Racially Incendiary Burke Flyer Seeks to Rally Black Vote

Soooo, vote for the rich white chick so that brothas stop getting shot by white cops? Is this the message? pic.twitter.com/PWs0rIxZiU

— James T Harris (@JamesTHarris) October 31, 2014

With Democrat Mary Burke increasingly desperate to the point of panic, given the recent revelations of her mendacity concerning her career at her family business, and the embarrassment of President Obama’s flop at North Division High School in Milwaukee’s inner city, both of which preceded news that the prestigious and generally very accurate Marquette University Law School poll shows her trailing Governor Scott Walker by a full seven percentage points among those voters who will walk over broken glass, if necessary, to get to the polls, a new flyer exploits the deaths of three young black men and perverts history in an attempt to shore up her numbers in Wisconsin’s African-American community.

The recently produced flyer, seen above, targets the black community. The flyer has gone viral since it was first seen in Wisconsin, then shot across the Internet, from Arizona-based radio host James T. Harris, to Wisconsin’s Daily Independent. The flyer shows photos of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Dontre Hamilton; under each is a caption saying, e.g., “Michael Brown can’t vote,” with the overall slogan: “Don’t let anyone silence your voice. Vote Nov. 4th.”

The first two young men, of course, have been in the national news and most people are sufficiently familiar with the details of their deaths that they need no reiteration here; the last man’s death is a local phenomenon with which most are probably unfamiliar.

In May 2014, a Milwaukee police officer encountered a man apparently sleeping on a sidewalk in Red Arrow Park, in the downtown district of the city. According to news reports at the time, the officer roused the man and attempted to conduct a pat-down search. The young man, Dontre Hamilton, a schizophrenic apparently off his medications, reportedly seized the officer’s baton and proceeded to beat him with it; the officer responded by shooting the suspect and killing him.

The event was immediately politicized, as family members induced others to demonstrate in Red Arrow Park for “justice for Dontre.” Eventually, the shooting was ruled justifiable and no charges were proffered against the police officer, but the rallies and demonstrations have continued unabated. Last month, responding to the pressure, the Milwaukee Police chief fired the officer, stating that in his opinion the pat-down search, which apparently exacerbated Hamilton’s schizoid tendencies, was “unjustified.” This, in turn, has led to a dramatic showdown between the chief and the police union, which recently held a non-binding but still very stinging vote of no-confidence in the chief; 99.3% of the membership voted no-confidence (this number obviously includes a significant number of African-American officers on the force as well).

All of this comes against a background of rising chaos in the inner city: killings have risen sharply, along with all of the urban pathologies which feed and fuel them: drug and alcohol dependency, homelessness, joblessness, a failing school system (the only one in the state of Wisconsin to receive a failing grade from the state Department Public Instruction), and so on.

The reason that this particular flyer, which obviously seeks to portray the Democrats as the saviors of the urban community, is a perversion of reality in Milwaukee in particular is revealed by one simple fact: The last Republican mayor of Milwaukee left office in 1908. Since then, the city has had a succession of Democratic mayors, broken only by the times that Socialist mayors have been elected (the last of these, Frank P. Zeidler, left office in 1960). So, even if the Socialists were benign in the city’s history, the Democrats have owned Milwaukee, and with Milwaukee, all of Milwaukee’s ills, for an unbroken 54 years and counting.

Milwaukee is routinely listed among the 10 poorest cities in the United States. The fact that the city’s population in the 2010 census was 594,833, while in the 1950 U.S. census it was listed at 637,392, is indicative of the problems: Milwaukee is the greatest single reason for the exponential growth of the suburbs in the surrounding counties, principally Waukesha and Ozaukee, two of the most conservative counties in the state. There has been a very steady outflow of professionals, white-collar workers, and higher-skilled and higher-paid blue collar workers from the city, whether or not they continue to be employed there.

This outflow has been so serious and so pronounced that current mayor, Tom Barrett, fought tooth and claw, until finally defeated in the courts, to retain a Milwaukee ordinance obligating all city employees to reside within the city, a law which has cost the city considerable talent, on the one hand, and has, for what should be obvious reasons, been wildly unpopular with municipal employees. Barrett has repeatedly justified the ordinance, which the state legislature voted to invalidate last year, on the grounds that it would prevent the last of the city’s “middle class,” city employees, from leaving.

In short, Barrett himself is testifying that Milwaukee is such an unattractive place to live that most city employees, given their freedom, would choose to live elsewhere. Now that there is some evidence that black voters are beginning to become more aware that the cause of their misery may be related to the Democratic stranglehold on city and county government in Milwaukee, we see the Burke campaign saying, in essence, “vote for the wealthy white heiress from Madison on the Democratic ticket, because she’ll restrain the police, run by Democrat Tom Barrett’s hand-picked chief, from shooting young black men.”

To paraphrase one Jeremiah Wright, it is beginning to look as though the Democrats’ chickens are coming home to roost. Tuesday should be a very interesting day.