You Say You Want a Free Election? Well, You Know

There's still just over a whole week of those ghastly campaign commercials bombarding us on the TV, radio, social media, YouTube, and front yards. So let's take a break from Election 2022...

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Oct. 21, 1982

...but first, this commercial from Election 1982.

Scott McCallum was running in Wisconsin for the senate seat held by William Proxmire, and aired a TV ad arguing that he was sympathetic to voters suffering from the Reagan recession and offering his unemployed brother John as proof. 

McCallum's ad didn't work, even though Proxmire didn't campaign on television at all. I suppose Wisconsin voters actually rewarded Proxmire for that.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Oct. 28, 1982

Pete Jansson was the Republican running against my district's congressman, Democrat Les Aspin. At a candidate forum hosted by the University of Wisconsin - Parkside, Jansson campaigned against what he called "Aspinomics." I suppose that was an applause line in any GOP crowd, but it fell flat in the mixed audience on a university campus.

in Racine Journal Times, Oct. 7, 1992

1982 was the Democrats' year, and Les Aspin cruised to a seventh term. By 1992, he was firmly ensconced as the First District's Congressman, Chair of the House Armed Service Committee, and running for his twelfth.

in Racine Journal Times, Oct. 20, 1992

Senator Robert Kasten (R-WI) came to office in the Republican sweep of 1980 and survived the Democratic wave of 1986, but sailed into strong headwinds in 1992. He painted his Democratic rival, Russ Feingold, as a dangerous radical — which is the standard Republican tactic — but then likened his own positions to those of Wisconsin's Junior Senator, Democrat Herb Kohl, and, incredibly, the Democrats' presidential candidate.

It is impossible to imagine any Republican since then offering themselves up as Almost Like Bill Clinton, or any other Democrat. Since the rise of Newt Gingrich in 1994, any hint of bipartisanship has become anathema in the GOP.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Oct. 29, 1992

Then there was the ad Feingold filmed greeting voters at The Joke Shop in Waukesha. The owner of the store, Jeffrey Campbell appeared in the ad, saying "Yes, it is," in response to Feingold asking "Is this a joke shop?"

Campbell was so upset afterward that Feingold's ad made him appear to support the Democratic candidate that he got himself into a Kasten ad swearing his loyalty to the Republican incumbent. Kasten's ad culminates with its narrator asking, "If we can't trust Russ Feingold's ads, can we trust Russ Feingold on crime, welfare reform or taxes?"

Jump we now to 2002: Drawing for a national LGBTQ+ audience, I only find an excuse to cartoon about local political races when there is a queer angle to one. My one such opportunity in October of 2002 came with the contest in Montana for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Max Baucus.

This time, it was the Democrats running a homophobic television spot.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2002

Challengers have one advantage in these ads in that they can pick and choose any one vote by the incumbent, even on a procedural matter, to accuse the incumbent of being against something that sounds popular or for something that can be given an unpleasant nickname. Republican Mike Taylor didn't have a voting record for Sen. Baucus to comb through, but someone at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dug up video of Taylor when he owned a cosmetology shop in Denver about ten or so years earlier.

The ad (paid for by the DSCC, not the Baucus campaign) accused Taylor of embezzling funds from the shop. The visual of Taylor massaging a male customer's face insinuated that Taylor might be gay. Whether it was due to the allegation or the insinuation, it was enough to prod a weepy Taylor to withdraw from the race at the 11th hour.

for Q Syndicate, October, 2012

Come 2012, I seized the opportunity to return to Wisconsin politics in my syndicated cartoon when former Governor Tommy Thompson challenged incumbent Senator Tammy Baldwin in a televised debate. While he didn't engage in any overt anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric against the only openly lesbian Senator at the time, he did seem to make an unusual number of references to Mrs. Tommy Thompson.

I've found Senator Baldwin's a challenging face to draw, and I tried to make this caricature as simplified as possible. In the end, I don't think this approach worked, and I haven't used it since.

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That brings us up to the present, so that's it for today's installment of congressional campaign cartoons past. We now return you to your regularly scheduled campaign commercials.

The Forty Summers of Twos

Last month, I noted that I had apparently drawn only one cartoon in the whole month of June, 1982 and offered that there was a probable reason for that.

The reason was that I was involved in the start-up of the Kenosha Tribune, which published its inaugural issue on July 1, 1982. Jumping from the well-established Journal Times in Racine to an upstart free weekly paper was a risky one, and one that didn't quite pay off. (I've already posted about the dispute between the publisher and the rest of the staff that doomed the Tribune, so I won't get into that here.)

"Hers & His" in Kenosha Tribune, July 1, 1982

The Kenosha Tribune focused on local issues, but my initial cartoons for the editorial page were devoted to national and international topics. I had put in time helping clean the new office, a block behind Washington Middle School; but I hadn't been equally diligent in catching up with Kenosha politics.

Happily, I did not draw a cartoon to accompany the publisher's issue one, page one article that alleged — without ever using the word "allegedly" or any synonym thereof — malfeasance by a police officer.  

"Start Negotiations" in Kenosha Tribune, July 8, 1982

My second cartoon touches on a couple points I've discussed here recently. As in last week's Q Syndicate cartoon, I used Cyrillic-style lettering to signify that a character (here Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev) is Russian.

I've also warned against using rubber cement as an adhesive. I used rubber cement to paste the text in Brezhnev's thought balloon over my original text there, and it has since discolored significantly.

Compare that with the dog in the Phyllis Schlaffly cartoon. I used a glue stick to add the dog to the cartoon, and there's almost no discoloration at all on the original drawing.

(As for the point of the Brezhnev cartoon, Ronald Reagan had campaigned against the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT, negotiations between the Carter administration and the Soviet Union. As President, Reagan basically renamed the negotiations "Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty," keeping one of the t's in "Strategic" so he could call it StART.)

"A Thoroughly Enjoyable Race" in Kenosha Tribune, July 22, 1982

With midterm elections heating up, it wasn't long before I was drawing more local cartoons such as this one about Wisconsin's upcoming gubernatorial primary, and sketching the candidates who came to the Tribune's humble offices to be interviewed.

Interestingly, none of the candidates in this cartoon would be elected Governor in the fall: not Republican nominee Terry Kohler (of the bathroom fixture family), his Republican rival Lowell Jackson (a former and future member of the Governor's cabinet), or Democratic former Governor Marty Schreiber.

Marty Schreiber, for Kenosha Tribune, July/August, 1982, but unpublished

Kohler, the son of a past Governor of Wisconsin, would win the September primary, secured the GOP nomination for Governor, but was trounced in the general election by Democrat Tony Earl, 57% to 42%, the worst showing for a Republican gubernatorial candidate in 40 years before or 40 years since. (To be fair, three Democratic gubernatorial candidates made worse showings in those 80 years: William Sullivan in 1942, Daniel Hoan in 1946, and Bill Proxmire in 1952.)

Moving along: Having spent so much of this post on 1982, I don't want to skip over 1992 entirely...

"Boola Boolah," unpublished, July, 1992

Besides, I drew each of those blades of grass individually with quill pen and ink, so it's about time they finally got to be seen by somebody somewhere.

We can discuss whether the Bush administration deserves credit for the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, and how much of it, some other time.

"Ah, Wikstrom" in Business Journal, Milwaukee, July 12, 2002

Jumping ahead to 2002, I have absolutely no recollection of the staff editorial this cartoon was drawn to accompany. But it affords me the opportunity to offer yet another take on Donald Joffrey Trump and his stubborn refusal to recognize that he lost the 2020 election.

Yes, he's a grifter and a spoiled brat grown up and grown old without ever once being held accountable for diddley squat. And yes, the Founding Fathers left him a glimmer of hope by creating the Electoral College because they were elitists who didn't entirely trust the Will of the People to elect the best President every time.

But I think that what the Trump presidency shows us is that coming from the World of Business is not such a great qualification for high office after all. Neither Wendell Willkie nor H. Ross Perot got to prove themselves in the Oval Office, but thanks to that damned Electoral College, we were treated to the Trumpian shitshow for four years

In the World of Business, your accounting team can take the same set of numbers and tease stockholders with tales of exponentially growing profits on the one hand, and plead to the IRS that losses swallowed up all your earnings. So naturally, if election officials in Georgia tell you that you're 11,780 votes short, you simply tell them to juggle the books and find you 11,780 more votes.

And if that fails, launch a hostile take-over.

for Q Syndicate, July, 2002

I wasn't colorizing my syndicated cartoons in 2002 (I had done so for the Business Journal's Biz insert cartoons and some InStep covers), but I went ahead and added color to this one before posting it on the GeoCities site I had at the time.

It deserved a little taupe, after all.

It was in 2012 that I started including a color version of every cartoon when sending them to Q Syndicate. I'll sign off today with one of my favorites from that year.

"Where the Boycotts Are," July, 2012

I Was Told There Would Be No Arccosecants

Our Graphical History Tour today steps back 40 years (for the benefit of you who may be products of Ron DeSantis's Floridian educational system, that's 1982). 

"Brisben..." in Mathematics Magazine, Washington, D.C., Nov., 1982

This cartoon wasn't published until the fall, but the original is filed in with stuff I drew in April of 1982, so in light of Florida Republicans' war on math, it gets to lead off today's post. 

I don't recall how I came to draw a cartoon for the then quarterly magazine of the Mathematical Association of America (it now publishes monthly); perhaps it was through my father, a chemist, but I'm pretty sure that we didn't get Mathematics Magazine at our house. (They were nice enough to send me this issue, and I believe that they paid for the cartoon. If only I had been able to keep coming up with cartoons about math, but alas...)

"New Music" in UW-Parkside Ranger, various days, 1981-82

Balancing that April cartoon unpublished until November with one drawn well before the Feast Day of St. Misbehavin, here's one I drew to accompany the music review column, titled "New Music," in the student newspaper at University of Wisconsin at Parkside. The column, written by various members of the arts and entertainment staff, was intended to be eclectic, covering new and decidedly not-new music, so the references in my illustration ran the gamut from medieval to rock.

"Save the Library" in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 29, 1982

The Ranger, along with several other student organizations, planned a "Save the Library Day" to protest cuts to Wisconsin's university system in Governor Sherman Dreyfus's state budget. Raffles, a dunk tank, and other fund-raising activities hoped to counter proposed cuts in staffing and periodical subscriptions.

To publicize the event, I was asked to draw Gov. Dreyfus strangling a book. From the vertical format, the boldness of the lines and the minimal crosshatching — and my initials hidden in the governor's hair in lieu of my signature — I believe that this caricature was intended to go onto t-shirts, but I can't recall that for certain.

At the time, Lee Dreyfus was considered a moderate-to-conservative Republican; if he were still in politics, today's Republicans would no doubt denounce him as a RINO, a dreaded liberal, or even a socialist commie. 

Nota bene: while the Grand Old Party has lurched to the extreme right nowadays, rest assured, gentle reader, that the party still had bona fide fascists back then:

"PAB Brazenly Presents," in UW-Parkside Ranger, April 15, 1982

Case in point: G. Gordon Liddy, one of the chief "plumbers" from the Nixon administration, whom the Parkside Activity Board paid $4,500 to speak in the Student Union cafeteria on April 19, 1982. Touring the country to promote his book, Will, Liddy forbade recording of his three-hour appearance, in which the convicted felon called Judge John Sirica "born stupid," claimed that the Watergate break-in was legal because laws do not apply to a president or those acting on his behalf, and made light of his having planned to kill investigative journalist Jack Anderson and White House Counsel John Dean.

To the end, Liddy, who died a little over a year ago, was proud of his role in the Watergate burglary, and I'm sure he was happy to have lived long enough to see fascists return to the White House in 2017. How he must have regretted that he wasn't able to participate in the January 6 insurrection with the others of his ilk. 

Yet his theory of the Divine Right of Presidents was indispensable to Republicans' defense of Donald Berzelius Trump in the impeachment trials of 2020 and 2021.

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Well, I can't end this post on that note, so here's a bit of trivia for the locals:

UW-Parkside Ranger, April 8, 1982

The young fella elected Parkside Student Government President 40 years ago survived this recall attempt and went on to a career in politics. This past Monday, he handed over the reins as Kenosha County Executive after 14 years in the post.

Maggie Thatcher

In memory of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, here's a bit of my juvenalia that I've dug out of my files. When the Falklands War broke out in the spring of 1982, many of my fellow cartoonists went for "Evita" references. I reached for a much older musical:

If I were to draw this cartoon today, I would probably have drawn Thatcher in one of Mitzi Gaynor's outfits or some such. Whether there would be any comedic point in drawing General Galtieri and Al Haig as Ray Walston and John Kerr is debatable.

I didn't draw a whole lot of cartoons about Thatcher; she appeared as a supporting cast member in a few cartoons about America's allies, such as this one when Ronald Reagan was attacking Muamar Qaddafi in 1986: