Judicial Elections

The best way to win an election against a judge running for re-election is to call them soft on crime.

Crime, of course, is not the real motive for anyone who pumps money into a judicial election. People who are subject to significant hazard of mugging, rape, drive-by shootings, extortion, daily intimidation on the street, do not have the money to buy multiple TV ads in major markets. Besides, the criminal defendants may be their second cousins.

The big money in judicial races comes from wealthy business leagues, who don't want to be accountable to the law. Of course, they can't tell the voters that. If any of us saw a TV commercial announcing "Judge Simon F. McGillicutty requires manufacturers who sell children's toys lined with lead paint to reimburse families for medical costs," naturally the good judge would be re-elected by a landslide.

Instead, the commercials say things like "Simon McGillicutty sentenced a convicted killer to less than half the maximum term allowed by law." Never mind that this was a case of vehicular homicide while intoxicated, with a sentence of twenty years rather than forty. Never mind the two dozen first degree intentional homicides where the sentence was life plus forty years.

It is not the job of any judge to be soft on crime, nor is it their job to be tough on crime, it is their job to examine each individual case according to the law and the facts, delivering justice every time. One day it might be the vicious psychopath who raped and murdered your daughter. The next case might be your saintly grandmother, up for trial as a drug king-pin because a real drug dealer cut a deal for a low sentence and named grandma as his supplier. All it takes is a little perjury, and grandma is sentenced to life in prison.

But we don't personally know the candidates, so we run like sheep, herded by colorful TV commercials.

The cold hard question is not, why are these rich people (with money to burn on judicial campaigns) so mean and nasty? Bullies are bullies. If they had a conscience, and acted on it, we wouldn't need so many laws to protect consumers, employees, children, the folks downstream from the pollution... The real question is, why do judges running for re-election cringe so defensively in the face of these bullies?

Professional campaign managers seem to believe that the only antidote to "soft on crime" bullying is more of the same. For example, somebody working for Justice Louis Butler's re-election campaign for the Wisconsin Supreme Court thought it would be cool to put on TV that Justice Butler voted against criminal defendants 97% of the time. That probably just played into the hands of his challenger. It sends a message that the challenger's campaign is asking the right questions, so obviously the man who asked the question is the one to vote for. It also suggests, ah-hah, Justice Butler has something to hide here. He doth protest too much!

The same thing happened in 2006 in the race for Wisconsin attorney general, between J.B. Van Hollen and Kathleen Falk. One has to sympathize with Van Hollen. He got into the Republican primary expecting to challenge an incumbent attorney general who had taken an arrest for DUI, in a state car, while serving as attorney general. Darn, the Democratic voters dumped her for a fresh clean face, and he had to find some other excuse for himself.

He ran one commercial after another, showing a distorted, black and white photo of Falk, walking in slow motion, while the most obnoxious narration that a male voice is capable of called her unqualified because she had never been a district attorney. Its the phony "tough on crime" issue again. (From the sound of these commercials, there is one guy in a studio somewhere who has made his living for the past thirty years doing nothing but making this kind of commercial. It's always the same nasty voice-over.)

What did Falk's campaign do? They dug up some obscure case of Van Hollen's where a convicted killer had briefly won an appeal over some misconduct by Van Hollen. It was a desperate, weak, knee-jerk move, and it backfired for reasons that should have been obvious. First, it confirmed Van Hollen's phony issue, which became the central point of the campaign. Second, since the felon did eventually get sentenced to life in prison, it was easily kicked back in Falk's face by a follow-up commercial.

All Kathleen Falk needed to do was come on her own commercials, in person, in living color, smiling like she did at the Labor Day parade the previous September, just be her own lively, vivacious self on camera, and talk a little about the experience she DID have as an assistant attorney general, talk about what the attorney general's job IS (they don't go into court to argue in front of juries), and talk about what she did hope to accomplish in the office. She could have won by a landslide.

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, even before he really figured out what he was going to do about the Depression, before he was even committed to a minimum wage law or a National Labor Relations Act, when he was still relying on a viciously anti-union retired general to get economic recovery rolling, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

The only thing we have to fear from fear-mongering candidates for judge, or attorney general, is the paralysis of assuming that their way is the winning way, and the only way to beat them is to one-up them with sleaze. When everything on the airways is garbage, the sloppiest garbage eater is going to win the election. How about a bold burst of light in the darkness to get attention?