In one of the most despicable campaigns this state has ever seen, Burnett County Judge Michael Gableman beat incumbent Justice Louis Butler in Tuesday's state Supreme Court election by just 20,000 votes.
With a recent study showing 93 percent of the ads run in the Supreme Court race came from special interests - over $2 million worth - it's obvious something has to change. Given the opportunity to denounce the ads, Butler did so and explained that he was only running positive ads. Gableman is another story.
I think we have stayed positive, and we have let the voters know why I'm the better candidate,"" he told The Daily Cardinal this week.
Yeah, and Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Gableman can claim all he wants that he ran a clean campaign, but his own ads show just how dirty he really was. Consider one ad the Gableman campaign began airing on March 14, which some have compared to the racist Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential race.
""Louis Butler worked to put criminals on the street like Reuben Lee Mitchell, who raped an 11-year-old girl with learning disabilities,"" the ad states, putting a picture of Butler, who is black, next to one of Mitchell, who is also black.
The ad then claims ""Butler found a loophole. Mitchell went on to molest another child."" If this were at all accurate then it'd be a legitimate ad, but as you'd expect, it severely stretched the truth.
Before becoming a judge, Butler worked as a public defender, which meant it was his job to defend the accused. In Mitchell's case, he got the appeals court to order a new trial because the judge allowed the inclusion of information that shouldn't have been available to the jury.
However, the state Supreme Court then reversed this decision, not because Butler was wrong, but because it didn't really matter.
""[We] can conclude that there is no reasonable possibility that the error contributed to the conviction,"" wrote now-Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, according to FactCheck.org.
Mitchell was paroled in 1992 and then, in 1995, committed the crime Gableman refers to in the ad. After the Wisconsin Judicial Campaign Integrity Committee called the ad ""highly offensive and deliberately misleading,"" Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce came out with their own version, the much-ballyhooed ""Loophole Louie"" spot.
As a special interest group, WMC is not supposed to coordinate with campaigns, but after seeing Gableman's ad, they just happened to come up with their own, citing the same ""loophole"" argument. Once again, the ad was severely misleading. It claims Butler cited a loophole in a case and ""almost jeopardized the prosecution of a murderer.""
Except Butler was the only dissenter in the 6-1 decision, and according to FactCheck.org, the majority made it ""clear they were forging a new legal path"" in making their decision. Butler actually took the position that most adhered to the constitution, something far from the ""activist judge"" label Gableman tried to stick on him.
So now that Butler lost, what can we do? Last Wednesday, the Government Accountability Board decided it would consider regulating special interest ads in upcoming elections. After the malicious and deceiving ads in this race, this is a good first step; however, it's not enough.
Regulating special interests would only require the groups to disclose their donors, but that doesn't mean they still won't spend the money. It also doesn't stop someone like Gableman, who lied through his teeth by claiming he was running a positive campaign, to run such vile filth on the air.
If we can't control these misleading ads, which also led to a victory for Annette Zeigler last year, then we need to end the election of judges in Wisconsin. We did it at the federal level and in 24 other states, why not here? A few weeks ago, state Rep. Fred Kissler, D-Milwaukee, called for an amendment to the state constitution that would do just that.
This would take up to five years since it would have to be put to a vote, but I don't care - I'm willing to wait. With appointment power, we never would have had Zeigler - whom the Wisconsin Judicial Commission publicly reprimanded for judicial misconduct - and Gableman - whose campaign has caused a rebuke from Democrats and Republicans alike - on the court.
Tuesday was a shameful day in Wisconsin - a day where special interests and loathsome tactics won out. Let's not let it happen again.
Erik Opsal is a senior majoring in journalism and political science. Please send responses to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
