As of late Tuesday night, it appeared that Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker had survived a recall election by a fairly comfortable margin. The huge influx of outside campaign cash — by some accounts being anywhere from 7:1 to 10:1 over Democratic challenger Tom Barrett — coupled with the results in Wisconsin leaves one pretty safe forecast that was a given even before the recall vote came up.
English: Scott Walker, 45th Governor of Wisconsin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Get ready for one whale of a spending binge on campaigning through the general elections in November, from Republicans and Democrats. We have Citizens United to thank for that.
Money talks. But we already knew that, didn’t we?
If we thought the amount of dough spent on campaigning in 2008 was huge, get ready for 2012 to dwarf that. The race to out-spend and out-slam each other is now on, and it’s gonna get ugly.
The individual voters still end up being the losers. But these are just my own thoughts, from outside Wisconsin looking in. What are the election-night thoughts of someone who’s actually lived there for a while, like Steve Kessler, a 67-year-old Wisconsin retiree who’s been a follower of this blog and an online friend of mine for several years?
“It’s a sad commentary on how the ‘bullsh**-o-meters’ are working in this state. I helped a bit over the course of this, but I know people who poured their souls into this election, and really thought we were going to prevail. They are crushed. Money talks, sanity walks. Only 15% of the money Walker raised came from in-state, and he raised 7 times the money Barrett did because of 2 or 3 billionaires.
“The best (partner) Kay & I could ever muster through this was hopeful optimism.
“I’d feel a lot more comfortable exulting in a victory for sanity in any comment I’d make than trying to justify this truly sleazy character’s lack of ethics. His ‘people’ started calling all the registered Dems they could find and told them, ‘If you signed the recall petition, you’re done and don’t need to vote.’ The local media, including Fox (News) amazingly, immediately said over the air that it was a hoax. Walker, of course, disavowed any involvement, but remember, he still may be indicted on the same charges of unethical conduct that 4 of his immediate staff are already going to be tried on.
“Time to seriously think about starting to work on Kay to sell her house and get the hell out of Dodge.”
Money talks in politics, no doubt about it. Is that a problem? If it is, we’re moving farther away from a solution, not closer.
Copyright 2012, Daddysangbassdude Media
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Definitely too much outside money involved in this recall election. Just too much money, period, regardless of where it came from. I’ve read that there may be a chance the Supreme Court would revisit the Citizens United verdict, via the case in Montana, and I would be thrilled if that actually happened. It was an absolute outrage that this was allowed to happen.
Former Justice Stevens is still livid about it. I still see remarks coming from him on that decision. It’s a nightmare.