The Cap Times had a piece yesterday about Shirley Abrahamson's re-election to Wisconsin's Supreme Court that contained an interesting quote from former mayor Soglin:
"We see that when WMC doesn't get in, with all the outside money and negative ads, when we have a race where the qualifications of the candidates and the issues are considered, the progressives win easily in Wisconsin," said Soglin.
What a sorry commentary on our electorate.
A corollary of what Soglin said is that, when the WMC and outside interests purchase negative ads, Wisconsin voters are rendered stupefied. They sit in front of their televisions like zombies: "Candidate X soft on crime...must vote candidate Y..."
Just because the WMC and its ilk pay for negative ads doesn't mean that resources where voters can discover the qualifications of the candidates and learn about the issues miraculously disappear in a poof of emotional appeal. The League of Women Voters still ask questions of those seeking office and publish those answers for all to see; the candidates have webpages; and, theoretically, newspapers and other news outlets have information on the issues. Yet all the WMC, etc. have to do is run enough TV commercials which traduce the candidate they don't like by using words like "liberal" & "judicial activist" to seemingly get tens of thousands of people to abandon the progressive values that they would otherwise express with their vote.
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