Recalls & Scandals in Wisconsin

Everyone seems to expect Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to survive his recall election. The only thing to do then is what football fans do: look to the point spread. That's what John Ellis does at Buzzfeed:

The key to this election, however, is not really whether Governor Walker wins. More or less everyone expects him to do that. The key is how much he wins by. The crude calculation is this: Walker defeat equals certain Obama win in November. Walker win by 1-5 percentage points equals very close presidential general election (nationally). A Walker win by 6 points or more equals Mitt Romney is the favorite to win in November.

That's unpersuasive, of course. A Walker defeat would not guarantee a Romney defeat, nor would a big margin for Walker guarantee a Romney victory. It's not nonsense. The one or the other might well indicate where Wisconsin's ten electoral votes will go this December. The factions in Wisconsin seem to have solidified in favor of the Republicans. They won the judicial recall by a hair. If Walker wins this one by five points or more, that would suggest the GOP holds the balance of power in statewide elections, something that might well mean that Romney has a good shot at the state.

A victory for Walker would mean two other things that are important. One is that a Republican governor can stare in the face of the Public Employee Unions and live. The other is that Scott Walker has been elevated to national stature. I don't know if he has ambitions beyond his state, but a victory will certainly earn him a place in the blessed circle of the frequently talked about.

It is possible that recall election will have resulted in some serious damage to Wisconsin Democrats. Over the weekend an outfit calling itself The Wisconsin Citizen's Media Co-op published a story online indicating that Scott Walker had fathered a child out of wedlock in 1988. The story, explicitly intended to discredit Walker's integrity, appears to be a transparent eleventh hour smear.

It is based solely on the testimony of one Bernadette Gillick, who claims to be the roommate of "Ruth," the women who bore the child. The WCMC acknowledges that it could not reach the alleged mother. As far as I can tell, no Wisconsin newspaper has published on the matter, probably on the responsible grounds that it is only a rumor. Daniel Bice, the "Watchdog Columnist" for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, has this:

I am getting a lot of emails because of this post. Two things: (1) I tracked down and talked to Dr. Gillick's freshman-year roommate at MU yesterday, and she adamantly denies that Walker is the father of her child. Yes, she got pregnant as a first-year student, but she believes Dr. Gillick is mixing up stories.

This is dirty politics on the bottom shelf. That didn't stop KOS from running with it. I don't know who the folks at WCMC are, but they have played the dumbest sort of trick: the one that discredits their side and makes the other look better. I have no reason to believe that WCMC is connected to any reputable Democratic Party officials or other anti-Walker group, but I admit that I am now curious.

There seem to be worse things than that afoot in Wisconsin. Ann Althouse received a mailing from The Greater Wisconsin Political Fund that was positively creepy, as she puts it. Here is some of the text:

Why do so many people fail to vote? We've been talking about this problem for years, but it only seems to get worse. We're sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicize who does and does not vote.

We all need to pull together. The chart shows the names of some of your neighbors, showing which have voted in the past.

After the June 5^th election, public records will tell everyone who voted and who didn't.

We know who you are and we know where you live. Public records indeed show who votes, but using such information in an explicit attempt to intimidate private persons is scurrilous and authoritarian. People have a right to vote for whomever they choose and they have a right not to vote, if they choose. It's bad enough to fabricate a scandal against an elected official, but Walker is a big boy and can take it. Threatening to expose people to their neighbors is bad on a whole 'nuther level.

Apparently this is not an isolated incident. One of Althouse's readers received a letter from "researchers" at Harvard. It provided a list of political contributions by the reader, along with a list of contributions by her neighbors, with names listed and the receiving political party identified in each case. Althouse's reader was the only Republican on a list including nine contributors to Democrats.

Ve know who you are and ve haf you surrounded. The letter is apparently part of an approved graduate student "study", though it requests no information. Tom Barlett at the Chronicle of Higher Education, speculates:

According to the Web site for the project, the purpose of sending out the letters is to understand how "the open nature of information can affect contributions." I'm going to guess that researchers plan to check whether the people who received letters contributed more or less money the following year. But I could be wrong.

Okay. So the experiment will show a positive result if the letters pressure some voters to contribute more or less than they would otherwise have chosen to contribute. Under what conceivable standard is that ethical?

Again, it's one thing to know that a candidate or an interest group is funded by the Koch brothers or the National Rifle Association. It is another thing to send letters to private individuals warning them that their neighbors will know to whom they gave money. Some recipients of the letter were understandably disturbed by it. The letter from Harvard was apparently sent to persons in other states, so it may have no direct intention regarding the Wisconsin race. If so, all it discredits is the idea of the disclosure of political contributions.

The fraudulent sex scandal that the WCMC attempted to sell is old school dirty politics. The letter that Althouse received is something new and much more vicious. There are at least two real scandals here. I expect that they will remain tightly confined. I have trouble imagining that any reputable Democrat would have had anything to do with either of them. Even so they are deeply embarrassing to the anti-Walker cause. The recall election looks to be a much bigger disaster for the Democrats than anyone could have imagined when it began.

Comments

[Donald Pay]

Move on. We got one of the mailers. It's not threatening at all. Anyone who votes regularly knows this is public record. I suppose the political neophytes might be a tad put off. It may scare a few of the paranoid personality types.

Political parties and candidates use these lists all the time, and they have since at least the 1960s, when I first volunteered for candidates. South Dakota Republican and Democratic Parties have your name, address and voting record.

Anyone can find out this information. In fact the Tea Party and racist elements of the Republican Party uses this information to try to knock minorities off the voting rolls. That's far more sinister than trying to spur people to vote.

[Donald Pay]

And, again, contribution records are public information. No one is really surprised that Althouse is in the tank for the right wing. Move on.

[Jon S.]

"No one is really surprised that Althouse is in the tank for the right wing." Donald, your buffoonery grows every day. Althouse is a registered Democrat who voted for Obama in 2008. Sorry Donald, wrong again. Once again, your blind partisanship shows as, again, faced with information which makes your side look bad or with which you disagree, you must resort to the most tendentious arguments possible. If you read Althouse's blog, which I do almost daily, you will find that she is basically a libertarian who perhaps tilts a bit left. But, as she said on her blog just last week, her blog is probably harder on the left than her own politics would indicate because she finds the left's claims to moral superiority more regular and more off-putting, something Donald shows every time he comments here.

[Jon S.]

Here is the actual quote from Althouse:
"In fact, what bugs me the most about lefties — what motivates me to go after lefties much more than righties on this blog — is the way they set themselves up as the good people and prance and stomp all over the place shaming and blaming the people who won't agree with them. Having lived in Madison for the last quarter century, I am fed up with their domineering bullshit. The reason my blog appears to skew conservative — when I am a political moderate — is that I am not surrounded by pious, overbearing right-wingers sneering at me and gasping about what a bad person I am.

BUT: I am not saying that domineering bullshit from righties is okay because lefties do it too or do it more or do it nearer to me. I don't like it. "

[Donald Pay]

Althouse says a lot of stuff, most of which is largely b.s. She's a gadfly and a narcissist. You can't believe much of what she says, except when she's all wrapped up in explaining how she FEELS about stuff. It's always about her feelings, and you can believe most of that at least for a few moments.
Althouse is really in touch with HER feelings, but doesn't really comprehend that people who make and order of magnitude less than she does have feelings, too. In short, she's a horrible human being.

And she's a quite a hypocrite. For example you say she's a libertarian, but she has no problem cashing her big government check for which she does very little. She hates Madison lefties, yet she chooses to live in the elite leftist part of Madison. I guess she hates the real folk more. With her it's all about who she hates more.

[Donald Pay]

By the way, publishing voting records increases turnout.

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/govt-and-politics/politiscope/madison-politiscope-you-may-find-it-distasteful-but-a-mailer/article_d14ceb48-ae5d-11e1-8b57-0019bb2963f4.html

[Jon S.]

"She's a horrible human being." Donald, what is your evidence for making such a scurrilous charge? How much anger is in your soul that would cause you to say something like that about someone you don't know the least about? As for "she does very little," using a tool called the Internet, I found that in the past decade she has published articles in the following law journals: George Washington Law Review, St. Louis Law Journal, Washington University Law Journal, TExas Review of Law and Politics, Lewis and Clark Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law REview, Brooklyn Law Review, University of Maryland Law Review, and Virginia Journal of International Law. She also published two book chapters. Also in the last decade she has written numerous times for publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Higher Ed, and in New York Times Book Review. In 2002 she was named teacher of the year by the Wisconsin Law Alumni Association. So I guess the students like her. She also serves on multiple Law School committees, including currently chairing the Tenure and Promotion committee. So I guess her colleagues respect her. So, yeah, looks like a record of someone who doesn't do much to earn her money. Once again Donald, if you would bother thinking before writing, I wouldn't have to spend time debunking your more ridiculously erroneous claims.

[Donald Pay]

Ok, Jon, maybe I did an Althouse on Althouse, ie. I let my thought fly without knowing much about my subject. I can't stand her snotty elitism, so I never cared to know much about her. Like you, she's a conservative on the government dole, so I understand your need to defend your fellow traveller.

The point is Althouse thinks she's aggrieved by someone using publicly available information to spur greater knowledge about the election process and voting. If it increases turnout, as it has shown to do, public disclosure of this information is important. After all, her Republican friends are using the same information to try to intimidate blacks in Milwaukee and students on her own campus to try to keep them from voting. She's only concerned with some imagined attempt to intimidate her. That is classic Althouse, a narcissist who imagines things only apply to her.

Jon, she's a lawyer, a bad one, but a lawyer. She knows, or ought to know, this information is public. I've know it since I was in middle school. You can't intimidate someone with information that is widely available. She's just another whiny conservative looking to be noticed.

[Donald Pay]

Actually I've know it since Junior High School. We didn't have middle schools back in the day.

[Donald Pay]

For example, this just in about Walker's campaign using public documents (recall petitions) to try to suppress the vote:

...I'm in our situation room right now and I have an urgent update about the state of the race on the ground. Reports coming into our call center have confirmed that Walker's allies just launched a massive wave of voter suppression calls to recall petition signers. Here is what people are receiving across Wisconsin:

"If you signed the recall petition, your job is done and you don't need to vote on Tuesday."

Disgusting. To counter this insulting attack on our democracy, we need to fire up another call center to phone every recall petition signer with the correct information. This means we have an immediate need to place an additional one million phone calls. Can you pitch in with $5 towards our Voter Protection Fund to help pay for these calls before midnight?
This pathetic, last-ditch effort to derail our campaign proves just how scared Scott Walker and his allies are of our massive GOTV operation. With our final tracking poll showing a difference of just one vote, our volunteers are on the ground attempting to achieve something that has never been done in Wisconsin: knock on more than 1.2 million doors before the polls close.

[Ken Blanchard]

Donald: source?

[Ken Blanchard]

Donald: your robocall story looks very phony. Even the Barrett campaign people are qualifying the story with "if true...".

[tedp]

Donald, I would find a letter "outing" me and my neighbors as non-voters or one detailing political contributions very disturbing. How about some of that civility your ideological compatriots like to talk about? These sort of things will only increase the polarization between the political factions in our society when we could do with a little more reasoned debate and compromise. BTW, your posts strike me as snarky partisan whining. How about a little more intellectual heft to your arguments...