Spooky Toons

Welcome to a special Halloween edition of Spookback Saturday! My cartoon this week was about an actual Halloween costume, but usually, we cartoonists mine this holiday for metaphors we can apply to whatever political story is in the headlines.

And I'm no exception. The charge that one's political opponent was attempting to scare seniors on the issue of social security was ready-made for a Halloween cartoon -- this one featuring the candidates for Wisconsin's 1st congressional seat in 1996 (Republican Mark Neumann and Democrat Lydia Spottswood).

Halloween and elections are made for each other. You can illustrate a charge that Candidate A is a Republican or Democrat in name only, for example, by having a donkey trick-or-treating in an elephant mask or vice versa. Just having kids dressed as political candidates and declaring that to be the scariest costume ever is overdone, I think -- I've seen way too many of such cartoons this season -- so the challenge is to find some way to turn that idea on its head.

I tried doing that in 2006 by portraying right-wingers attempting to be the very opposite of scary as they bemoaned Republicans' dismal chances in off-year elections. Fortunately, they did not succeed in convincing Democrats to stay home on Election Day that year.

Jumping ahead to 2013, these two persistent trick-or-treaters weren't being scary; but they were going to be disappointed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on the issue of marriage equality.

Another use for Halloween imagery is when there is some issue that "just won't die," as in this 1986 cartoon for the NorthCountry Journal about a dam on the Kickapoo River, started in the 1960's; the Army Corps of Engineers ended up leaving the gates open, however, yielding to environmental concerns. A Democrat running for Wisconsin State Assembly in 1986 wanted the project completed.

This cartoon actually ran in the November issue, so I had to frame it from the vantage point of being after Halloween.

A big problem with Halloween is that it is so prone to cliché. Do you think taxes, prices, or the rent is too damn high? Vampire cartoon! Do you think somebody doesn't realize how hopeless they are? Great Pumpkin cartoon! Do you think Tea Partisans are mindlessly reckless and bent on destruction? Zombie (or Frankenstein) cartoon! Do you hate Hillary Clinton? Witch cartoon!

I can't be sure whether this 1900 R. C. Bowman cartoon was drawn for Halloween, but it illustrates how old these spooky ideas are. There is very little new material without having to dig very deep (oh, about six feet) to find anything original on which to hang a cartoon.

The most famous Halloween editorial cartoon of all time was drawn in 1936 by J. "Ding" Darling, showing Harry Hopkins, James Farley and Franklin Roosevelt running off with a family's outhouse, labeled "Private Rights," with an alarmed John Q. Public peering out from inside. Darling hadn't actually meant the cartoon for publication, and his editor at the Des Moines Register thought it was in bad taste; but the wife of his syndicate publisher reportedly told the New York Herald Tribune editors, "If you don't publish it, I'll put it on the woman's page!"

If you're going to swipe an old cartoon idea from someone else, at least give them the credit for it.

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.