No Runny Eggs

The gang at Drinking Right has all-but-broken up after everything of consequence has been called. However, putting an instant reaction up calls, and since I still have some bandwidth on the semi-smartphone, and I brought the laptop, I may as well break through the alcohol-induced fog and whip out a quick instant take.

The topline is that Operation Revenge Chaos failed miserably. At last check, with 62% of the vote in and the races called by the media, Scott Walker took the gubernatorial nomination 58%-39% (with about 67% reporting) over Mark Neumann, and Ron Johnson crushed Dave Westlake 85%-10%. I knew I should have listened to Wiggy when he told me that it wouldn’t have an effect.

The two races taken together means – money without message or consituency cannot buy an election, and message without money gets one crushed when a candidate with both message and money enters the race. While things did get a bit heated, especially in the gubernatorial race, I’m glad we didn’t have a Delaware situation, where there were two fatally-flawed candidates, and the establishment doesn’t exactly seem willing to accept a Christine O’Donnell whipping of Mike Castle (shades of 2004, when Tim Michels upset the establishment candidate Russ Darrow in the Senate primary and both the NRSC and the then-moderate RPW let him twist in the wind).

In the lieutenant governor race, as I type with 67% reporting, it appears Rebecca Kleefisch survived a three-and-change-way dance, taking a 46% plurality over Brett Davis’ 26% and Dave Ross’ 16%. Guess the voters don’t like career politicians after all. On the Democrat side, Spencer Coggs will not be the first Wisconsinite of African descent to win a statewide election – the Democrats value geographical diversity more than racial diversity.

As for the Milwaukee County Democrat Party Purification, they went 1-for-2. County-wide, Sheriff David Clarke proved too popular, while in the 7th Senate District, the draw of electing someone often in legal trouble but ideologically “pure” was more than enough to overcome whatever old-line-union sentiment remains in the Democrat Party as Chris Larson easily beat Jeff Plale.”

There still is nip-and-tuck races to be this year’s sacrifical lamb in the 2nd Congressional (that would be Madison and points south and west for those of you outside Wisconsin) and for state treasurer, where the spring-boarder-wannabe Kurt Schuller and the pro Scott Feldt are running neck-and-neck.

Beyond that, things are pretty much settled. Congratulations to Walker, Kleefisch, Dan Kapanke in the 3rd Congressional (as if that was in doubt), Sean Duffy in the 7th Congressional, Reid Ribble in the 8th Congressional, and the rest of the Republicans who made it out of the primary.

Revisions/extensions (9:00 am 9/15/2010) – Chad Lee ended up with the nomination in the 2nd Congressional 53%-47%, and both halves of the treasurer’s race will be a circus as Schuller pulled it out over Feldt 37%-36%.

Mark Belling reported several people in southeast Milwaukee County have received robocalls from Meyer Teleservices telling them that, since Scott Walker had the Republican gubernatorial nomination in the bag, they should instead vote to save Jeff Plale’s job in the 7th Senate District Democrat primary. He did not know who paid for the calls.

While I received a similar call from the outfit, the version that ended up on my answering machine did not include any reference to the Republican primaries. It also had only a vague reference to the Plale campaign via a plea to call “the campaign” (unnamed) at the campaign’s phone number, and did not contain who paid for the call. The transcript (click the transcript to hear the audio):

Hi. I’m just calling to remind today is election day. If you have not voted already, I encourage you to make it out to the polls and vote for Jeff Plale for state Senate in the Democratic primary. Polls are open until 8 o’clock. If you have any questions, need a ride to the polls, or need to know where your polling location is, please call the campaign at (414) 762-2740. Thank you.

Thanks to WordPress’ post-scheduling feature, by the time this hits the blog, I will be in line to vote. I know; I may be a bit late with this, but that’s the way it is. Since I will be participating in the Republican side, I won’t be able to help save Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke or prevent Chris “Sticky Fingers” Larson from being the Democrat nominee (and likely general election winner) in my state Senate district (the 7th) because of the current bout of Democrat Party Purification going on in Milwaukee County. In any case, here’s my picks:

• Governor – Scott Walker – Walker has governed as a conservative and won elections (the latest by a landslide) in probably the toughest environment possible in Wisconsin for a conservative to win and govern. How tough has it been? Never has Walker had enough of the Milwaukee County Board to even reliably uphold his vetoes; yet he consistently submitted no-levy-increase budgets, and vetoes to Board-passed budgets that restored them, knowing a signifcant number of those vetoes would be overridden.

  Mark Neumann also has a rather-impressive fiscal conservative pedigree. However, his record of electoral success isn’t exactly as good, and by the end of his time in Washington, he was trading pork for fundraisers.

  The third candidate, Scott Paterick, simply hasn’t done anything to show he can win in November.

• Lieutenant Governor – Dave Ross – This one is a process of elimination, as the three major candidates (Ross, Brett Davis and Rebecca Kleefisch) have actively courted both the “less-than-fully-affiliated” grassroots (aka the Tea Party Movement) and the party establishment with varying degrees of success. Davis lost me with his vote for the 2007 version of the DemoBudget in exchange for a subsidy for a soybean crusher (which, if memory serves, was line-itemed out of the budget), his lead in Wisconsin’s ethanol mandates, and his opposition to a meaningful version of the Taxpayer Protection Amendment (thanks, Owen). He is, however, rather strong on education issues.

  The two minor candidates in the race are Robert Gerald Lorge and Nick Voegeli. As Owen put it yesterday, Lorge is, well, Lorge. Voegeli has been pretty much nonexistent in the race, and in a race where other candidates have been visible, invisibility is not a winning strategy.

  Rebecca Kleefisch is a very interesting candidate, and I know most of those I follow on the right end of the Cheddarsphere have endorsed her. She has said all the right things, but in a situation where the lieutenant governor may well become governor in early 2013, having nothing more substantial than campaign positions and a marketing background isn’t going to work, especially if there are still significant elements of the Republican half of the bipartisan Party-In-Government remaining (see McCallum, Scott, and I am a charter member of the 2-member McCallum Fan Club along with Christian Schneider).

  Ross has done as Superior’s mayor pretty much what Walker has done in Milwaukee County, and he stemmed the growth of government in the lesser-known of the Twin Ports. He also would bring geographical balance to the ticket regardless of who the gubernatorial nominee is, which can’t be underestimated given outstate voters’ dislike of southeast Wisconsin and the Milwaukee name in particular. I am a bit leery of his push to compromise on the 2007 DemoBudget, but it is hard to argue against fiscal conservative results.

• US Senate – Ron Johnson – The bottom line is to beat Russ Feingold in November. Stephen Finn has been so invisible, I didn’t even know he was running.

  Dave Westlake is a great guy who is solid on the issues. The bad news is he has run his campaign as though he were running for an oustate county office rather than in a statewide race where the general-election opponent will spend somewhere north of $5 million to save his seat. He first got overshadowed by Terrence Wall, who, despite his rather-ugly donation record, understood that one needed to actually spend and fundraise (the former significantly, the latter not-so-successfully), then by the Favre-esque (non-)campaign of Tommy Thompson (which also hurt Wall’s fundraising efforts), and finally Johnson.

  From the moment Johnson jumped into the campaign, he has been a contender because he has been willing to spend toe-to-toe with Feingold. Even though Johnson has, by-and-large self-funded his campaign, he raised more money in his first 2 months as a candidate than all the other Republican contenders and ex-candidates did in their entire campaigns combined through the end of June.

  Some bloggers have derided Johnson as merely a “gut” conservative because he misspoke a couple times early on the campaign trail. Johnson has learned from those gaffes, and honestly, I trust someone whose gut is in the right place and is willing to work past the campaign gaffes.

• State treasurer – Scott Feldt – One has to look at what the treasurer does – sign checks, return unclaimed property, and manage EdVest, all with a staff of 14, and does not do – anything else, to understand this choice.

  Kurt Schuller told the Waukesha Freeman that he would use his term as what he hopes to be the last state treasurer ever to springboard into a career as a politician. I don’t think so.

  Jim Sanfilippo’s heart is in the right place as he would criticize bad budgeting decisions and push for zero-based budgeting (for those of you not familiar; zero-based budgeting assumes that the state starts with $0.00 to spend, while current practice assumes every program must continue with at least as much spending as the previous budget), but the other third of his platform, get the treasurer’s office to audit state finances, would necessarily entail an enlarging of the office and would duplicate the efforts of, among other agencies, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

  Feldt knows what needs to be done in the office, as he served as an aide to former treasurer Jack Voight, and his emphasis is on streamlining the operations of what the treasurer’s office is charged with doing.

In the other Congressional Districts where there are Republican primaries, I would go with Peter Theron in the 2nd, Sean Duffy in the 7th, and Reid Ribble in the 8th.