Kurtoons Online

September 28, 2012

Tommy Thompson was a popular and widely respected governor of Wisconsin in the 1990s.  Perhaps his most important achievement as governor was his “Wisconsin Works” program to reform the state’s Welfare system.  In 2001, Thompson resigned as governor to join George W. Bush’s cabinet as Secretary of Health and Human Services.  After a year in that department he left the Cabinet and remained out of politics for a while.

In 2012, when the Democratic Senator from Wisconsin, Herb Kohl announced his retirement, Thompson re-entered the fray, beating several other Republicans to become the nominee for Kohl’s seat.  A video surfaced of a speech he made in the primary in which he boasted that he would “…change Medicare and Medicaid like I did with welfare. And who better than me who’s already finished one of the entitlement programs to come up with programs to do away with Medicaid and Medicare?”