Uppity Wisconsin

The road to filing day is littered with the wrecks of candidates who were once 80% or 90% sure to run for something, but never quite got to the starting gate.

Is the Tommy Thompson for Senate campaign about to join the would-be candidacies that never quite materialized?   There's already a whole section in that political graveyard with headstones marking Tommy's previous brushes with running that were stillborn.

In any case, a story by Politico and another in the Washington Post certainly make it sound much less certain that Tommy will take the plunge than his surrogate son, Bill McCoshen, has led people to believe.

McCoshen had Tommy 70% in earlier, but now the Post reports:

Now,Former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson (R) is "50-50" on whether or not to challenge Sen.

"Is there any group of people held in lower regard than lobbyists? Car salesmen? Journalists? Here's one possibility: Lobbyists who are thinking about becoming politicians."-- Dan Bice column in the Journal Sentinel,Dec. 6, 2007.

Bill McCoshen's all over the news these days, talking like the unofficial spokesman for the might-be, could-be but maybe-not Tommy Thompson campaign for US Senate.

McCoshen also took time this week to trash the state's (and Democrat Jim Doyle's) record on job creation, in an appearance in Beloit where he relied on data from the conservative (read Republican) Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. "Forward may be the state motto, but it's going backward," McCoshen said. Cute.

Some people watching and reading the news may be wondering just who this McCoshen guy is.

If I were Tommy (I can't even imagine that!), I might want to pay more attention to the comments than the story about his musings.

The news media and some Republican insiders may think Tommy for Senate is a great idea, but the great unwashed are unimpressed. Check it out. It's certainly not a poll, but it's a focus group of sorts. People sound like they've had enough.

The Massachusetts voters have spoken, and Tommy Thompson has been listening.

What does he hear? That voters are so upset with politicians that they want a Washington, DC lobbyist to run for the US Senate in Wisconsin. He tells Politico:

In a brief interview Wednesday about the possibility of a Senate run this year, Thompson, a Republican, would only say: "I'm not saying no."

Will Tommy, who's been feeding at the corporate trough since leaving the Bush administration, actually run? Given that he's been threatening to run for something every two weeks for several years, it seems unlikely.

But people of Wisconsin might welcome a Tommy candidacy, so we could find out once and for all how much money he's been raking in and from whom, since he'd have to release all of his financial dealings.

Mostly, this seemed worth noting just to be able to post that remarkable AP photo.  Stand by for another in a long series of Journal Sentinel "Tommy might run" stories tomorrow.

Strategic Vision, the controversial (some say phony) polling firm that perhaps should have called itself Virtual Reality, has been a major factor in Wisconsin media's political coverage.

As we noted earlier, the media, particularly the Journal Sentinel, were all too happy to report the results released by Strategic Vision, which always claimed it had no clients paying for the polling and was somehow doing all kinds of expensive polling as a public service.

Reporters never asked to see the cross tabulations -- the breakdown of underlying responses that produce the bottom line numbers.

Remember the 2006 stories about how Tommy Thompson would beat the pants off Jim Doyle if Tommy decided to run for governor again? Here's the JS report, by Patrick Marley and Steve Walters, to refresh your memory:

Madison — Former Republican Gov. Tommy G. Thompson would trounce Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle by a nearly 2-to-1 margin if he jumped into the race, according to a poll released Wednesday.

In recent weeks, Thompson has called former aides and other Wisconsin political power brokers, soliciting advice as he considers taking on Doyle or U.S. Sen.

It seems to have escaped public notice that Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle has added a Republican to his cabinet, with the appointment of Rick Raemisch as secretary of corrections.

 Raemisch is a former Dane County sheriff who was appointed by then Gov. Tommy Thompson, was later elected to the post as a Republican, and ran unsuccessfully for Dane County DA on the GOP ticket, too. (Yes, he’s also a lawyer.) He had been deputy corrections secretary.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, and not that it’s a big deal, but it seems worth a mention, and neither of the state’s two biggest newspapers, the Wisconsin State Journal and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, bothered. So now you know. (WisPolitics did mention it.)

AFTERTHOUGHT: Doyle actually has another R in the cabinet, but he didn't choose him. Veterans Affairs Secretary John Scocus was named by a Republican-heavy veterans board shortly after Doyle took office. Scocos is now temporarily on active duty, but still riling people up. Yet another. I am reminded by a reader that Insurance Commish Sean Dilweg is a former Republican staffer. They're everywhere!

Other random thoughts:

A debate I might watch: Tommy Thompson vs. Michael Moore? My money’s on the fat(ter) guy.

Paul Bucher is being mentioned – probably by Paul Bucher – as a potential Supreme Court candidate. As the Whallah! Blog notes, that would be a great opportunity for the incumbent, Louis Butler, to recycle a slogan from last spring’s campaign” “Not one day as a judge.”

Almost two weeks after the press release, the Journal Sentinel gets around to reporting that Wisconsin’s former US Senator Bob Kasten has been named a foreign policy advisor to the presidential campaign of Everybody’s Mayor, Rudy what’s his name. The story says Kasten runs his own investment banking and consulting firm. Last reports we heard sometime back was that he was an arms dealer. But he and Rudy, we understand, both look good in a dress.

This is what struck me in the NY Times article:

In response to lawmakers’ questions, Dr. Carmona refused to name specific people in the administration who had instructed him to put political considerations over scientific ones. He said, however, that they included assistant secretaries of health and human services as well as top political appointees outside the department of health.

Did Tommy sanction these restrictions, or will he claim headed a rogue agency, with his top aides running amok?

He's running for president. Someone just might want to inquire.