Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Tuesday's Biggest Loser Wasn't Even A Candidate

Tuesday's primary is finally over and the people have chosen their champions that they want to represent them in November's general election.  Some of the primary races ended up in routs while others were painfully close.

But the biggest loser on Tuesday wasn't even a candidate.

Milwaukee County Emperor Chris "Boss" Abele wanted to expand his "sphere of influence" by running a couple of hand-picked candidates and investing heavily into another.  But instead of gaining more power like he wanted, Abele went 0 for 3.

In Assembly District 19, Abele chose Dan Adams to be his representative of the Abele Party.  For whatever reason, Abele and Adams thought it would be a good idea to run an anti-union, pro-poverty campaign in a very progressive district.  To make matters worse, they also thought it would be a good idea to launch a series of highly negative and immature attacks against the two favored candidates, Marina Dimitrijevic and Jonathan Brostoff.

Brostoff managed to eke a victory over Dimitrijevic, winning by a couple of hundred votes.  Adams came in a distant third.

Likewise, in Assembly District 10, Abele chose to run his own staffer turned campaign manager, Tia Torhorst against Milwaukee County Supervisor David Bowen.  Torhorst wasn't much better than Adams, getting caught in lies and boasting of her support for her support for Act 14, which reduced the amount of representative government in Milwaukee County.

Torhorst came in second in this race, but got less than half the votes that Bowen did.

As bad as it was that Abele tried to buy these two elections - and failing miserably - that wasn't the worst of it.

Abele, who has had a longstanding feud with Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, decided to intervene in this race by dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of Clarke's opponent, Chris Moews.  Abele had the local airwaves flooded with ads filled with flimsy talking points and misleading attacks.

Instead of helping Moews, all he did was rile up Clarke's base so much that numerous Republicans chose to cross over and vote on the Democratic side in order to support Clarke.

Moews ended up losing by about 4,000 votes, sticking Milwaukee County with another four years of a loud-mouthed, ineffective and incompetent fool for a sheriff.

Abele's problems don't end with losing three races that he had invested in so heavily..

In his power grab attempt, Abele has burned a lot of bridges behind him.

Not only has Abele attacked fellow Democrats, but he has gone as far as supporting some of the most rabid Teapublicans over good Democrats, just in an effort to get his way.  As one might expect, this has made a lot of people angry and leery of him.  And this doesn't mention the other groups that he has alienated over the course of the last year or two, including veterans, park lovers, art lovers and the unions, to name just a few.

Abele has painted himself into a corner that he doesn't want to be in with his own reelection coming up in a year and a half.

That said, it's nice to see Abele screwing himself instead of everyone else for a change.  And he's doing it like a boss.

4 comments:

  1. Abele - Show Me the Walker emails! The taxpayers paid for them.

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  2. Boss Abele actually went 0 for 4...he also endorsed Jon Richards in the AG primary, and he lost to Susan Happ.

    Of course, the only reason Boss Abele supported Richards was so that so that Abele could try to stick one of his cronies in Richards's Assembly seat (Abele's crony, Dan Adams, lost the primary).

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  3. Could Chair Dimitrijevic beat Abele in the next vote for County Exec?

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  4. It wasn't a good day for Chris Abele, as all who ran under his influence lost! As such, it also showed that the public disapproves of Abele and the Greater Milwaukee Committee agenda. They don't like democracy or representative government, but the voting public seems to.
    Thank Cog Diss for looking into and describing politics as it really plays out, rather than the superficial, "official" corporate media version of life. Democracy, for it to work, needs informed citizens to play their part for the public good.

    And, their was a large Milwaukee County document dump on Friday, August 8th, which our mass media has only reported on one Tom Nardelli exchange, questioning the motives of a John Doe investigation. Surely there is much more to be gleaned from this new release.

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