June Toons

Today's Graphical History Tour head down into the Bergetoon vaults in search of cartoons from ten, twenty, thirty, and forty Junes ago. 

2016

June, 2016

I noticed that the Philadelphia Gay News, which usually runs my cartoons in grayscale, chose to print my Barney Frank tribute cartoon in full color in their annual Pride issue currently on newsstands. I did offer a grayscale version of it, which I did not do for the cartoon I drew ten years ago this week in response to the Pulse nightclub massacre.

Rainbows do not translate well into grayscale or black-and-white. For the first 16 years or so when I began drawing for the LGBTQ+ press, I didn't incorporate color except for special projects. At first, whenever I put a rainbow flag in a cartoon, I could only suggest the colors by drawing six shades of cross-hatching. Around 2005, I started employing computer-generated halftones in my work, but it was another seven years before I began regularly colorizing my drawings.

Changing the mood entirely:

2006

for Q Syndicate, June, 2006

Some guys just aren't second date material. And some other guys just don't know how to break it to them.

The non-topical nature of this cartoon suggests to me that although I drew it in June, it may have been sent to Q Syndicate as a reserve for a later date when I might be on vacation or any other reason miss deadline.

So I assume it was published sooner or later, because if it is still languishing in the retired computer back-up files at syndicate offices, I ought to change the Q in the final panel to an N in order to keep it relevant.

1996

June, 1996

Here's a cartoon I drew for the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee student newspaper, the UWM Post, and drove it up to their office only to discover that they had no plans to publish during summer break.

Previously, the Post put out three issues each summer, publishing biweekly instead of its regular semiweekly schedule.

As for the content of the cartoon: Sen. Bob Dole, having secured the Republican presidential nomination with a record of supporting the party priority of criminalizing abortion, now sought to appeal to supporters of abortion rights. Not by softening his position on reproductive rights, but by welcoming the support of pro-choice Americans willing to have that choice taken away from them.

Standing behind Dole in this cartoon are House Majority Leader Dick Armey, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Senators Phil Gramm and Jesse Helms, and theocratic activists Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed.

1986

June, 1986

Speaking of cartoons that never saw print, I have not been able to determine whether or where this cartoon might have been published. It stars my congressman, Les Aspin, after he had voted in favor of President Reagan's military aid package for the right-wing Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras.

Aspin's vote stunned liberals at home and in Washington. Elected on a peacenik platform during the Vietnam War in 1970, his prior experience in the Pentagon garnered him the chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee in 1985.

I populated this cartoon with a number of actual Democratic politicians: I can be certain of Alan Cranston, Daniel Inouye, Majority Leader Jim Wright, House Speaker Tip O'Neil, 1984 vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, and future President Joe Biden (which means that I was wrong about when I first drew him according to this Graphical History Stop). Some that I'm less sure of might be Representatives Barbara Mikulski and Dick Gephardt, Party Chair Paul Kirk, and Senator Robert Byrd.

Jumping back to 2016, I'd like to end up with a cartoon that I'm fairly certain got published somewhere.

for Q Syndicate, June, 2016

Republicans' mythical Big Tent popped up in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, when he claimed to have great support among the LGBT community while simultaneously wooing the antigay evangelical vote that had become so critical to becoming a GOP nominee. Since then, the evangelicals have bowed before the Baal of Trumpism, ceding their dominance to the oligarchs and broligarchs, Nazis and apartheiders.

By the way, I couldn't find the file of the colorized version of the Friends with Benefits cartoon, so I've recolored the original scan. I probably didn't originally paint Trump's face orange like I do now, since I also hadn't drawn tiny hands or the overlong necktie in this cartoon. The pig snout came a bit later.

Now, I don't know what LGBT supporters Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee at this point, had in mind, aside from Ric Grenell, Scott Bessent, Milos Yiannopoulos, and Caitlyn Jenner. But Trump's campaign message after the Pulse Nightclub massacre was that Hillary Clinton would "bring[] in more people who will threaten your freedoms and beliefs" (his tweet). He also told an audience in Atlanta: 

"The LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community — they are so much in favor of what I've been saying over the last three or four days. Ask the gays what they think and what they do, in, not only Saudi Arabia, but many of these countries, and then you tell me — who's your friend, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?"

This ties in, not just to the cartoon at the top of today's post, but also to the Bob Dole cartoon. I doubt that Dole, or any of the guys drawn behind him, seriously thought that he had fans of the pro-choice persuasion. Inviting them to vote Republican was just one of those things politicians used to do even in the days when we were sorting ourselves into irreconcilable adversaries.

But one does get the impression that Donald Trump lives in a fantasy world where facts become true (or crooked) simply because he says so. He hears the LGBT community, the gay community, the lesbian community agreeing with him in his head, so they must be his bigliest friends, that he can tell you.

Ditto the adulating crowds at Madison Square Garden, the praise for his gilded ballroom, any number of big men who have come up to him with tears in their eyes, and those peace negotiations about to bring Iran's surrender any minute now.

Space. The Final Vomitorium.

When I slap together these Graphical History Tours featuring my own cartoons, I usually dredge up one cartoon from each decade marker for the month. But when I started looking through the cartoons from April of 1985, I couldn't decide which one I wanted to write about.

So here are a whole bunch of them.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Apr. 25, 1985

With the current maladministration punishing any media that don't kowtow to Trumpspeak, here's a reminder of an earlier president's efforts to get reporters to echo the Official Line.

Unlike the Gulf of Mexico, which has bore that name for centuries, the Reagan administration's space-based "Strategic Defense Initiative" was brand new. But it was popularly called "Star Wars" after the film series. Reagan and spokesflack Larry Speakes were up against late-night comedians and editorial cartoonists. "Star Wars" was shorter than "Strategic Defense Initiative" and pithier than "SDI."

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Apr. 4, 1985

This cartoon starred local Congressman Les Aspin (D-WI) in a triple role. The inset copies a cartoon I had drawn for the Ranger the previous November, after Aspin had debated Republican challenger Pete Janssen on the Parkside campus, cruising on his way to an eighth term. First elected in 1970 as a critic of the Vietnam War who had served as a U.S. Army officer in Vietnam and a Pentagon systems analyst under Robert MacNamara.

With some serious seniority under his belt in 1985, the Defense Department gadfly was named Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and his more conservative positions soon came to the fore. I drew this cartoon after he voted in favor of Reagan's Star Wars program and the controversial MX missile system.

He would also support Reagan administration aid to the Contras fighting against the socialist government of Nicaragua, and later, George H.W. Bush's build-up to the Gulf War I. It got him deposed as Armed Services Committee Chair, but only briefly; it also got him named Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense.

In the meantime, his House position in those days got us Blue Angel fly-overs on Fourths of July hereabouts.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Apr. 11, 1985

Wharton School of Business D-student Donald Trump has been wreaking havoc recklessly imposing and revoking draconian tariffs, eviscerating your 401k and college savings fund. It's all part of his cunning plan to undo decades of global free trade.

Forty years ago, the postwar American dominance of world markets was suddenly challenged by Japan. In the 1960's, Americans considered Japanese products cheap and of inferior quality; but after the energy crisis of the 1970's made gas-guzzlers unfashionable, Japanese automakers produced fuel-efficient cars while U.S. automakers were slow to retool.

The U.S. complaint was that Japan was not letting American goods into their country while underselling our domestic manufacturers. (And then buying our domestic manufacturers.) At the end of March, both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of resolutions calling for retaliation against Japan unless it reduced its trade imbalance with the U.S. Over the course of the year, 300 protectionist bills were introduced in Congress by members of both political parties. 

So the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations hammered out free trade agreements wherever they could; and thus Coke was able to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. And domestic manufacturers moved all the jobs to Mexico, China, and wherever the median wage was a bushel of beans per month.

✍

I drew an alternating pair of comic strips for the Ranger that year. "Reductio and Absurdam" starred a man and a woman — I never established which was Reductio and which was Absurdam — who appeared in a variety of situations. They might be a couple, or co-workers, or teller and customer, as the gag warranted.

"Reductio and Absurdam" in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., April 11, 1985

The only consistent conceit was that, except for any text, I drew the cartoon in charcoal. The problem with charcoal as opposed to india ink is that I couldn't go back and erase pencil marks showing around the charcoal. 

I called the other cartoon "Post Nasal Strip." That I drew with india ink, the medium I've relied on for most of my cartoons for not quite 60 years. 

"Post Nasal Strip" in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Apr. 11, 1985

"Post Nasal Strip" tended to be more topical than "Reductio and Absurdam," here highlighting a quote by Sen. Jake Garn (R-UT) upon his return from a jaunt into outer space on the space shuttle Discovery. NASA had publicly mused about sending a artist, journalist, or teacher as the first civilian into space, but gave the seat to the Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies instead.

Garn had flown as a pilot with the U.S. Navy and the Utah National Guard before winning election to Congress in 1974. Designated "payload specialist" for the Discovery flight, he was the guinea pig for experiments on Space Adaptation Syndrome. So basically, he was there to throw up.

And so he did. And the rest is History.

"Jake Garn was sick, was pretty sick. I don't know whether we should tell stories like that. But anyway, Jake Garn, he has made a mark in the Astronaut Corps because he represents the maximum level of space sickness that anyone can ever attain, and so the mark of being totally sick and totally incompetent is one Garn. Most guys will get maybe to a tenth Garn, if that high. And within the Astronaut Corps, he forever will be remembered by that."

Two side notes about my cartoon: I snuck in the Ranger Features Editor, Jim Niebuhr, as the fellow delivering the punch line in the final panel. And yes, having performed on a thrust stage, I know what a vomitorium really is.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., May 2, 1985

Last week's Graphical History Tour was all about the fall of South Vietnam, so I'll close with this cartoon drawn for its tenth anniversary.

The cartoon was supposed to accompany an article about the anniversary. The article didn't run, but the Ranger ran my cartoon anyway, just below the cartoon I had drawn for the editorial page.

You'll notice that there is one president missing from my cartoon. There was a war in Vietnam (this time with China) during Jimmy Carter during his presidency, but the U.S. stayed out of if. Nor did Carter commit American troops to a shooting war anywhere else, so there was no particular reason for me to include Carter in this cartoon.

A Summer NIMBY-cue

I've been stuck in 1921 for over a month now, so lest my Saturdays turn into the Dead Cartoonists Society, allow me to catch up on the stuff I drew thirty years ago.

The UW-M Post published only two issues that summer, and there wasn't an editorial page in either of them; so I'm pretty sure that this cartoon, drawn when President George H.W. Bush replaced the Supreme Court's African-American civil rights lion with an African-American civil rights dog-in-the-manger, was never published. I did, however, get a few cartoons published in the Racine Journal Times over the summer of 1991.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., June 23, 1991

Wisconsin nearly lost a congressional seat in the 1990 census, threatening the end of the congressional career of one of the state's nine representatives: Les Aspin (D-WI1), Scott Klug (R-WI2), Steve Gunderson (R-WI3), Gerry Kleczka, (D-WI4), Jim Moody (D-WI5), Tom Petri (R-WI6), David Obey (D-WI7), Toby Roth (R-WI8), and Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI9). 

Wisconsin narrowly escaped the cut in 1990, only to lose one of the the two Milwaukee seats after the 2000 census. Of these nine congressmen, only Kleczka, Petri, Obey, and Sensenbrenner were still in Congress by then. The last of the nine to leave Congress was Sensenbrenner, in January of this year.

There is nothing particularly original about my cartoon, although I do like how I incorporated the 1990 census's logo onto the record album.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., June 30, 1991

The rest of these cartoons were drawn about local issues and thus will require a bit of explaining. There was a proposal at the time to reroute and widen Wisconsin State Highway 38, a two-lane roadway between Racine and Milwaukee. For about three curvy miles, it dips in and out of creek valleys, so there are very few opportunities to pass if one should come up behind a slow driver. Joining up with County Trunk Highway G for an east-west mile, it passes through the unincorporated intersection of Husher, Wisconsin, notorious as little more than a speed trap. Tabor, on the other hand, doesn't even have a sign to mark where it is.

I put the distance to the 38-G exit in kilometers to indicate that the image was sometime in the future, but obviously I had no clue what cars of the future were going to look like...aside from that Smart Car at top center. (You may have noticed how far into the future they lasted.) No matter. Neither metric conversion nor the Highway 38 "Lake Arterial" have come to pass.

Yet.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., August 4, 1991

A proposed sludge drying site in Mount Pleasant also sparked a lot of opposition from its would-be neighbors, to nobody's surprise. It's a dirty job that has to be done; you can't just let sludge build up in the sewer system and wastewater treatment systems. After humankind discovered that just dumping the stuff in our rivers, lakes, and oceans was a terrible idea, we had to come up with something else. And no, shooting it all into outer space is not the solution.

Step one, apparently, is to rename sludge "biosolids."

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., August 12, 1991

When drawing cartoons critical of NIMBYism, I am mindful that one of the earlier Lake Arterial proposals had it running quite literally through my parents' back yard.

As illustrated by the Foxconn deal (their Potemkin factory now easily visible from my back yard), the lesson learned by the present leadership of Mount Pleasant has been to work in secret and only let the public know about a controversial project after it's too late to object to it.

Midterms of Enfearment

For this week's installment of Salonback Saturday, I'm rehashing some of my favorite cartoons about midterm elections. Many of them have appeared in these journeys through my archives before. Given how few midterm election cartoons there are to choose from, I'd rather avoid some of the more hyperlocal ones requiring enough of tedious explanation to spoil the humor.

A while back, I mentioned my fictional Democrat, Luke Warmish, whose congressional career was interrupted in 1994.

There was no real Luke Warmish, but plenty of Democratic candidates were spooked by President Clinton's failure to get health care reform through a Democrat-majority Congress. This cartoon marks a profound difference between Democrats and Republicans as we were entering the Newt Gingrich era. Democrats head for the hills at the first sign of difficulty, for which they paid dearly in 1994 and 2010. (Today, they disavow any particular fondness for Nancy Pelosi.) Republicans rallied around their Republican president in 2002 and have done so again in 2018, in spite of Mr. Trump's high disapproval rating with voters.

It helps that gerrymandering has inoculated Republicans against the will of the general electorate, but the only Republicans you ever see admitting that they're not particularly fond of Trump's bombast, bigotry, divisiveness, and contempt for Constitutional principles, are the ones who have decided not to run for reelection.

You would hardly know it to look at my cherry-red home congressional district now, but for two decades, the seat was securely held by a Democrat, Les Aspin. The district still included Beloit and not the southern Milwaukee suburbs, and it ran on good-paying union jobs. Aspin barely broke a sweat at election time, especially after he was named chair of the House Armed Services Committee, winning more campaign contributions than he knew what to do with. His main campaign expense was printing new yard signs, changing colors every year. In some years they were orange; have you ever seen that color on a campaign yard sign?

An evergreen issue for election cartoons, midterm or full-term, is political advertising.

Most citizens don't have time to go to all the campaign rallies, and local TV news programs seldom pay attention to them unless a presidential (or Oprah Winfrey) visit is involved. I would guess that the readership for campaign mailers is also pretty low, so more voters get their information from candidate and advocacy group advertising.

There may be some ads run nation-wide, but most are strictly local, of little interest outside the district or state of the campaign. Here in Wisconsin, Republican Mark Neumann stretched the truth beyond recognition in a TV ad accusing incumbent Senator Russ Feingold of supporting federal spending on monkeys sent into outer space by the Russian space program. Feingold had opposed the budget item which somehow made it into the final budget bill anyway.

A commercial for an earlier race for Wisconsin's other senate seat, then held by Democrat Bill Proxmire, occasioned pre- and post-election cartoons that have to be presented as a pair. Once Proxmire won election to the late Joe McCarthy's seat in 1957, his national reputation for exposing government waste made him so popular at home that he was able to win reelection five times by overwhelming margins despite refusing outside campaign contributions and spending $200 or less of his own money on each campaign.

His hapless opponent in 1982, Scott McCallum, ran a TV ad trying to tie Proxmire to the sour economy by exploiting the plight of McCallum's unemployed brother. Meanwhile, President Reagan was working to convince the nation that unemployment rates were at last headed downward.

But no, Bill Proxmire didn't hire John McCallum. I made that up.

I don't mean for today's post to focus on my home state, but I can't recall drawing any cartoons about Minnesota politics (except for one upon the death of Hubert Humphrey) during my four years in college there. That in spite of the rather interesting election of 1978 with the governorship and both senate seats up for grabs. I followed the news in the newspapers, but didn't watch much television, so I guess I wasn't catching the candidates' commercials.

Occasionally, an ad from elsewhere in the country will grab my attention. In 2002, the Democrat running for reelection to the U.S. Senate by resorted the same sort of sneaky, underhanded innuendo about his opponent that Republicans get criticized for employing. But as Donald Trump would shrug, hey, it worked, didn't it?

Certain themes run through a lot of campaign commercials, since they have often been created by the same tried and true ad agencies and tested with scientifically selected focus groups. The candidates' names are interchangeable.

Hallowe'en was just a few days ago, and since it's always right before election day, it's natural fodder for election cartoons. It's a slam dunk to depict the candidates or their supporters as trick-or-treaters, as in this bite-sized candy from 2006 when Republicans were expected to lose several seats in the House and Senate.

I'm going to have to draw my first post-election cartoon this weekend. As you can imagine, that can be quite challenging. I close with a post-election cartoon from a year in which the campaign commercials made it difficult to support either candidate.

Late Election Results

This week's elections in Virginia, New Jersey and elsewhere gave new hope to a beleaguered Democratic Party. It was much the same 25 years ago this week, when Democrats, who had seemed incapable of overcoming their electoral disadvantage in the South, Midwest and West, put an end to 12 years of Republican rule. Souljahback Saturday returns to my thrilling cartoons of yesteryear, as a nation overlooked accusations of sexual harassment to send Bill Clinton to the White House.

Here in Wisconsin, we participated in the Democratic sweep. We ousted Robert Kasten to send Russ Feingold to the Senate, and Armed Forces Committee Chair Les Aspin won decisively over first-time congressional candidate Mark Neumann. But the President-elect had other plans for Aspin...

...little realizing that two years and two elections later, the third time would be the charm for Mr. Neumann.

On his way out the door, President Bush issued a controversial pardon to Caspar Weinberger, who had been Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan and had been indicted for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal in June. Prosecutors added a new count to the indictment less than a week before Election Day, based on a diary entry that contradicted President Bush's claim of being "out of the loop" while the Iran-Contra scheme was concocted.

In December, the additional indictment against Weinberger was thrown out due to the statute of limitations having expired. Bush pardoned Weinberger and five other Reagan administration officials in time for Christmas.

On October 30, President Bush had come to my hometown to be interviewed by Larry King. I had joined a group of protesters on the presidential limousine's route to Memorial Hall, waving a sign mocking a quip Bush had made during one of the presidential debates about Bill Clinton's paper-thin experience in foreign policy.

From inside his brightly lit limousine rushing down Sixth Street at 35 miles per hour, it is extremely unlikely that President Bush was able to read any of our signs, or even to detect that we were protesting at all.

A month later, I drew these last two cartoons by way of appreciation for his handling of four years in which the world went through fundamental change seemingly overnight. I couldn't stand along the road waiting for his motorcade to drive by again, so as much as anything else, these were my apology for that Millie poster. Oh, we were (and are) still stuck with Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, but David Souter didn't turn out to be so bad.

I was particularly pleased at how this cartoon turned out visually, and it remains one of my all-time favorites.

Election Quadranscentennial

Return with us this Solaceback Saturday to that halcyon moment only a quarter century ago when America stood at a crossroads and elected not to go with the egotistical millionaire claiming to have all the answers.

These are some of my cartoons from October, 1992. With only a month to go before the election, the representatives of the two major party nominees had finally agreed to a debate schedule and formats, only to have H. Ross Perot, who had quit his independent campaign in the summer, announce that he was back in the race.

Wisconsin's First Congressional District was represented by eleven-term Democrat Les Aspin. 1992 would be the last election for that seat in which a Democratic victory was virtually assured. As Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, Aspin had only token opposition from Janesville realtor Mark Neumann in 1992, and attacks on him by Republican interest groups and a national newspaper barely dented his popularity in southeast Wisconsin.

President Clinton would choose Aspin to be his Secretary of Defense in 1993, necessitating a special election. And while that election would be won by Democrat Peter Barca, it was only by 675 votes, and Barca would lose to Republican Mark Neumann in the rematch the following year. After 1996, the Democratic Party all but stopped contesting the seat entirely. Redistricting in 2001 and 2011, the decline of the auto industry, and widening exurban sprawl out of Chicago have made Wisconsin's CD1 safely Republican.

H. Ross Perot had originally entered the presidential race by promising on Larry King's CNN program to run if enough people committed to support his campaign. His withdrawal from the presidential race in July — making unsubstantiated claims that Republicans and the CIA had doctored photographs to portray his daughter as a lesbian and thus ruin her wedding — came as a stunning betrayal to those who had done the legwork to get his name on their state ballots, since polls had been showing him running ahead of both President George H.W. Bush and Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.

This next cartoon spoofs a Bush campaign ad which blurred Bill Clinton's face while accusing him of flip-flopping on the issues.

Tune in again next week for the exciting conclusion of Decision 92!

Mark Neumann Toons: Part I

There are four Republican candidates vying for Wisconsin's U.S. Senate nomination in the August 14 primary. I posted a cartoon about Tommy Thompson yesterday, and commented on an Eric Hovde ad a week or so ago. Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald barely registers in the polls.

In the latest Marquette University Law Poll, former Mark Neumann came in at only 10%, but since he was Congressman from my district for four years, I've had plenty of occasion to draw cartoons about him. In his TV ad, he attacks President Obama's Health Care reform for including coverage for abortion; running for Congress in 1994, the real estate developer attacked President Clinton's Health Care reform efforts:

Neumann's opponent in that race was Peter Barca, who had beaten Neumann 49.9% to 49.3% in a special election the previous year to fill the vacancy left when Clinton appointed 10-term Congressman Les Aspin Secretary of Defense. (1994 was Neumann's third race for Congress in as many years; Aspin had beaten him by 17 percentage points in 1992).

Neumann was unrelentingly negative, attacking Barca as a big spending tax-hiking errand boy of the Clinton-Democrat Bureaucracy Machine. This time, Neumann unseated the incumbent Barca with 49.4% of the vote to Barca's 48.8%, and quickly established himself as one of the most staunchly conservative members of the new staunchly conservative House majority.

In a stark contrast to Congressman Aspin, Freshman Neumann didn't bring home the bacon to his district. Nor was he inclined to; he proved to be a doctrinaire devoté of the Balanced Budget Amendment, opposed to pork-barrel spending, as well as to Big Government, abortion rights, environmental protection, LGBT equality, and all things progressive. The guy is deadly serious to the point where he looks incredibly awkward when he tries to smile. As a campaigner, he has been quick to go vicious, so he just doesn't come off as a nice guy. It was kind of like having Dwight Schrute as your Congressman.

In 1996, the Democrats' congressional candidate was, like Barca, a Kenoshan: President of the City Council Lydia Spottswood. The major issue that year was Social Security, which Republicans promised to replace by encouraging private investments, claiming that the present system would soon be broke. Spottswood responded that Neumann wanted to end Social Security.

It was a nasty race on both sides. Two years later, Spottswood described Neumann's attitude toward her in a PBS interview with Kwame Holman:

"My opponent then was actually very hostile and overtly hostile when he would see me, which was rare. I don't think he was interested in seeing me very often."

Hilary Clinton and Al Gore made campaign appearances with Spottswood, but Neumann won 50.9% of the vote to Spottswood's 49.1%. Since then, the national Democratic party has made no effort to support Democrats running for Wisconsin's First Congressional District seat. Spottswood made one more try for Congress in 1998, when Neumann ran for the U.S. Senate; but outspent by Republicans and outside groups, she lost by 15 percentage points to 28-year-old congressional aide Paul Ryan as the DNC sat idly by.


For Neumann's 1998 Senate race against Russ Feingold, stay tuned for Part II.