State Sen. Kathleen Vinehout (D-Alma) Announces She Will Not Run for WI Governor

Earlier today, Wisconsin State Senator Kathleen Vinehout (D-Alma) announced that she will not run for Governor against millionaire Mary Burke. (Please see this article from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel for further details.) From her statement:

“The severity of the injury received in the car accident last month — a splintering of the bone in my upper right arm — and the time required to recover and rehabilitate make it impossible for me to run the intense, grass roots campaign that I want to run and would be necessary to win. …I wish success to Mary Burke and others who may offer their time and talents in leading our state.”

Folks, I knew this news was coming, but I’m still upset by it. As I wrote back in October, Mary Burke is an untested, unqualified candidate. Burke does not understand anything about the poor or those looking for work, has shown no empathy, either, and has offered no solutions as to how to grow the economy in the Southeastern Wisconsin area. Whereas Kathleen Vinehout is an eminently qualified candidate, a centrist who’s won election and re-election in a Republican-dominated area, someone who’s been both a dairy farmer and a college professor — and someone who was so committed to getting elected to the Senate that she sold off her own dairy herd to do it.

As I said in October:

From this vantage point, the only thing Burke has to offer is a whole lot of her own money to throw into the governor’s race.  She has no record to run on.  She has no idea how to improve things as a Governor because she’s never been elected to public office (excepting her current stint on the Madison school board).  She officially has “no platform” and has made “no promises,” according to the Wisconsin State Journal . . .

While I completely understand Sen. Vinehout’s position — she was in a nasty car accident in a snowstorm that left her arm with a nasty fracture requiring an eight-hour surgery to put back together, and substantial rehab must now be required — it still makes me extremely upset.

Vinehout doesn’t have a lot of money, you see.  But she has the right values for Wisconsin.  She understands, as Mary Burke doesn’t, the plight of the working man and woman — she understands the self-employed, the unemployed, the fully employed, and works hard for every last one of us.

I am deeply impressed by Sen. Vinehout, and wish her all the luck in the world going forward.  But her not running for Governor at this time — while completely understandable on a personal level — is a huge loss for Wisconsin.

And I refuse to say otherwise.