WI-08: Who’s Your Candidate?

by Kerry Thomas

August 10, 2006

On September 12 voters in Wisconsin’s 8^th Congressional District will be asked to narrow the field of candidates to see who will succeed outgoing Congressman Mark Green. The best choice in this race is Terri McCormick.

We need someone in Washington who can do the right thing, no matter what the political cost. We need someone who will be honest with us, someone who hasn’t been bought by the big money lobbyists. We need a Representative who cares more about their constituents than about advancing their own political career. As the world stands at the brink of World War III, we no longer have the luxury of playing such childish political games.

Republicans have a clear choice, between a career politician anointed by party bosses, breaking the rules and cutting back room deals with one another, or an independent successful small business owner who, among her other accomplishments, founded Wisconsin’s charter school movement.

Terri McCormick has real world experience. She hasn’t spent a lifetime in Madison. Her innovative ideas have won her recognition and awards from the Small Business Administration, and served as the model for small business regulatory reform across America. She’s put that experience to work chairing the Assembly’s Economic Development Committee.

In her short time in the Assembly, Terri McCormick has made her mark. She has exhibited a fierce independence, and has been a champion for clean campaigns and election reforms, reforms that have been blocked by her primary opponent. She’s developed legislation that would have reformed Wisconsin’s health insurance system. And Republicans throughout Wisconsin are claiming credit for her legislation providing full property tax credits for disabled veterans.

Unlike her opponents, Terri has posted a detailed series of specific proposals on her website, mccormickforcongress.com.

If you want your Representative in Congress to be honest, intelligent, creative, articulate, independent, and able to write legislation that utilizes innovative solutions to fix complex problems, then you would do well to consider Terri McCormick as your candidate.

It comes down to questions of honesty, integrity and character.

Terri McCormick says “I am not going to be beholding to anybody but the people of the 8^th District." Too bad the same cannot be said for her opponents. Her primary opponent has never been accused of being innovative or independent.

If you like the way professional politicians buy and sell their votes in Washington…

If you’re happy with letting party bosses pick your Representative for you…

If you’re comfortable with a RINO who will act as a rubber stamp for those party bosses…

If your vote can be bought with an endless series of empty sound bites and mind numbed advertising…

If you like knowing your Representative isn’t shy about accepting buckets of special interest cash, especially from contributors who have legislation pending before “their” Representative’s committee…

If you want a Representative who’d rather be at a Washington fundraiser than meeting with his constituents at a public forum…

If, as a taxpayer, you’re happy paying the $57,000 per hour Air Force One tab to fly the President in for a political fundraiser…

If you’re comfortable being able to buy access to your Representative with $500/plate and $1000/plate luncheons…

If you see nothing wrong when a candidate “reimburses” a well-known sports celebrity some $1600 after receiving that celebrity’s endorsement…

If you think it’s okay for a politician to use the Green Bay Packers trademarked logo in his fundraising letters without getting permission to use that logo from the Packers…

If you think it’s all right when a politician tries to trick the men and women who build fire trucks in Appleton into reading scripted endorsements for himself, when these same men and women never even heard of the politician in the scripts…

If you want your Representative to have almost 20 years of “experience” cloistered under the protective dome of the Capitol, but no experience outside of a college internship and a career in Madison…

If you want your Representative to be a career politician who portrays himself as an easy-going guy in public, but who carries on like a spoiled child, using threats and intimidation to bully other legislators behind the scenes…

If you want a Representative who uses his leadership position to safeguard Madison’s culture of corruption and kill efforts to reform Wisconsin’s political ethics laws…

If you want a Representative who claims residency at his vacation home in the 8^th District and collects per diem pay based on that residency claim, all while living in his suburban Madison area home…

If you want a Representative who claims to be a conservative, but who, as Assembly Speaker, allowed passage of State budgets that have spent Wisconsin into a more than $2.5 billion deficit…

If you want a Representative who obstructs things like the repeal of the automatic annual gas tax increase, Wisconsin’s GI Bill, health insurance and prescription drug reforms, and election reform, and then has the chutzpah to claim credit for their passage…

Then John Gard is definitely your candidate.

He’s not mine.