When a challenger takes on a well-known five-year incumbent and is outspent over 20 to 1, and the challenger wins, that’s a big deal. It should have been the screaming headline the next day in the daily newspaper, except this is Milwaukee and our daily paper is the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Instead of an article about the big upset, the cover of the Journal Sentinel on Wednesday, Feb. 17, had an article and a picture about a German shepherd at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show. And when the Journal Sentinel is sold again in about a month, most people believe it will only get worse.
However, tucked away on page 6, was an article written by Don Behm, a very capable journalist, with the headline, “Larson Grabs Slight Edge in Tight Milwaukee County Exec Race.” Had the Journal Sentinel’s boy, Chris Abele, won, it would have been a front-page story, and the headline much stronger.
The interesting story is that Abele spent a couple of million dollars on slick TV ads and glossy mailers to try to get the voters to really like him. The advertising was well done and it carefully twisted and stretched the facts to try to make Abele look like a likable, capable, compassionate, transparent county executive who never raised taxes. Unfortunately all of that was false despite all the money he paid to high paid out-of-town consultants to spin the truth. As a former friend of Abele likes to say, unlike most people, Abele is one of the very few people he knows where the better people get to know him, the less they like him.
According to a quote in the Journal Sentinel article, Abele brags, “For five years I’ve asked voters to hold me accountable, not just for what I say I will do, but for what I get done.” As usual, Abele underestimated the intelligence of the Milwaukee County voters. They did hold him accountable, they knew what he had done to Milwaukee County and they voted against him.
Now after he tried to paint this positive picture of himself and the voters didn’t buy it, he is going to use a lot more of his family money to mount a very expensive and very nasty, negative campaign against Sen. Chris Larson. If you can’t get people to like you, you can hopefully get the voters to dislike your opponent.
Abele will dredge up petty things about Larson, such as a misdemeanor by Larson when he was a young man, and try to make them into something big, or, if necessary, he will simply create a false issue and repeat it over and over in ads since he has the money to do that. These negative ads will not come from his campaign, of course, but rather from an independent expenditure group run by some of his cronies and where the donors—or in Abele’s case, perhaps the sole donor—can be anonymous.
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Also keep an eye on the Journal Sentinel, which no longer has the courage to endorse candidates and declare where they stand and why. Instead they will use their “news coverage” to support their candidate while attempting to seem more objective than they are.
It will be an interesting next six weeks, but the Shepherd believes that we Milwaukee voters are a hell of a lot smarter than the Boston guy and his consultants think we are.
