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.

✍

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.

Yet Another Luxembourg-Themed Post?

Having devoted three posts this month to the late U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg James C. Hormel, imagine my surprise when President Joe Biden named Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett to that same post this week.

Why, I just happen to have drawn a bunch of cartoons featuring Tom Barrett, mostly for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee back in the early 'aughts. I also wrote a school report on Luxembourg in the sixth grade for which I got somebody in the Grand Duchy to send me a very nice package of informational materials. But I don't know where that school report is any more, so let's take a look at the cartoons, shall we?

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis. Oct. 20, 1992

I thought I might have drawn at least one cartoon featuring Barrett while he was a member of Congress, but I'm only finding two in which he appears, and only as an extra. He had not yet been elected (although he was a shoo-in) in this first cartoon, in which Wisconsin's incumbent Republican Senator horns in on an imagined Democratic campaign event.

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, February, 1997

Here, Barrett is standing behind Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Milwaukee Brewers' new stadium.

(Clearly, I had no pictures handy showing what the Brewers' new baseball stadium looked like. I later drew a pencil sketch in the margin of this cartoon so I would know how to properly cartoon the building and Miller Park logo.)

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, June 4, 2004

Once Barrett left Congress and was elected Mayor of Milwaukee in 2004, I naturally had many more opportunities to draw him. These are only a few of them.

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, August 13, 2004

A politician can throw cartoonists a curve by changing their look; Barrett wore a more business-like hairdo as Mayor than he had as Congressman...

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, August 27, 2004

...And then he went and shaved off his moustache, which changed his look dramatically. Removal of his most noticeable facial feature meant having to rethink how to represent him in two-dimensional black and white.

Before long, however, I hit upon what would become my go-to caricature of him. Except for the nose. The nose is wrong here.

in Business Journal, Milwaukee, July 1, 2005

It's a good thing that it didn't take long to settle on my mayoral caricature, because by the end of the year, the Business Journal had decided that it didn't need an editorial cartoonist any more. Milwaukee's mayoral politics hasn't impacted LGBTQ+ news a whole lot in the meantime, so I haven't drawn Mr. Barrett for Q Syndicate.

But I did put him in a cartoon for the on-line Racine Post when he ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2010.

for Racine Post, July, 2010

The cartoon is based on a campaign commercial from the Republican Party that told voters that Milwaukee was going down the toilet. Of course, the Milwaukee County Executive running for governor on the Republican ticket, or the national Great Recession, had nothing to do with it.

By the way, the original GOP ad didn't portray outgoing Governor Jim Doyle and Mayor Barrett as Nosferatu and the Joker. It just ain't easy to depict the grainy black-and-white images of television/video political attack ads in a cartoon that's in grayscale to begin with, so I had to come up with something else.

Creating the third and fourth panels in color would have been a good choice; I didn't start using color until some months later, though. A missed opportunity, really.

So anyway, if there are any Luxembourger cartoonists looking for tips on how to draw the new ambassador from the United States, here you go. Check out whether Stuart Carlson or Phil Hands have any Qwantable examples out there, and have fun.

All This And 1992

As my Scrunchieback Saturday review of the climax of the 1992 election campaigns in Wisconsin and the U.S. continues, things are looking very good for the Democratic Party candidates.

Only a year earlier, President George H.W. Bush seemed a shoo-in for reelection. His popularity immediately after defeating Saddam Hussein's army in Gulf War I was off the charts; leading Democrats had demurred from the race; and Republicans had developed a lock on the southern states. But as the war euphoria wore off, popular anxiety over the economy lingered well after the recession of 1990-91, and the Democrats had named two southerners to their ticket. With Texan H. Ross Perot also in the race, southerners had plenty of their own to choose from. Bush found himself running second — occasionally third — in the polls.

The Bush team attempted to contrast Bush's heroic record as a pilot in World War II with Bill Clinton's student deferment and protests against the Vietnam War, but found that U.S. voters were less than eager to re-litigate the Vietnam era.

Here in Wisconsin, Republican Senator Bob Kasten found himself running behind his Democratic challenger, Russ Feingold. Democrats in the state benefited from having fresh faces on the ballot in a year favorable to fresh faces, and Feingold's sunny, upbeat, populist campaign contrasted with the nasty one Kasten had survived against Ed Garvey six years before.

In a move that no Republican would dare make today, Kasten aired TV and radio ads likening his own positions to those of Democrats Bill Clinton and Wisconsin's other Senator, Herb Kohl, owner of the Milwaukee Bucks. Coming from a Republican who had come into office with the Reagan sweep of 1980, the comparison just didn't ring true.

(Evie is Kasten's wife's name.)

Returning to the presidential race, this next cartoon comments on an argument President Bush made at a three-way debate on October 19. (With three candidates at each of the debates that month, the result was that the challengers were able to gang up on the incumbent.) I also tried to emulate Mr. Bush's speaking style.

As it turned out, President Clinton would enjoy having the power of a line item veto in 1996 and 1997, only for it to be ruled unconstitutional in Clinton v. City of New York.

Millionaire H. Ross Perot, meanwhile, conducted his campaign exclusively on television, guesting on Larry King Live, and purchasing air time for 30- and 60-minute infomercials as well as more traditional 30-second spots. He nevertheless maintained that he was the leader of a populist revolt against the two major parties.

Returning to the Wisconsin senatorial campaign: Russ Feingold aired several folksy ads of himself campaigning around the state, ending with him showing the back of his left hand to the camera as if it were a map of Wisconsin and pointing out wherever it was he planned to visit next. In one of these ads, he visited The Joke Shop in reliably Republican Waukesha County just west of Milwaukee. The ad included a brief exchange with store owner Jeffrey Campbell, who signed a release allowing the Feingold campaign to use him in the commercial, but later complained that the ad gave the false impression that Campbell, a Republican, supported Feingold.

The Kasten campaign responded with its own ad with the tag line, "If we can't trust Russ Feingold's ads, can we trust Russ Feingold on crime, welfare reform or taxes?"

Remembering Ed Garvey

Ed Garvey died this week at the age of 76. Garvey was a labor lawyer from Burlington, Wisconsin, perhaps best known for having been executive director of the National Football League Players Association during their strikes in 1974 and 1982.

After leaving the NFL Players Association post, he entered Wisconsin politics, serving as Wisconsin's Deputy Attorney General, then winning the Democratic nomination for the 1986 Senate race against Republican Robert Kasten. His campaign against Kasten, an unremarkable freshman senator elected in the Reagan wave of 1980, has to be included among the Wisconsin Democratic Party's many lost opportunities.

Garvey's TV and radio ads hammered Kasten, highlighting — among other things — the Senator's refusal to release his tax returns, and his having been arrested in 1985 for driving drunk on the wrong side of the road and running a red light (the charges were dropped). Consumer advocate Ralph Nader came to Wisconsin to campaign for Garvey, calling Kasten a "chronic drunk" who needs "rehabilitation rather than re-election." Kasten's campaign manager countered Nader's attack by accusing Garvey of "mov[ing] his campaign from the gutter to the sewer."

Nationally, 1986 was a good year for Democrats, but not in Wisconsin. With Kasten vastly outspending Garvey, there wasn't much doubt that he would win re-election. The race ended up being a bit closer than some pre-election polls had predicted; so if Garvey had somehow managed to pull an upset win, there would still have been readers who would have found this post-election cartoon (drawn before the returns were in) appropriate.

Garvey made a quixotic run for governor against Tommy Thompson in 1998, at the height of Governor Thompson's popularity. At the time I was drawing separate cartoons for two University of Wisconsin student newspapers, the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, In Step Magazine and Q Syndicate; yet somehow, I did not draw a single cartoon about the gubernatorial race all year. The Business Journal editorialized on the Feingold-Neumann senate race a few times, requiring cartoons to match; the LGBT press was more interested in Tammy Baldwin's election to Congress.

Madison blogger Gregory Humphrey summed up Garvey's legacy in a more positive light than my cartoons have, so I'll let his words be the ones to leave you with:

"His optimism about the future needs of our political institutions was always strong as he continued to speak out and strongly support those who had a message that often echoed his own. He proved that politics it is not only about winning or losing but keeping the spirit of the fight alive even when the odds are against you."