Let’s hear it for good timing — and coincidence.
In Wisconsin, liberals have so far failed to block Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s common sense reforms electorally, legislatively, or legally. So, as he stands for re-election, Democrats are trying to taint him by digging up details from a politically-motivated investigation that has already been shut down.
At issue is what’s known as a “John Doe” investigation, which, under Wisconsin law, allows prosecutors to conduct a probe in secret without naming their targets or publicly disclosing what the investigation is about. Such a probe into former Walker staffers (before he was governor) was launched in 2010 based on an actual crime reported to the authorities by Walker’s Milwaukee County staff. The probe was closed in March 2013 without any charges filed against Walker.
Yet, now, two weeks before the congressional midterm elections, Democratic Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele, has released 16,000 of the emails that investigators combed through in a vain attempt to find wrongdoing by Walker. A court ordered that the emails be made public back in May, and they could have been released at any point since then, or indeed at any time up to the end of this year. But of course, Democrats chose to do it two weeks before Walker is up for re-election.
They’ve made nothing stick against Walker despite years of trying, so they are now stooping even lower in a last desperate effort to prevent his re-election. That they think Wisconsin voters would smile upon a party that plays this dirty says much about their contempt for the people whose trust they seek.
Abele, as Walker noted this week, has personally committed over $60,000 toward Democrat Mary Burke’s election campaign challenge to the governor. And of course, to that sum one must now add whatever in-kind value there is to forcing the old investigation back into the news, especially given that the headlines obscure the fact that the probe has already closed. For Burke has now actually planned her political ad schedule around the story, releasing an ad about the investigation two hours before the documents came out. It was, as the conservative blog Right Wisconsin noted, “her campaign’s first explicit mention of the John Doe investigation in an ad.”
Walker has little to fear from the late document dump, which the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel described as mostly routine emails covering well-trodden ground. As the governor told reporters in Milwaukee this week, “Voters are pretty smart in this state.” That seems a more attractive campaign message than the Democrats’ implicit suggestion that they are dumb.
Indeed, a recent poll of the race by the University of Marquette Law School found that although the contest is nearly tied between Burke and Walker, 59 percent of likely voters believe the investigations of Walker to be “just politics,” and only 37 percent say it is “really something serious.”
Even so, the silly and transparently abusive nature of this late disclosure suggests that the state’s Democratic power-brokers are frantic. They remain bitter that Walker broke their electoral stranglehold on the state government. They are even more upset that he weakened them for the future with his union reform measures, which have saved Wisconsin taxpayers billions of dollars at the state and local level and freed many unwilling state employees from having to pay union dues for the privilege of having their jobs.
Walker’s union reform law, known in the state as Act 10, is now so popular that even Burke does not dare campaign against it. If Walker does pull it out in the end, it will be victory for results, and a defeat for abusive political tactics.
