Wisconsin recall: Did Tom Barrett close gap with Scott Walker in debate?

For Jeff Krien, a customer service representative in the suburb of South Milwaukee, “the recall should never have happened to begin with.” Mr. Krien says the protests that began in February 2011 “started out about [preserving] collective bargaining [rights for public-sector unions], but that hasn’t been talked about for months.”

During Thursday’s debate, Barrett did not dwell on the perceived damage of eliminating collective bargaining rights, but instead framed the issue as an example of Walker’s “divide and conquer strategy” in trying to transform Wisconsin into the “capital” of the tea party movement.

“You wanted to pit people against each other because that’s the way you operate, and you wanted to use a crisis [involving collective bargaining] to do that,” he told Walker.

Walker insisted, as he has in the past, that reforms were needed to address the state’s $3.6 billion budget deficit he inherited, and that he did it without raising taxes or wholesale job cuts.

“The mayor has a moral obligation to tell people what exactly he would have done differently … the mayor doesn’t have a plan and all he has is attacking me,” Walker said.

Barrett often addressed Walker directly, and he returned frequently to an ongoing investigation into Walker’s previous tenure as the Milwaukee County executive, involving allegations that workers campaigned on county time and embezzled money from veterans groups. The so-called “John Doe” ethics investigation has not targeted Walker for wrongdoing, but he has transferred about $160,000 from his campaign to a legal defense fund, which, according to state law, is lawful only if the campaign gets prior approval from donors.

Walker has so far declined to say which contributors gave their blessing.

“This is all about trust,” Barrett said before turning to Walker: “Tell us who is paying your legal defense fund … you owe it to the people of this state.”

Later, Barrett hammered Walker for a television commercial that shows a blurred image of a 2-year-old who spent almost a week in intensive care after being severely beaten. The aim of the ad was to criticize Milwaukee’s track record on preventing violent crime.

“He is running a commercial showing a picture of a dead baby. This is Willie Horton stuff," Barrett said to Walker, referring to a crime-related ad in the 1988 presidential campaign, widely seen as inflammatory, that proved devastating to Democrat Michael Dukakis. "The person who killed that baby was arrested by Milwaukee police.… You should be ashamed,” he said.

Walker defended the ad, saying Barrett campaigned in the primary on his work to reduce the violent crime rate. “I think if it was worth to say that people should vote for you in the primary because it had gone down, the same question is completely legitimate in reverse. Violent crime has gone up, sadly,” Walker said.

The Marquette poll that shows Walker up by seven percentage points was conducted May 23-26, before the first gubernatorial debate. However, “if the Marquette poll is accurate, it’s going to be tough for Barrett,” McAdams says.

“There’s a very small number of undecided voters, so there’s not a lot of people out there to be moved,” he says.

One such resolute voter is Karen Stardy, a farmer from Union Grove. Earlier in the day, while manning her booth at a farmer’s market in South Milwaukee, Ms. Stardy said her disgust was not necessarily with Barrett but with how the recall election is dividing her community but not offering real solutions to turning the economy around.

“There’s arguments all over the place. It’s like, nobody’s really right and nobody’s really wrong,” she said. “I’d rather not see people arguing over politics. We have to tough it out. There’s no instant solution to the problems that we’ve got.”

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