Frederica Freyberg:
We begin with the Democratic candidate for governor in the recall election against Governor Scott Walker. One of the Wisconsin 14, the senate Dems who left the state during the budget repair bill showdown. State senator from Alma, in west central Wisconsin, Kathleen Vinehout. And Senator, thanks very much for being here.

Kathleen Vinehout:
It's my pleasure.

Frederica Freyberg:
We want to ask you why do you want to be governor?

Kathleen Vinehout:
Wisconsin need as fresh start. We need a new beginning. Everywhere I go, people say, somehow we have to bring this state together. We need somebody who can heal those differences among us. Somehow we have to respect each other while we debate our differences. I come from a very different background than the other candidates. I have spent two-- my life in two very different careers as a dairy farmer, running our family dairy farm, and as a college professor. I started off as a nurse's aide. I bring that perspective that I would say is the workers' perspective and I think that's a perspective that people want.

Frederica Freyberg:
So you believe that that sets you apart, not, just kind of, where you're from and where you've worked, but what you've done.

Kathleen Vinehout:
Absolutely. And my experience in state government in the last five-and a-half years, since I’ve been a state senator, I have had experience in all those different areas that the governor has to deal with. And I haven't been afraid to advance my own proposals, sometimes even when my own party said it might not have been wise. For example, just about a year ago, I wrote an alternative to Governor Scott Walker's budget saying a lot of these things he did for political reasons. They didn't have to be done because the budget was in such a mess that all these cuts had to happen.

Frederica Freyberg:
According to a recent Marquette University poll, in a Democratic primary, Tom Barrett has the support of 36 percent to Kathleen Falk’s 29 percent, with yourself and Doug La Follette each at 8 percent. How do you overcome this apparent, kind of, this lack of name recognition across the state?

Kathleen Vinehout:
Well, that's what campaigns are all about and that's what is happening. And the lack of name recognition is in the eastern part of the state, not the west and north where people have known me for quite some time. Right now, we're seeing a most unconventional political landscape. We have people that have been engaged like I've never seen before. I really don't think we've seen for a hundred years. People are telling me, they don't want somebody else to tell them who the viable candidates are. They don't want their union to tell them who to vote for. They want to get out, shake the hand of the candidate, look them in the eye, get answers to their questions. And that's what's happening. When I look ahead at our calendar, almost every day there's another candidate forum. All across the state. So people are going to get a lot of opportunities to see those candidates right in their own neighborhood. And make their decision when they see the candidates line up on stage and they hear the answers to questions. And I think this race is going to change. We're going see that.

Frederica Freyberg:
Let's hone in on some of the issues in this race. Collective bargaining. Do you restore it and if so how?

Kathleen Vinehout:
Yes. As you well know, I went to Illinois to stop Act 10 with my other 13 senate Democratic colleagues. There are a lot of very bad things that were in Act 10, in addition to the changing collected bargaining rules. I believe that that bill should come forward very early in the session. I would-- I support Senate Bill 233, which is the same bill. It’s resorting collective bargaining rights. I’m a co-sponsor on it along with a lot of other people in the assembly and senate. I would like to see that bill come forward very early in the session. I'd like to see the bill pass on its own. I have heard a lot of discussion about whether or not this bill should be in the budget. And when I think about that strategy, I'm not opposed to that. But I think that strategy might be flawed for a couple of reasons. First of all, all across the state, there's widespread support for public employee collective bargaining. Collective bargaining is the American way. It's part of our democracy. And of course, you remember the Democrats, including myself, said that it originally didn’t even belong in the budget and in the end it wasn't. All the budget part was stripped out of that bill. Second, people are under the misconception that our budget has to pass. If you will recall in 2007, I was a rookie state senator, and helped a number of other senators, two other senators, with creating something called Healthy Wisconsin, to bring health care to everyone in Wisconsin. We put that in the budget in the senate. And it stayed in the budget and there was a battle back and for the between the assembly and the senate. And the budget didn't pass and it didn't pass and it didn't pass. And we continued under the old budget until it finally passed in late Fall. So, some states shut you down. The federal government shuts down, but not so in Wisconsin. If we don't have a budget that everybody can agree on, we continue under the old budget. And I don't know too many people in Wisconsin that want to continue under Governor Scott Walker's budget after he's already left office.

Frederica Freyberg:
Let's move along to education funding. Do you try to restore it and if so, how so?

Kathleen Vinehout:
Yes. I appreciate that question. I've spent a great deal of time working on this in my time in the state senate. What I suggest in a six-point plan that I put out last Sunday, that we start out with emergency funding in this coming school year. And when we look at our schools right now, the second year of the budget is worse for a number of reasons for schools. So I believe that that's one priority number one. But then we need to phase in most of Tony Ever's Fair Funding for our Future, his changes to the funding formula. And I would do that by first the new formula in place in the next budget and phasing in the final bit of that formula in the following budget. So I'm proposing a five-year change to the funding of our schools, immediately restoring as much money as we can, but then changing the way that we pay for schools, so that we make sure that those schools that are inner city and rural and schools of declining enrollment and schools with high special education needs, students with special education needs, those parts of the funding formula are fixed. At the same time, we need to put in place accountability measures for our schools. This was something I tried to do in the past session. It was an amendment that I had to make, basically, schools accountable for graduation rates, for the achievement gap that we see, a number of other different measures.

Frederica Freyberg:
Let's move along to job creation. What is your blueprint?

Kathleen Vinehout:
We need to bring to access to capital, the small businesses especially. We need to make sure that we resolve the problem of the skills gap. All around Wisconsin, we're experiencing a mini wave of increase in manufacturing jobs. But we hear over and over again that manufacturing and other businesses can't find the skilled workers. Instead, we see the governor has taken the largest proportion of cuts to tech colleges. Everywhere I go, from the West to the East, I see schools that have long waiting lists and people that could get jobs if they'd been trained. So part of the answer is making sure that we fund our tech colleges, which is something that I did in the alternative budget that I wrote last year.

Frederica Freyberg:
Let's talk about health care. I know this is something that you have great interest in. Given that Medicaid and BadgerCare costs are skyrocketing, how do you maintain these programs in the face of that?

Kathleen Vinehout:
We have some very serious problems in the management of Medicaid. This was exposed in an audit that I worked on for three years as co-chair of the audit committee, and as a ranking minority member, that came out-- the audit came out right before Christmas. What it showed is that of the $7 billion in the Medicaid program, auditors could not attribute to the correct program almost $2 billion. When I think about the major problems that we're facing, the governor says, well, if we drop care to 21,000 people, we're going-- or whatever, we're going to have this amount of savings. But right now the administration cannot say how much the BadgerCare program actually costs, because the accounting system is so archaic. We need to figure out how to solve the fiscal problems in-house, in the Department of Health before we start dropping massive numbers of people off of health care. At the same time, we need a private sector alternative for people who buy insurance on their own or who are small businesses. And this is a proposal I put together. It's called an Affordable Healthcare Exchange. It's something we can do. It's something almost every other state-- we're only one of 16 states that haven't done-- it's something we need to do right away, regardless of whether or not the Affordable Care Act is found unconstitutional at the federal level.

Frederica Freyberg:
Let me ask you about the pledge that Mayor Tom Barrett has asked the other candidates in this race to sign, not to attack the others. Have you signed that?

Kathleen Vinehout:
No, I have not. I think there are too many pledges in this race. I think there are a lot of people who said, 'Kathleen, I'm really glad you didn’t sign any pledges.' I don't need the threat of punishment to run a clean campaign. I've always run a clean campaign and I will continue to run a clean campaign.

Frederica Freyberg:
How do you heal the wounds that people have expressed exist in Wisconsin?

Kathleen Vinehout:
That's a very good question, and it is top on my priority list. The first thing I would do as governor is change the signs, the tourist signs coming into the state. Instead of saying, "open for business," they should say "open for everyone." It's a symbolic step but it's important symbolism because it said to me and everyone we need to bring people together. We're only going to move forward if we move forward together. And that tone is a tone I would set from day one as governor.

Frederica Freyberg:
Senator Vinehout, thanks very much.

Kathleen Vinehout:
My pleasure, thank you.