Jim Sullivan’s guide to winning friends and influencing people

According to Milwaukee County Executive candidate Jim Sullivan, the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors should have rolled over and played dead when then-County Executive Scott Walker proposed his yearly budgets, instead of acting like responsible elected officials and actually representing the citizens who elected them:

“I think that had the County Board taken a different tack and, in 2003 when Scott Walker was proposing his first budget basically just rubber stamped what he asked, I think that his political career would have been over a long time ago,” Sullivan said.

Surely Jim Sullivan’s comments won’t win him many friends among the members of the Board of Supervisors, who did a heck of a job of bringing Scott Walker’s fantasy-based budgets back into reality.

ED. NOTE: Milwaukee County Supervisor Marina Dimitrijevic has stated she was contacted by the Sullivan campaign, which clarified that Sullivan had been quoted incorrectly and that he actually noted how VERY responsible the Board was in correcting Walker’s Budgets.

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15 thoughts on “Jim Sullivan’s guide to winning friends and influencing people

  1. I think the point he was trying to make, is if they would of actually allowed one of walkers budgets to stand the state would of seen how bad and unqualified he really is. Instead. their competence in the wake of his incompetence, allowed him to campaign on always cutting taxes even though the board would not allow it.

    SO I think he means they should have called his bluff once and then they would not have had to do it again.

  2. @Zach I think it is pretty clear what Jim was saying. Had they not done the hard work for Scott Walker they may have exposed his flaws.

  3. I believe he was misquoted. Seriously. I will try to find confirmation of that. It makes him sound like he blamed the board for not allowing Walker’s mismanagement to be exposed.

  4. Sullivan’s right. It’s all a game to Walker and his supporters, and he was never serious about imposing his proposed budget on the people of Milwaukee County. The County Board should have called the bluff, and he’d be a historical footnote today. Instead he got to pose as “holding the line” on taxes and blamed the big, bad County Board for the poor results that followed.

    We’ll see how fake and disastrous a Walker budget actual is over the next few months, and then we’ll have to end his career as an executive the same way it started. With a recall of a corrupt runt helping his buddies feed off the taxpayer trough.

  5. Wow, doing Abele’s dirty work by repeating an incorrect quote from the JS that was debunked three days ago. Everyone else on here understood what Sullivan was saying, why can’t you Zach?

  6. If I’ve got it wrong, I’ll be happy to correct myself; just point me in the right direction with a link proving this has been debunked and that Sullivan was misquoted.

  7. And for the record, I fail to understand how allowing Scott Walker’s proposed budgets to stand would have been a good thing for the residents of Milwaukee County, the residents the folks on the Board of Supervisors were elected to represent. Sure, allowing Walker’s budgets to be enacted without changes would have been great politics and may have ended Walker’s career in elected office, but it would have been the residents who ultimately suffered the consequences if the board had rubber stamped those budgets.

  8. Did he say the supervisors SHOULD have rubber-stamped the budget and made Walker fail, or did he say that IF the supervisors had rubber-stamped the budget, he would have failed?

    The former, I agree, is irresponsible and shouldn’t come out of a candidate’s mouth in public (even if he believes it personally). The latter is just more of a cause-effect statement and I don’t see a lot wrong with it.I’ve been in many situations where I’ve cleaned up messes that would have sunk other people (my old boss, for one) and it would be very accurate to say, “if Stacie had just copied and pasted the weird notes Old Boss gave her, he would have been exposed at the meeting with Big Client as losing it.”

    The JS article makes it unclear and leaves out context. Surprise, surprise.

  9. It’s too bad the election is so close, or you could “sit down” with Jim Sullivan just like you did with Chris Abele, and ask him yourself.

    If I were on the board when Walker was co. exec., I could not have allowed his cuts to go by uncontested. In a hypothetical world, yes, Walker’s cuts could have gone uncontested. But we might as well speculate on how the ultra-conservative state government may undergo self-fission in a year, or how a future county board might do. Instead, we could ask the people who’re there now what they think, or better yet, ask the candidate himself rather than parading an out-of-context piece of misreporting as a de facto final judgment on a candidate.

    1. I “sat down” with Jim Sullivan several weeks ago, before this quote came out. However, the quote has been clarified and I’ve made the appropriate corrections.

      Thanks for your feedback!

        1. I posted my correction about an hour ago….after I got home from work and read the comments left by you and John.

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