Murphy's Law

Wauwatosa has suddenly become the center of the state political world. State Rep. Leah Vukmir(R-Wauwatosa) has announced she is challenging incumbent state Sen. Jim Sullivan(D-Wauwatosa) in the November 2010 election – in a race that could determine which party controls the state senate.

Though Vukmir grew up in Brookfield and her assembly district includes Elm Grove and chunks of Brookfield, it also includes the western portion of Wauwatosa. That’s where she lives, just 21 blocks west of Sullivan. But the two are worlds apart. Vukmir is a registered nurse and high-profile, arch-conservative Republican, while Sullivan is an attorney, barely known, and a moderate Democrat.

Vukmir is "one of Wisconsin's most extreme and divisive politicians," Sullivan has declared, with "a long history of putting her own partisan agenda ahead of the needs of the district."

Responds Vukmir: "It's too bad that Jim Sullivan wants to start this campaign by making negative attacks. He knows his record makes him vulnerable, so he's attacking me instead."

Yup, this could be a very mean-spirited election.

On paper, the district seems to lean Democratic: the other two assembly districts within Sullivan's senatorial territory are held by Democrats David Cullen (his 13th Assembly District includes parts of Milwaukee, West Milwaukee and eastern Tosa) and Anthony J. Staskunas (his 15th Assembly District is mostly West Allis, with a sliver of Milwaukee). But West Allis has a lot of conservative Democrats and eastern Tosa is hardly liberal land. Meanwhile, Vukmir's district is heavily Republican and very conservative.

This is a “swing district,” says former state legislator Mordecai Lee, now a UW-Milwaukee professor of governmental affairs. Sort of, though the state senator for this district has typically been a Republican.

Sullivan snuck into office in 2006 with a narrow win over Tom Reynolds, the highly controversial Republican. A Milwaukee Journal Sentinelcolumn by Cary Spivak and Dan Bice reported that Reynolds asked job applicants such questions as whether they were born-again Christians, would remain virgins until married or had been divorced. Reynolds’ standing fell badly with voters.

But conservatives have still not forgiven Sullivan for displacing Reynolds and have launched an effort to recall the incumbent, citing his vote for a statewide smoking ban. This is hardly the sort of issue that would electrify a recall effort, but the campaign will provide another distraction for Sullivan.

Democrats now have an 18-to-15 margin in the state Senate, so the GOP needs to gain two seats to recapture a majority. As a result, you can expect big spending in this race, says Lee, who predicts the candidates could spend a combined $2.5 million.

Since both parties will target the race, though, the spending is likely to be neutralized. This could leave the campaign coming down to just a few factors, including:

Door-to-door campaigning: The candidate who does more doors usually gets an edge.

Media impact: Vukmir is the darling of talk radio and has appeared in the past as a pundit on both the Sunday morning shows of Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling(whose show no longer runs). You can bet they will go all out for Vukmir. Sullivan, meanwhile, will harp on Vukmir's selection as one of the state's 10 worst legislators in the February 2009 issue of Milwaukee Magazine. You can bet his literature will includes quotes from the story.

Framing the issues: The real battle here is for the middle ground. As Lee notes, Vukmir will win the talk-radio Republicans and Sullivan the hard-core Democrats. It's the independents and middle-of-the-road voters that will be key.

To that end, Sullivan describes himself as a "strong independent voice," and voted against the recently passed state budget to show he's not a liberal Democrat.

Sullivan claims Vukmir's "extremism" is proven by her vote against the "Compassionate Care for Rape Victims Act" and against a bill that would have prevented the state from contracting with companies that export American jobs overseas.

Vukmir will rely on

Vukmir needs to make this a race about a conservative versus a liberal; Sullivan needs to make it a contest between a conservative and a moderate.

Sullivan has one key advantage: He has less of a history, having served for just two years. Vukmir, by contrast, has been in office for six years, and before that did some research for a conservative think tank, the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. In short, she’s taken more stands, giving Sullivan more to sift through to find issues he can use against her. She is easier to define, while Sullivan’s thin resume allows him more flexibility in this election. (Sullivan did serve as a Tosa alderman for some years, but that’s not likely to yield much for Vukmir to mine in a legislative contest.)

The election is in November 2010. By the political clock, that's a near-lifetime away. The mood of the voters could change completely by then. Ultimately, the candidate who best anticipates that mood – who best understands the district – will win. Odds are, the victor won't win by much.

John Torinus, Health Care Nag

Walter Lippmann was perhaps the greatest newspaper columnist of the 20th century, but toward the end of his career, he got stuck in a rut. The great internationalist eventually turned against the Vietnam War, and it stuck in his craw: He wrote column after column on this and got to be too predictable and something of a scold. Lippmann realized it, but couldn’t help himself. He finally hung it up and retired.

I’m reminded of this when I read the weekly columns of John Torinus in the business section of the Sunday Journal Sentinel. Torinus can be interesting because he’s a former journalist and head of the company Serigraph, so he provides an articulate view from the business community’s perspective. But so many of his columns have turned into nagging about health care: He opposes nationalized health care or state coverage and just about any Democratic solutions. He favors incentives that force employees to choose cheaper health insurance that, depending on your perspective, create efficiency or simply push more of the costs onto employees.

Frankly, Torinus has become a bore. A columnist’s job is to surprise us, and by now, any faithful reader knows all John’s tropes by heart.

All this repetition, moreover, raises a large problem for the JS. Where’s the balance? I can’t think of any other part of the paper that has so regularly pounded the same viewpoint over and over. I might note that this is a huge issue, perhaps the major domestic issue facing this country right now. If Torinus is going to get on a soap box to hector us about health care, then the JS should provide a regular counterpoint from an articulate opponent like longtime Democratic policy wonk David Reimer. Either that or Torinus should be asked to give it (and us) a rest. Please. We beg you.

The Buzz

One legislator who failed to vote on the huge budget bill that just passed was state Sen. Alan Lasee(R-De Pere). Talk about not doing your job. "It's the single most important vote of a two-year session," says Mordecai Lee. The budget, he adds, represents about half the work of a legislator.

Is there any legislator who is more irrelevant than Lasee? All four times Milwaukee Magazinehas rated the best and worst legislators (and each feature was written by a different writer) – in 1986, 1997, 2003 and 2009 – Alan Lasee was rated one of the 10 worst of the 132 legislators. It is a remarkable, unchallenged record for ineptitude. Perhaps we should be thankful when he doesn't vote on legislation.

And the Sports Nut says the Brewers need a savior. But who?