Little has been written about the fact that state Sen. Jeff Plale (D-Milwaukee) faces a primary challenge from Milwaukee County Supervisor Chris Larson, but it shapes up as one of the more interesting September races. This is a brash effort by certain liberal Democrats to expel a party member they feel is too conservative.
“Clearly, Larson is aggressively attacking me as not liberal enough,” Plale says.
Larson adds some specifics: Plale is pro-life while Larson is pro-choice; Plale opposed the climate change bill, which Larson (“I’m an environmentalist”) would have supported. State Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee) adds another liberal commandment defiled: Plale opposes a ban on the carrying of concealed weapons.
Plale blames the whole primary challenge on Kessler. “I knew that Fred was working overtime to find me an opponent,” Plale grouses. “Fred is going through a party purification process.”
Back in 2006, Kessler helped recruit Democrat Donovan Riley as Plale’s opponent. Not a good choice, it turned out, as Riley was accused of voting twice in an earlier election and pleaded no contest in the case.
Larson looks like a much stronger challenger. He has experience and name recognition as a county supervisor, he’s a young fresh face with South Side credentials (grew up in Greenfield, attended Thomas More High School), and he’s a physically fit bundle of energy who has run several marathons and is aggressively doing doors. “There’s no doubt it’s a real race,” Plale concedes.
Plale’s district has long been a conundrum for Democrats. It stretches along the lake from the liberal East Side all the way to socially conservative South Milwaukee and Oak Creek, comprising a “quiche to kishke district,” as one wag put it. (Plale recalls the wag being Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Cary Spivak.)
“I’ve been criticized for being too conservative and for being too liberal,” Plale says.
It’s certainly a safely Democratic district. In the last 10 even-numbered election years, from 1998 to 2008, the district has voted, on average, 57 percent Democrat, Kessler notes, including 62 percent for Barack Obama in 2008 and 60 percent for Jim Doyle in 2006.
But the reality is that two-thirds of the district is in the south suburbs (also including St. Francis and Cudahy), and those are typically conservative Democrats. Plale first won the seat in 2002 (with about 56 percent of the vote) by running to the right of Joel Brennan, a former aide to Tom Barrett who now works as president of Discovery World. And Plale’s predecessor, Richard Grobschmidt, first won the state Senate seat in 1995 in a memorable election pitting two Democratic representatives from the district: Grobschmidt ran to the right of Rosemary Potter, who hammered Grobschmidt for his pro-life views.
“The results were almost exactly the same as in my election,” Plale says, “almost down to the ward totals.”
Larson and Kessler, however, are banking on a hotly contested Republican gubernatorial primary between Scott Walker and Mark Neumann pushing Democrats to switch parties. By law, you must choose to vote for either primary, and there are lots of Walker fans in the south suburbs who may vote Republican in order to support him; these are people who would have supported Plale.
The last time there was a comparably competitive Republican primary, Kessler says (and he is a noted student of local elections) was in 1994, when there were three candidates vying to oppose incumbent U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl: Matt Gunderson, Robert Welch and Cate Zueske. This drew a lot of Democratic crossover votes, Kessler notes, with about 58 percent of the district voting in the Republican primary.
If that happens this September, Plale could be history.
The new Alan Borsuk
Alan Borsuk was one of the veteran Journal Sentinel reporters who knew far more than most about local and state government but often underplayed what he knew. He rarely did analysis pieces, which reporters sometimes derided as “thumbsuckers,” perhaps because the editors never seemed interested in this sort of writing.
But now that Borsuk has left the paper to take the august position of senior fellow at Marquette University, he is freelancing a weekly piece on Sundays for the JS that offers something new, a sort of analytical roundup of education issues. His piece last week on Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public instruction, was quite good, giving us a sense of how several different trends have combined to give Evers an almost unique amount of power over public education.
The new format allows Borsuk to tell readers more of what he knows after having covered education for so many years, and to put complex issues in context so we can understand them. Borsuk did a little of this while on staff at the newspaper, but he was so careful about every conclusion the analysis often turned to pabulum.
Now, removed from the top-down structure of the newspaper, Borsuk seems more relaxed, less worried about what his old bosses might think and more focused on serving readers. It’s an obvious recipe for good writing, but it’s not so often, alas, that a newspaper reporter actually gets to follow it.
The Buzz
Back in January 2009, the 1st District State Court of Appeals ruled that Circuit Court Judge Joe Wall used inappropriate language when sentencing an African-American defendant, with comments about the criminal’s “baby mama” and asking where “you guys” find financially supportive women. The appeals court concluded these comments might lead the defendant or a reasonable observer to conclude that race was a factor in the sentencing.
Conservatives cried foul. I supported the appeals court ruling, and you’ll find my reasons here. But last week, the notoriously fractured state Supreme Court overruled the appeals court unanimously with a 7-0 vote. You might say the supremes also slapped down any of those criticizing Wall, including yours truly. The most in-depth treatment of the Supreme Court ruling was offered by the Wisconsin Bar website. The court, it notes, flatly rejected the “reasonable observer test” and concluded the burden was on the defendant to prove the sentence relied on race or gender in sentencing him. For now, at least, this is the new law of the land in Wisconsin.
-Is Ron Johnson as weak at geography as Peggy West? NewsBuzz reports; you decide.
-And was last week’s JS story on the legal aftermath of the Frank Jude case sorely lacking in context? Pressroom Buzz weighs in.
-Correction: an earlier version of this column incorrectly stated that Plale voted against the climate change bill. There was in fact no vote on the bill, but Plale has said he opposed it.
