We thought that Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele was desperate when he decided to use Republican Karl Rove’s strategy when attacking his opponent in the April 5 election, state Sen. Chris Larson, in his latest round of advertising. Rove’s campaign playbook includes the tactic of attacking your opponent for your own weakness or attacking your opponent on his or her strength.
Abele’s TV ad accuses Larson of being on the side of big banks and Scott Walker—a ludicrous accusation, given that Larson has fought Walker’s agenda every step of the way and it’s Abele, instead, who has worked closely with Walker and tea party Republicans to concentrate power in his own hands.
Larson has called on Abele to take down this false ad, but Abele’s campaign is doubling down on it with a new round of slick mailers hitting Milwaukee mailboxes.
In them, Abele is repeating his TV ad claims and adds a few more details about Larson’s alleged sympathy for big banks. And what we’ve found while trying to set the record straight should make Chris Abele—not Chris Larson—ashamed of himself.
Abele makes a lot of wild accusations in his campaign messaging, but perhaps the worst is that he is also misrepresenting the work of a trusted LGBTQ ally, Kevin Flaherty. As Larson explained in his press conference last week, among the donations he’s accepted over the years are Flaherty’s, since both men were committed to legalizing marriage equality in Wisconsin and Flaherty wanted to support Larson in his campaigns. Flaherty just happens to work for Associated Bank. So, Abele is attacking Flaherty as being a big Wall Street fat-cat, when it’s nothing of the sort. Associated Bank is a local Wisconsin bank with a good reputation and a bank that the Shepherd had used for years. Wall Street banks are very different from a locally owned Wisconsin bank, actually, night-and-day different.
Why should Abele be ashamed of himself? Well, as Larson pointed out in his press conference, Flaherty was standing beside Abele when he signed the county’s domestic partnership ordinance in 2011.
Talk about stabbing a friend and ally in the back. Abele needs to apologize to Flaherty.
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Abele’s Arena Plan Would Cause More Foreclosures
Abele’s also trying to accuse Larson of voting for “giveaways to banks and wealthy individuals” and to link him to Milwaukee’s foreclosure crisis.
Let’s make this clear: Chris Abele is the one who already has given away county assets to wealthy individuals and, according to insiders, Abele plans to do more asset giveaways if he gets re-elected. Abele also tried to make life even harder for struggling Milwaukee homeowners by bringing on a new foreclosure crisis.
How?
Let’s go back to Abele’s disastrous handling of the Bucks arena financing deal. Abele singlehandedly put the county on the hook for $80 million to finance an arena that Gov. Walker felt should have been financed by the entire state and not on the backs of Milwaukee County taxpayers as Abele demanded. Walker had proposed taking care of the public financing part of the arena with state bonds until Abele offered Milwaukee County taxpayer dollars. The arena would house the Bucks, which are owned by Wall Street hedge fund managers. These are precisely the kind of Wall Street types and wealthy individuals that Abele accuses Larson of helping, when it’s Abele who has actually done their bidding at the expense of Milwaukee County taxpayers when no one, including the Bucks owners, was really in need of Abele’s “help.”
To cover the $80 million for the arena, Abele wants to go after delinquent property taxpayers in the Milwaukee suburbs, even though the independently elected comptroller found that there isn’t enough bad debt to cover the $80 million in the long run. Even worse, getting tough with these debtors would likely lead to more foreclosures and financial insecurity among struggling suburban Milwaukee residents. Once again, Abele is following Rove’s playbook by covering up his own weaknesses by accusing his opponent of doing the same.
Larson and his fellow Democratic legislators were able to strip that provision out of the final bill. But Abele came back this winter with a standalone bill that revives his bad debt scheme. It quickly passed the Assembly but the bill is so toxic that the state Senate may not act on it.
In addition, let’s not forget that Abele ran to his Republican friends in the Legislature to cut the Milwaukee County Board out of all land sale deals except for parcels zoned as parks. With this new power, Abele was able to sell nine acres of Park East land valued at $8.8 million for $1 to—you guessed it—the hedge fund managers that Abele accuses Larson of being so chummy with.
Make no mistake: Chris Abele, the son of a billionaire who is so uncomfortable with average Milwaukeeans that he refuses to go door to door to meet average voters, can’t even show up for public hearings so he doesn’t have to answer citizen questions, and is a good pal to his fellow billionaires and millionaires. Don’t fall for his false, Rove-like attack ads against Chris Larson. Instead, ask Abele to pull down his false ads from the airwaves and apologize to Kevin Flaherty.
