A deeply unappealing decision

Busy couple of weeks, including moving to a new apartment. Good to be back.

So, Wisconsin politics are less fraught than they were when I first started this blog, but only because I started the blog during a time of quite unprecedented fraughtitude; things remain less than collegial in the halls of Madison, the moreso now that the governor's race is heating up for round 3: this time not with Tom Barrett!

There are a number of things going on that could affect that race (in particular, the long-simmering John Doe investigation which has been tied up in highly technical procedural knots for weeks, resulting in some supremely uninteresting wire stories. My take: I think Walker and co. truly believe that their reciprocal backscratching with 3rd parties like club for growth met the letter of the law, and that they wouldn't recognize the spirit of the law if it attempted to gnaw off their sexual organs of preference). While there are ongoing sideshows regarding reproductive rights and gay marriage, the main thrust of this election seems to be economic. The Walker camp argues that they have balanced the budget and made life easier for local governments to do the same and that the state has added 100K+ jobs under his tenure. The camp of his opponent, Mary Burke, counters that he balanced the budget on the backs of public workers and recklessly cut tax revenues, that Wisconsin lags all the surrounding states in job creation, and that in any case, he had promised 250K+ jobs in his first term. The Walker camp counters that she was commerce secretary under previous Democratic governor Jim Doyle and therefore must be responsible for the crushing deficits and highly unpopular chicanery undertaken to resolve them seen during his tenure. The Burke camp counters that he's a doo-doo head, etc., etc.

Anyone who was around when I first started blogging knows my feelings about Walker. They've not changed. But despite my pronounced antipathy toward him and his, I'm finding it hard to get a lot of enthusiasm built up for this election, because Burke is an abysmal candidate, with no more integrity, decorum or competence than Walker.




If I were not working at the Daily Herald, here's the guest column I'd be submitting describing my feelings about this governor's race.

Dear editor: 

Let's be perfectly honest, here. Mary Burke will make a terrible governor.  

She has not articulated a single policy objective beyond generic 'we should do better at this' for her supporters to rally around and use to argue in her favor. Her campaign draws no distinction between topics with which it is reasonable to bludgeon Scott Walker and those with which it is not. She is more than willing to denounce Walker's decisions on the Kenosha Casino, Act 10, etc., but has refused to specify what she would have done differently or what decisions she will make on these topics if elected. In just the last week, we have seen multiple instances of a judgment and leadership vacuum in her campaign, whether that be bad-mouthing the Neenah School District, or not keeping track of her consultants' work and finding out that it was plagiarized (not just reusing the consultant's own work, but from others, including the Wisconsin State Journal, as well).  

This is a sloppy, slipshod campaign, devoid of vision or integrity, and we have every reason in the world save one to expect that a Burke administration would share these traits. 

Unfortunately, in the case of Scott Walker's proposed second term, we have every reason to believe the same, plus one: we've already experienced it once. Four years of Scott Walker have shown him and his staff to be as morally and ideologically bankrupt as Burke is so handily demonstrating herself to be. Whether it be blatant union-busting clauses like required annual re-certification (but not for police or firefighters, because they vote Republican), to repeatedly punting the Menominee casino decision to after his election, to highly fishy fundraising activities as revealed in the John Doe probe (which, even if it eventually finds that Walker and co. did not violate the letter of the law, there can be no question but that he has utterly disregarded the spirit), everything we've seen from Walker is at least as bad as the signals we're getting from Burke. 

And while it seems unlikely that Burke and her team will shape up once they've been elected, it's still a better bet than Walker and his team doing so after being elected for a second time. 

So, vote for Mary Burke. There's a small chance she won't be as awful as Scott Walker is. 

William Morris,
Wausau

 And I think that about sums everything up. Burke is a worse challenge for Walker than Kerry was for Bush, and yet that's who we've got to choose from. So let's all (who live in Wisconsin, which might just be me) vote for Burke, on the off chance that she'll somehow be a dramatically better governor than she is a candidate. Yee-haw.