Five for Exec

    Five names will be on the February 15th primary ballot for  Executive of Milwaukee County.  All of them participated in a candidate forum at Marquette University Law School  Friday, January 21.  Questions were posed by four journalists, and an audience of about a hundred other people were present.   Here are my impressions of the candidates:

Lee Holloway arrived early, and spent about 15 minutes shaking hands with everyone in the room.  He lost the primary for Mayor in 1988, but has won every   county supervisor  election he entered since, including an unsuccessful attempt to recall  him.  He is the epitome of a black, urban politician.
Holloway answered most questions by referring to his 18 years on the County Board and his one month as Acting County Executive.  Although he was  very knowledgeable about all the issues, he does not speak well;  he drops final  "g's"  from words ending in "ing" and frequently makes grammatical errors, such as "what you and them have in common."   Holloway blamed his  well-known problems with his apartment buildings on the bad economy,  which  resulted in his tenants' inability to pay rent.  He said he is curing all his building code violations.

Chris Abele, a thin young man with glasses,  long hair, a moustache and goatee looks like a  "computer nerd."   Although very well-informed about county affairs, he lacks the commanding presence one would expect in an executive.  He noted that he doesn't need the job, and will not accept PAC money, if any is offered.  Abele emphasized his independence from political parties, and stressed the need for co-operation between government entities and politicians of different parties. 

Jim Sullivan, tall, muscular  and crew-cut, looks about 19 years old, but is really in his early thirties.  Unlike Abele, he is a partisan Democrat, and lobbed a number of  verbal grenades at  Scott Walker for "8 years of decay and neglect." Although he is supported by former Exec Tom Ament, he declared that the County was already "moribund" when Walker took over.
Sullivan  favors a small county sales tax dedicated to transit cost.   As if to emphasize his youthful appearance, he spoke often about his late father's service in the Coast Guard.  He declined to answer a hypothetical question about whether he would be in this race if he had been re-elected to the State Senate. 

Jeff Stone, a Republican state representative from Greenfield, is also tall, but looks about 40 years old.  Stone stressed his background in business, as well as in the Greenfield city council and state legislature.  Stone promised not to raise taxes. At all. Period.  He spoke well, but is not an exciting speaker.

Ieusha  Griffin, a young black paralegal who won fame last year for trying to run for the Assembly on the slogan "Not the White Man's Bitch",  explained that she did not mean the slogan racially, but only as metaphor for the power structure. ( She is not using the slogan in this campaign.)   Although  she spoke well and showed good command of  financial  matters, she could not cite any experience that would prepare her to  administer the $1.5 billion county budget.

I predict that Holloway will survive the February 15 primary,  mainly on the strength of  the black vote.   If Abele really spends a  million dollars of his own money on the primary, he will probably get through it, too.   Sullivan and Stone both have an electoral base  (Wauwatosa and Greenfield, respectively) and  a party base  (Democratic and Republican, respectively), but I doubt that either one can match Abele in crucial TV advertising.  Griffin cannot  possibly survive the primary, but if she gets more than about 10% of the vote,  she just might be able to sink Holloway into third place.

But even if Holloway comes in first in the primary, I contend that he has too much "baggage"   (which the Journal Sentinel will keep on Page One) to  win over any of the possible rivals  on April 5.

From Hate Speech to Hate Crime

      Ever since the tragic shootings in Tucson last week,  people have been discussing the possible link between  hateful political messages (nowadays disseminated primarily on the Internet) and  physical  attacks on public officials.   Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin  denounced  such connections as a "blood libel,"  an unfortunate choice of words.  But is she right?

     Since the end of World War II, the United States has endured the murder of one President  (John Kennedy), the shooting of another (Ronald Reagan),  the attempted assassinations of  Presidents Truman and Ford,  and the shootings of  two   presidential candidates  (Robert Kennedy and George Wallace).    Major public figures who never  sought elective office  (such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and  John Lennon) were  also  shot to death during this period, and several members of the House of Representatives were wounded by gunfire right in the House chamber in 1954.  

      Of course, there have also been assassinations of national leaders in other  countries  such as Egypt, Israel, Sweden, South Africa and  India during this time, but of these,  only India has lost more  top leaders than the US (1).    Why is the United States especially vulnerable to  political assassinations, and  are they driven by extremist political rhetoric?

      The fact that guns more readily available in this country than in most others cannot be ignored as a factor.  All the attacks mentioned above, in addition to the killings of three  previous   presidents (2), an attack on President-Elect Franklin Roosevelt  (3)  and  the wounding of  a  former president running for another term in the office (4) before World War II were all committed with guns.  (Significantly,  some of the foreign assassinations did not involve guns.   Prime Minister Verwoerd of South Africa was killed   with a knife and  Prime Minister Ragiv Gandhi  of  India with a bomb.)  The Second Amendment to our Constitution guarantees access to  guns, and political violence is one price that we pay for it.   As Nevada Republican senatorial nominee Sharron Angle put it last year, some people  she knows are looking at  "Second Amendment" solutions to political problems not solved to their satisfaction by elections.

      Hate-filled political rhetoric is not new in this country; the history books are full of it.   Actually  major American newspapers today  are  more moderate in tone than some that were published  in the 1800's, which carried vicious cartoons and attacks on Abraham Lincoln and subsequent presidents.   But not everyone gets quoted in the newspapers;  if you are not a prominent  current or former official, the best you can hope for is  a letter to the editor, which  will be purged of incendiary language. 

      The difference today is the Web:  anyone can  write on it,   and anything can be published  (like the Glazerbeam!)  The blogs and tweets and other electronic messages are subject to no quality  or even sanity control, so the most irresponsible and outrageous stuff  goes out and gets read.

           But do hateful messages on the Web inspire  actual violence?   Although there is no known connection between  the shootings in Tucson and any political  rhetoric anywhere,  the general answer is that it can.  Although  American assassins are usually characterized as "deranged loners",  even deranged loners  are often affected by what they hear and read.   A message that a certain politician is a traitor, a baby-killer or  whatever evil monster may focus the rage of a psychopath on a particular  target  For example, there is no question that Timothy McVeigh in the US and Yigal Amir  (who shot Yitzchak Rabin) in Israel were influenced  by the vitriolic rhetoric of others.

           Today's  Internet  facilitates contact between  like-minded people, so that no matter how absurd their conspiracy theories may be,  they are  comforted by the knowledge  that they are not alone.  A person is more likely to commit a violent act if  he (or she) believes that many others will approve the  crime.

           Those who spew vile verbiage about public figures on TV, radio or the Web are not legally liable if some nut with a gun acts on it.  But they should  be considered morally  accountable if   their words lead to criminal deeds.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) Although Mahatma Gandhi never sought or held public office, he had hundreds of millions of followers in India at the time of his murder in 1947.  Prime Ministers  Indira Gandhi and her son  Ragiv were also assassinated.

(2) Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and William McKinley.

(3) A bullet fired at  Franklin Roosevelt in Miami in early 1933 instead killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who was seated next to him in an open car.

(4) Theodore Roosevelt, who was shot in Milwaukee during  the  1912  presidential campaign, died in 1919.