Check out the full video interview here.

Sen. Tim Cullen, D-Janesville, is one of two Democrats to have announced a run against Gov. Scott Walker in a possible recall election. Cullen served as senate majority leader in the 1980s and as former Gov. Tommy Thompson’s secretary of health and human services. He came out of retirement in 2010 to run for the Senate again.

The Badger Herald sat down with Cullen to discuss his gubernatorial aspirations.This is part two of an edited interview. 

The Badger Herald: You’ve been out of the state spotlight since the 1980s when you last served as former Gov. Tommy Thompson’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. What made you run for the Wisconsin Senate in 2010?

Sen. Tim Cullen: After I spent 20 years in the private sector, I retired in 2007, and then I served two years on the Janesville School Board, which was a nonpaid school board, doing public service.

I had no intention of ever running again for state office, but when the incumbent state senator retired and wasn’t going to run again, I thought, well, I could do that job. I’ve done that before.

I’m not the kind of guy who can go off every day and go fish, and so I thought this is something I can do. I think we’re on this earth to give back. I don’t think we’re here to just take, and I thought I could contribute so I ran.

BH: You’ve served on the Janesville School Board, the Janesville Teacher Diversity Board and currently serve on the Committee on Education. What do you think of the state of education in Wisconsin?

TC: I think it has to improve. I think we’re challenged by not just how we’re doing against some other state, but by how we’re doing against other nations. It’s a completely global economy, and we have to be as good as China and India.

BH: How do you feel about voter ID? And if you become governor, would you try to work with the Legislature to overturn this law, or would you let the courts decide?

TC: I would love to have the courts fix it, but if they didn’t, and it looked like it was going to be a protracted legal dispute, I would try to get the Legislature to reverse a lot of it.

I think there may be an opportunity there because right now the public is not particularly angry about the voter ID bill, or the voter suppression bill as I call it, because there hasn’t been an election run with this new set of rules.

Once an election is run under these new rules and people are not able to vote who didn’t know about the complicated new rules, … I think there’s going to be a real backlash against this law, and I think that’s going to be an opportunity to change it.

It was sold to people as stopping fraud. That was one of the big Trojan horse explanations of all time. This bill had about .5 percent to do with fraud and about 99.5 percent to do with making it difficult for certain groups of people to vote in an election. The public will wake up when they actually experience the law.

BH: Job creation is a key issue on both sides of the aisle. What initiatives would you support to create more jobs in Wisconsin?

TC: One of them has been called the venture capital bill. I think that it’s more like a startup capital bill. It’s about getting money in the hands of startup companies that have ideas for products and services, but they don’t have the capital to move forward quickly.

They have the idea, the product idea, and giving them some startup money could help them get faster from the startup phase to the hiring of people stage. I think this bill is one of the more important things we can do.

The other thing is that it’s the governors who try to tell the people of Wisconsin that they create jobs. Elect me governor, and I will create x number, 100,000 jobs. This governor said 250,000.

Governors don’t create jobs. Jobs are created when you’re running a business and the consumer demand for your product or service exceeds what your current workforce can produce for your customer base.

And when you can’t meet your customer base’s needs, you hire another person or more to meet their needs. That’s how a job is created. It isn’t created because some politician in Madison says “I will create.” And a lot of that is related to the economy.

Wisconsin governors can help on the margins. We can help make it better in Wisconsin than somewhere else. But the idea that the governor of Wisconsin can dictate the economy of Wisconsin, the number of jobs that are created, simply isn’t true and every governor, I think, before this governor understood that.

BH: Would you push for reinstating collective bargaining rights for public employees? If so, how would you do this with the current political situation in Wisconsin?

TC: Well, it will be difficult, but the reality is in the governor’s solution to the budget, he needed to get public employees to pay more for their pension, more for their health insurance. The public employers were willing to do that. And that’s all he needed to do to create a balanced budget.

But what he did was — and he couldn’t help himself — he didn’t stop there. He went on to destroy collective bargaining, which had little to do with the money he needed to balance the budget.

And it was certainly unfair in the sense that public employees didn’t create this budget deficit. It was decisions that were made in this Capitol in the last 20 years that created the deficit, and yet he made public employees scapegoats for all the problems.

And the entire solution was funded on their back. But, what I would try and argue with the Legislature is that we can restore collective bargaining and bring some level of peace to this state without endangering or unbalancing the budget.

BH: How would you deal with a budget deficit?

TC: I would see whether it’s real or not, first of all, and then I would try to see what caused the deficit and then [ask] how do we fix it in a way that’s fair to everybody and does not pick out a slice of Wisconsin and say that you’re the problem, which is what this governor did.

BH: Do you support campaign finance reform? And what reforms would you like to see put in place?

TC: The most important one is the simple matter of disclosure. If people are going to give money that’s going to get spent during the campaign, the public has a right to know who is giving the money and how much they’re giving.

And then the public can decide, “I don’t like these ads that are being run by that group who support this candidate. I’m going to support someone else.”

BH: Last February, blogger Ian Murphy impersonated David Koch, one of Walker’s campaign contributors, on a phone call with the governor. In the phone call, Walker referred to you as “the only reasonable one” out of the Democratic caucus and a “guy” who is not “there for political reasons” but “trying to get something done.” Do you agree with this analysis? How did this affect you at the time?

TC: Well, I think he captures me pretty well, and I want to thank the governor for his endorsement. That’s a wonderful endorsement to have.

They caught him at a moment when he was, I think, expressing his true feelings. He thought he was talking to his friend, one of the Koch brothers.

I was surprised he said all of that, but then I realized that he didn’t think it was ever going to get public. I think he accurately described me.