Burke is not without vulnerabilities. She can still come off uneasy on the stump or overly rehearsed in her remarks. When we sat down to talk, a handwritten note on the table reminded her to “Emanate strength and warmth.”
In light of the recent news of her campaign’s rampant plagiarism, this gave me a chuckle too.
She told me that she vets most of her campaign’s emails and compiled her own research on meaty policy issues, until the campaign hired a research director. Even so, a few weeks after we met, it came to light that sections of her jobs plan were cribbed from those of previous Democratic gubernatorial candidates. An outside consultant, who’d worked on the campaigns of the other candidates, was fired as a result.
A new Marquette University Law School poll on Wednesday showed Gov. Scott Walker with a 50%-45% lead over challenger Mary Burke among likely voters.
Among registered voters, Walker leads 46%-45%.
The good news is that Walker is moving in the right direction in the polls. With a 5 point lead 5 weeks out from the election, the national money may start drying up for Burke.
Schimel is also moving in the right direction.
In the race for attorney general, Waukesha County District Attorney Brad Schimel, a Republican, leads Jefferson County District Attorney Susan Happ, a Democrat, among likely voters, 41%-39%.
Among registered voters, Schimel and Happ are tied at 37%, with 22% undecided.
One would think we would see this in the MJS as a story, but wow…
A veteran reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said Monday she was prevented from talking to the crowd during an event at which First Lady Michelle Obama spoke.
Michelle was appearing Monday on behalf of Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke.
The reporter, Meg Kissinger, said she was “creeped out” by the Orwellian encounter with officials from the White House and the Burke campaign. She posted her frustration on her Facebook page:
Mary Burke is finally starting to peek out from under her media-enabled “generic anti-Walker candidate” persona and offer a sliver of actual policy positions. Last week she let us know that she completely supports the controversial Common Core standards and completely opposes statewide school choice.
Given Burke’s stint as a member of the Madison School Board and her demonstrated adherence to the agenda of the teachers union, her support of Common Core comes as no surprise. The problem for Burke is that opposition to Common Core is not a conservative vs. liberal or Democrat vs. Republican issue. The opposition cuts across ideological and partisan lines. It is not an issue that polls highly when people are asked to state important issues, but the people who oppose it are passionate.
Gov. Scott Walker has stated that he would like the Legislature to take up the issue of Common Core in the next session with the goal of replacing the federal Common Core standards with a Wisconsin version. If Walker supports replacing Common Core with a state standard, Burke must support keeping Common Core. It is a slightly risky position for her to take a strong stance on in what is billed to be a very close election.
On the issue of school choice, Burke is taking an even greater risk. Her stated position is that she supports keeping school choice in Milwaukee and Racine, but opposes it as a statewide program. One might remember that Walker and the Republicans made a tepid effort to expand school choice a couple of years ago, but capped it at a thousand students statewide.
The problem for Burke on this issue is two-fold. First, school choice enjoys strong support in Wisconsin. This makes sense since Wisconsin was a pioneer in school choice and has it in Milwaukee for a generation. It is not new and Wisconsinites have watched the school choice program in Milwaukee thrive for the benefit of thousands of kids.
A Public Opinion Strategies poll from last year shows that a full 61 percent of Wisconsin citizens support school choice. More troubling for Burke is that the same poll shows that school choice enjoys 83 percent support among blacks and Hispanics. Burke is already having trouble getting the Democratic base excited about her campaign. Angering a large contingent of the Democratic base by taking a strident stance against school choice would seem unwise.
Burke’s second problem on the issue of school choice is that her position is utterly incoherent. Burke opposes school choice because she says that it is “a drain on our public school system at a point in which we have very, very limited resources.”
On its face, that argument is utter rubbish. The money that follows a child to a choice school does not cost the public schools a dime. It is money that the public schools never receive, but it is also a child that they never have to spend a dime to educate. It is like when you go to McDonald’s for coffee instead of Starbucks. Your choice is not a drain on Starbucks. You were never their customer.
Further, if Burke believes that school choice is bad public policy and a drain on public education, then why would she want to keep it going in Milwaukee and Racine? What sense does it make for Burke to support continuing a policy that she believes is detrimental to education at all? And why would she only continue it in cities with large minority populations? The answers are as troubling as they are cynical. Burke has also read the polls and sees the overwhelming support for school choice in those cities. She is trying to split the baby by appeasing minority voters in Milwaukee and Racine while appeasing white liberals in the rest of the state.
It is good to see Burke finally taking a firm stance on some issues. Her choices shine a light on more of the reasons why she is not equipped to be the governor of Wisconsin.
(Owen Robinson’s column runs Tuesdays in the Daily News.)
“If you can’t trust her honesty and her integrity when she tells you that this is her plan, why would you trust her honesty and integrity on anything else she tells you about what she’ll do for Wisconsin or about Scott’s record?” Christie said. “You shouldn’t trust any of it.”
The most effective argument against expanding Wisconsin’s statewide voucher program is how much it could cost, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said Monday.
“We have to get out of the ideological warfare on this (issue) and let’s just talk dollars and cents, which resonates with just about everyone,” Burke said.
Burke’s comments were made to attendees of an invitation-only panel discussion at UW-Madison. About 40 people attended the event, which included National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García. The discussion was moderated by Wisconsin Education Association Council president Betsy Kippers.
Burke pointed to a $1.2 billion projected total annual cost of the voucher system if it expanded, which she said would likely be at the expense of programs and teachers in public schools.
“We’re all smart enough to realize that if there’s a certain amount of funding that is going to the voucher program, unless the taxes are raised to pay for that or it comes from another part of the budget, it’s going to come from the public schools,” Burke said.
Notice that Burke is talking to a crowd packed with public school advocates, so she talks about what she thinks is the best way to combat school choice without leaving any room for anyone who supports school choice.
But to her point… the financial argument always falls flat for me. Yes, if the state sends money to a choice school because a kid opts to attend it, those dollars are going to be taken from the public school. But also, the PUBLIC SCHOOL DOESN’T HAVE TO EDUCATE THE KID. When a kid goes to a choice school, the public school district incurs zero cost to educate that kid. And the voucher funded by the taxpayers is less than what it would take to educate that kid in the public schools.
Here’s what we have when kids use the school choice program: taxpayers spend less; public schools have no cost; child receives an education more to the family’s liking. Who loses here?
But that’s just it. Lefties don’t oppose school choice because of the financials, educational rigor, or anything related to what’s best for the kid. They oppose it because it decreases the market share of a government institution. And we can’t have that.
Once again we get some legitimate stories about Burke’s murky resume that were not uncovered by the mainstream media. This time from Media Trackers. It’s beginning to become reality that the alternate media is the only place to get real news anymore.
An email between then-Gov. Jim Doyle and his chief of staff, Susan Goodwin, show Doyle was looking to replace Mary Burke as commerce secretary a full month before Burke announced she would leave the job. The chain of events that followed Burke’s resignation leaves questions about whether Burke was ready to leave the position of her own accord.
Burke, who is the Democratic challenger to Gov. Scott Walker (R) this fall, served as Wisconsin’s commerce secretary between 2005 and November 2007. Burke announced her resignation from the post on October 12th, 2007. But an email between Doyle and Goodwin on September 12th, 2007, shows Doyle and Goodwin were already in the process of looking to replace Burke.
Burke and Doyle were both on a trade mission to China and Japan at the time of Doyle-Goodwin exchange. Records show Burke racking up thousands of dollars in expenses on the taxpayer paid trip just a month before her resignation – including 1st class flights that Media Trackers previously reported on.
Asked by reporters to define plagiarism, Burke said: “This, this probably, using words, exact words, from a source that doesn’t, that isn’t cited and isn’t attributable.”
She said she her jobs plan did not violate her principles.
Frankly, I agree with Burke. I’m sure that plagiarism doesn’t violate her principles.
Neenah District Administrator Mary Pfeiffer sent Burke a letter Friday “to express my disappointment regarding your use of our district as an example of your perceived negative impact of Act 10 on education,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by Post-Crescent Media.
“It is unfair and misleading to claim that Act 10 is the primary reason why one specific candidate chose to accept a position in Minnesota over an opening in the Neenah Joint School District,” Pfeiffer wrote. “There are many reasons why candidates choose to work in other districts and certainly some effects of Act 10 may factor into those decisions.”
In the letter, Pfeiffer noted several positive changes since Act 10, including lower unfunded liability, employee merit pay and staff salary increases.
Jim Strick, communications manager for the Neenah Joint School District, said “that (Act 10) isn’t what we understood as to why she didn’t take the job here.”
Burke has been getting away with peddling this falsehood on the campaign trail for months.
After months of being badgered for lacking an economic plan, Mary Burke released her much-heralded “Invest for Success” jobs plan March 25 of this year — the day after Gov. Scott Walker signed a $525 million tax cut into law. In releasing her plan, Burke condescendingly derided Walker’s 2010 plan saying, “I’ve seen eighth-grade term papers that have more work put into them.”
The news broke last week that substantial portions of Burke’s vaunted jobs plan was plagiarized from at least four other people. Even eighth-graders are expected to do their own work.
BuzzFeed broke the news. It is worth noting that it again took a national reporter to uncover bad news about Burke because the Wisconsin news media has been too invested in her success to be real journalists. BuzzFeed compared Burke’s jobs plan to those of other candidates and found that large passages were exactly the same as those from the jobs plans of Democratic gubernatorial candidates Ward Cammack, Jack Markell and Terry McAuliffe. A Wisconsin GOP aide also pointed out another passage copied from a White House news release.
Burke promptly blamed the plagiarism on a campaign consultant and fired the consultant. At the same time, she defended her jobs plan as her own saying, “I stand by it. I would not have put those ideas into my plan, if I didn’t think they were right for Wisconsin.” Which is it? Is the plagiarism a result of a rogue consultant or did the plan originate with Burke? She can’t have it both ways.
The most problematic aspect of this episode for Wisconsin voters is that Burke has touted her business acumen as the reason to elect her as governor state. Her Harvard MBA and private-sector executive experience were supposed to make us believe that she was supremely qualified to lead the state’s economy to the Promised Land. Now we find out that she was not even capable of producing her own campaign jobs plan.
A closer examination of Burke’s rsumperhaps explains why Burke was incapable of drafting her own jobs plan for Wisconsin. After earning her illustrious Harvard MBA and spending a couple of years as a consultant, she landed at her family’s company, Trek. From 1990 or 1991 to 1993 (Burke has given different dates for when she started at Trek), she was Trek’s director of European Operations. She claims to have been responsible for vastly expanding Trek in Europe at this time, but Trek has not verified her claims. Given the recent revelations of her taking credit for others’ work, her claims should be taken with a grain of salt.
After an exhausting two or three years at Trek and in her 30s, Burke took a two-year snowboarding sabbatical. She spent four months in Argentina with a boyfriend or just some friends, again her story has changed, and the rest of the time in Colorado. When asked about this period, she had to resort to old receipts and passports to remember what she was doing. Most people do not need to resort to documentation to answer simple questions about their own lives.
In 1995, now presumably rested, Burke returned to the family company for the next nine years where she does not even attempt to articulate any definable accomplishments. In 2005, she left Trek to be Gov. Jim Doyle’s commerce secretary. Her tenure there was unremarkable and she resigned in 2007 saying that her department “sat on the sidelines while other states vie to recruit new businesses.”
Burke was unemployed from 2007-12, but this did not stop her from generously giving almost $10,000 to President Barack Obama’s campaign. Finally, from 2008 to present, after self-financing the most expensive campaign for school board in state history, Burke has been a member of the part-time Madison School Board.
An examination of Burke’s job history explains why she was incapable or unwilling to come up with her own jobs plan for Wisconsin. Burke has only been gainfully employed for 17 of the 29 years since she graduated from Harvard in 1985. Twelve of those years were at her family’s company and two of them were as the commerce secretary. The remaining 12 years were spent doing what rich people have the luxury of doing — bumming around snowboarding, volunteering for pet causes and generally enjoying a life of leisure. It is a nice life, but not one with which most Wisconsinites can relate. And it is not a life that qualifies Burke to lead Wisconsin.
Burke decided to fill her jobs plan with plagiarized failed economic ideas of other liberals because she is unqualified to do anything else. It is as simple as that.
(Owen Robinson’s column runs Tuesdays in the Daily News.)
Geez. I just submitted a column about her other plagiarism and it’s already out of date.
Sections of Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke’s veterans and rural communities plans appear to copy text directly from a variety of sources.
The sources include, but are not limited to, academic journals and reports, and a local newspaper column.
In other instances, the sources are linked in plan’s footnotes, though Burke’s plan makes little effort to indicate that not just the source, but the words themselves were taken from the sources.
I’ll point out again that virtually every negative story about Burke comes from national news outlets. The Wisconsin media is seemingly incapable of finding these stories. Or, more likely, they are unwilling to do so.
Buzzfeed has broken a bombshell scandal: Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate directly lifted significant portions her jobs plan from three different Democrats: Delaware Governor Jack Markell, Tennessee gubernatorial candidate Ward Cammack, and Indiana gubernatorial candidate John Gregg.
Burke is accused of directly plagiarizing phrases, sentences, and even entire paragraphs from the jobs plans Markell produced in 2008, Cammack wrote in 2009, and Gregg released in 2012.
This shows again that Burke is a complete media fabrication. There’s no substance there. The debates should be fun to watch. And again I would point out that it took a national media outlet to catch this. Once again, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Madison State Journal, Appleton Post-Crescent, and all of the other Wisconsin mainstream media outlets are caught sleeping when it comes to any critical analysis of Burke.
Given the fact that the Democrats have dominated the media airwaves all summer, the John Doe prosecutors continue to operate for the benefit of the Burke campaign, and the mainstream media has completely passed on challenging Burke on anything of substance while hammering Walker, these polls are positive numbers for Walker. That being said, Walker still has a lot of work to do in the next 7 weeks to close the deal.
Excellent. This is an issue where two-thirds of the people support voter ID. She should make this a major campaign plank.
MADISON, Wis. – Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke supports repealing the requirement that voters present photo identification at the polls.
Wisconsin election officials were scrambling Monday to deal with a federal appeals court’s ruling reinstating the requirement that voters show photo identification when casting ballots.
The law had been on hold, after being in effect only for the low-turnout February 2012 primary, following a series of court orders blocking it. But a three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, just hours after hearing oral arguments, said late Friday that the state could proceed with implementing the law while it weighs the merits of the case.
[…]
“We’re all in a holding pattern right now waiting for clarification,” Albrecht said.
Perhaps it is just the reporter’s choice of the word “scrambling,” but why is there scrambling? And why are clerks in a “holding pattern?” This law has been on the books for three years. It has been held up in court for a while, but there was always a very good chance that it would pass constitutional muster. Even if it fell short, there was a very good chance that the Republican-led legislature would tweak it to make sure it was okay with the courts. After all, over 30 states already have some form of Voter ID. In other words, there was every reason to believe that this law would come into force in Wisconsin one way or another. Furthermore, the law was already active for one election – even if it was a primary election – before it was held up in court.
So why is there any “scrambling?” Wouldn’t a competent Government Accountability Board already have gone through the effort to prepare all relevant instructions and policies in preparation for the law’s implementation? If the GAB had done their job correctly, all that should have been necessary was to dust off the procedures from when they implemented the law the first time and move forward. I hope the reporter’s characterization of “scrambling” is overblown.
On another note from the same story, this is just funny:
“Scott Walker knows that we can win, and he believes that efforts to keep voters from getting to the polls is a win for Republicans,” Burke spokesman Joe Zepecki said in a fundraising email late Friday.
The law was passed in 2011 – three years ago and at least two years before Mary Burke even entered the scene. Walker hasn’t had anything to do with it since signing it. It has been in the hands of the courts. For Zepecki to suggest that Walker somehow got the 7th Circuit Court to lift the stay on the law because he “knows that [Burke] can win” is beyond ridiculous.
She would favor reinstatement of collective bargaining for public employees, especially in the education field, to help the education field remain competitive. She said she recently talked to a Neenah man whose daughter took a teaching job in Minnesota instead of her hometown because of better pay and benefits.
And once again the media lets her get away with it.
Her anecdote about the Neenah man she spoke to may be true. Of course, nobody has bothered to ask her who that man is or to verify the story. She could be making it up out of whole cloth. But it could be true.
But she uses the story to paint a picture of the effect of Act 10 and the Neenah School District that is absolutely false. As John McCormack did the job that Wisconsin media won’t do:
Burke didn’t explain what was so bad about the schools in Neenah, a city of 25,000 people about 40 miles south of Green Bay, but the district certainly isn’t having a hard time finding good teachers in the Walker era. “We probably get a couple hundred applications for every opening,” John Lehman, vice president of the Neenah school board and a Republican, told me. “After Act 10, we increased our starting salary from $34,000 to $40,500.”
Because of Act 10, Lehman said, the district reopened two elementary schools that had been closed after earlier budget cuts. Budget constraints were forcing the district to lay off 10 to 12 teachers each year. How many teachers have been laid off since Walker’s Act 10? “None,” said Lehman. The middle school has even begun offering Chinese language courses.
Burke seems to feel that she can just continue to spin this yarn of deception without any critical examination from the media.
MIDDLETON — Gov. Scott Walker says his Democratic challenger Mary Burke hasn’t addressed low graduation rates for black students as a member of the Madison school board and doesn’t want to save taxpayers money by implementing the law that effectively ended collective bargaining for teachers.
Mary Burke wants to be our next governor. Her record really only has two things to measure. First, she was an executive at her father’s company at a time it was outsourcing thousands of jobs to China. She left that company about a decade ago. Second, she’s been on the Madison School Board for 2 years. Other than that, she appears to have been fairly unemployed since leaving Trek. Given that her resume is so thin, we have to evaluate what is there.
In this case, her record on the Madison School Board is worth examining. Or is it somehow untoward to examine someone’s record nowadays? Perhaps the media would be so kind as to actually run some stories about her actions – and inactions – on that board.
“Scott Walker has given women the back of his hand. I know that is stark. I know that is direct. But that is reality,” Wasserman Schultz said at a round-table discussion in Milwaukee, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The Florida Democratic representative continued, extending her comments to the GOP.
“What Republican tea party extremists like Scott Walker are doing is they are grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back. It is not going to happen on our watch,” Wasserman Schultz said.
Of course everyone knew that the Democrats were going to push their phony “war on women” against Walker, but they are doing it without even a hint of sophistication. “Grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back?” Really? Caveman imagery? Fantasies about Governor Walker being violent toward women?
To be fair, Wasserman Schultz has demonstrated time and time again that she is an idiot. The record is replete with examples. But that is still no excuse for her despicable rhetoric. If Burke has any sense of decency, she will distance herself from Wasserman Schultz’s comments immediately.
After arriving in Milwaukee, the president was greeted by Col. James Locke, commander of the 128th Air Refueling Wing, and several Wisconsin politicians. That included Walker, Mayor Tom Barrett, Milwaukee County Exec Chris Abele and U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee.
Burke campaigned at Laborfest, but announced ahead of time she would not participate in the president’s public event, saying it would not be appropriate because it was an official White House stop.
The Democratic President of the United States comes to Milwaukee. The Republican governor shows up to greet him at the airport as he should. The Democratic candidate for governor is at the same event, but decides to completely avoid being seen with the POTUS.
Burke’s excuse for not greeting or appearing with Obama is a farce. She says that since Obama is visiting in his official capacity, it would be unseemly for her to be there since she is campaigning. Rubbish. Obama was here to campaign. Just listen to his speech and that is clear. And even if he was here as POTUS and not the Campaigner in Chief, there would have been nothing untoward about Burke appearing with him.
Even though Burke’s excuse is flimsy, her campaign logic is interesting. It is obvious that she does not want to be linked too closely to the president because his popularity is sagging and his policies are crashing. And even though Wisconsin voted for Obama twice, it also voted for Scott Walker twice. Yet Burke is trying to have her cake and eat it too. She did meet with Obama privately (apparently it is OK to plot campaign strategy with him in private when he is visiting Milwaukee in his official capacity) and tweeted:
“Great chat w/ @BarackObama in Mke abt WI mfging. Look fwd to seeing him again b4 11/4…esp if its after the @Packers beat da Bears – mb.”
I wonder how this looks to the Democrats in the base. Is it a good thing or a bad thing for them that Burke is running away from Obama?
