Milwaukee County Executive elections: Ryan lost his own community in early returns Tuesday

Dumas has announced that he would not run for the mayor's office in deference to Council President Marvin Pratt.

I did not know that. Well, he's going to be a good soldier and do whatever he can to get his man (Pratt) elected to the Mayor's office. Then the big, fat paycheck will come.

If Dumas is successful in demonizing Walker, he may just get it. But I think that with the little revolution that happened Tuesday, most of the people of Milwaukee County are tired of this kind of crap. It's just a matter of how tired the people of the City of Milwaukee are. Something tells me the city proper will continue to be the mushrooms they've become (i.e., they flourish when kept in the dark and fed bull$#!+). Not all of them, just a majority.

First, I'll explain my "behind the times" comment. 8 years ago, the Democrats found themselves out of power in both New York City and Los Angeles (well, in the case of LA, the incoming mayor was someone who realized that it was much easier to win a general election than try to run in the primary where he belonged). While LA reverted to type, NYC is still being run by someone who calls himself a Republican (though I don't know just how Republican Michael Bloomberg is).

As good as Tuesday's election was for the county as a whole, I honestly don't see any hope for the city of Milwaukee. This was the "perfect" election for a conservative candidate. It was caused not by the end of a term, but by 181,000 citizens (countywide; I don't know the split between the city and the suburbs) who took matters into their own hands. One candidate (Walker) adopted the platform of wholesale change that this outpouring of dissatisfaction with the status quo suggested, and ran a masterful campaign that included the active pursuit of the one group of voters that was perceived to not have really participated in the recall Ament effort. The other candidate (Ryan) ran a horrid campaign with the message that all the discredited status quo needed was a massage and some more money to spend. As neither candidate was from the city of Milwaukee, there was no "hometown" bias. Walker lost the city by 3,383 votes, or 51.9%-48.1%.

Bear in mind that this vote total was in a virtually-fraud-free election. The Milwaukee Machine has demonstrated that they can come up with 3,000 votes out of whole cloth, so in reality, a conservative (or even a RINO) would start off with about a 6,400-vote hole in a "perfect" campaign, where he had the issues and a discredited status quo to run against. I honestly don't see how, unless the discredited politician himself runs, this can be overcome.

Unless Norquist decides to reverse course and run in 2004, I don't see the conditions for the "perfect" campaign coming together again. I hope I'm wrong, because I don't want to see Milwaukee continue down the spiral to decay.

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