants to buy into it for a premium unless they're
indigent.
- Meanwhile, Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act is being
chipped away at and more efforts are underway to do away with it.
If you became governor, you can declare that you want all of
these things but how do you kind of reverse what has been
happening to the Affordable Care Act?
- Well, we have a President Donald Trump who in my view is
vandalizing our healthcare system and betraying us to the
Russians quite frankly but in the short run,
what I would do with healthcare with him,
the Affordable Care Act to me is a bridge between an old system
and what I hope is Medicare for everybody.
So we have to open the exchanges.
We have to have more options and I will fully fund everything
that's in my power to fund.
- Matt Flynn, thanks very much.
- Good to be here.
Thank you.