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The candidates running for governor have all spent a lot of time – and hot air ­– promising to create more jobs for Wisconsin. Yet all three – Democrat Tom Barrett and Republicans Mark Neumann and Scott Walker – have filled top positions in their campaigns with political pros from out of state.

Gone are the days when Wisconsin’s campaigners came up through party ranks together as legislative aides and policy wonks. Today, calling the shots in the governor’s race are outsiders – hired guns whose credentials reach from Minnesota to Pennsylvania, Tennessee to California, New York to Washington D.C.

illustration by adrian palomo

One political observer points to the Capitol caucus scandal of the early 2000s as a reason why more “imports” are in the field. The misconduct probe, which led to the conviction of five lawmakers, focused largely on the illegal use of government staff to do campaign work on state time.

“When the caucus system blew up, we lost the farm team of people who had an interest in that sort of campaign work,” says Steve Baas, who worked for Gov. Tommy Thompson and Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, a caucus scandal casualty now awaiting a retrial of felony convictions that were overturned on appeal.

In the pre-caucus scandal days, aides at the end of a legislative session would move easily from policy work to political campaigning. On the Republican side, for instance, several aides to Gov. Thompson went on to work for his reelection campaigns. Scott Jensen served as Thompson’s chief of staff and went on to run his 1990 campaign. Chief of Staff Bill McCoshen followed the same path, running the former governor’s 1994 campaign. And Thompson press secretary Darrin Schmitz took on the 1998 campaign.

“You just don’t see that progression anymore,” adds Baas, now director of governmental affairs for the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce. “There were more hard chargers back in the day. If you were hungry, you could move up faster, take a leave of absence and run campaigns. In the wake of the caucus scandal, a lot more staff take a ‘That’s not my job’ attitude… Some of it is caution, some of it is culture.”

Here’s a run-down of the campaign managers working for the three candidates:

Tom Barrett

While Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s close friend and chief of staff Patrick Curley has run several Barrett campaigns, Curley remains at City Hall while outsider Bill Hyers manages the mayor’s second attempt at capturing the governor’s seat. Hyers has several high-profile races under his belt. He worked on John Edwards’ campaign for president in 2004, ran New York Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand’s campaign in 2006 and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s campaign in 2007 before working on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 and moving to a White House position after the election. Campaigns & Elections’ Politics magazine named Hyers, a native of Minnesota, one of its 2008 Rising Stars, a distinction shared by the likes of James Carville, Rahm Emanuel, Karen Hughes, Laura Ingraham, Ralph Reed and George Stephanopoulos.

Mark Neumann

Former Congressman Mark Neumann is now on his third campaign manager – all of them from out-of-state – a fact that is not lost on Scott Walker campaigners. “Mark Neumann’s campaign is simply not resonating with voters,” says Jill Bader with the Walker camp, “so it is not surprising that it has been plagued by staff turnover and lacking of any real grassroots support from the start.” Need we say that Neumann disputes this contention?

Neumann’s first campaign manager was Rick Wiley, an Illinois native (and Cubs fan) who moved north after running several campaigns to work as political director for the Republican Party of Wisconsin from 2001 to 2004 and then as executive director from 2005 to 2007. Wiley left to work on Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign, then managed the unsuccessful run for Texas governor by U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison before signing on with Neumann last year. He left camp after a few weeks to work for the Republican National Committee’s western region.

Neumann next hired Bruce Pfaff, chief of staff for state Sen. Ted Kanavas (R-Brookfield) for more than two years in the early 2000s. He was communications director for Congresswoman Jean Schmidt of Cincinnati when he was tapped as Neumann’s manager, but went back to Ohio after five months on the campaign trail.

In March, Neumann hired California-based Chip Englander to take over. Englander is a former chief of staff for California Assemblyman Joel Anderson and is listed on LinkedIn as a vice president at the Sacramento office of Mercury Public Affairs, which is owned by Omnicom Group, a global advertising and marketing company.

“I don’t know Jack Shit about him, and nobody does,” says one Democratic consultant, off-the-record, of course.

Scott Walker

The campaign manager for Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker is homegrown through and through, a Madison insider from the start. Keith Gilkes, a UW grad with a political science degree, first interned for then-state Rep. Carol Owens (R-Oshkosh) before getting hired as the field rep for Sheila Harsdorf’s successful state senate bid in 2000. After starting his own Madison consulting firm, the Champion Group, in 2005, Gilkes worked with legislative leaders at the Senate Republican Caucus and the state GOP headquarters, and ran a winning campaign for Sen. Dan Karpanke (R-La Crosse). He went back to the Capitol in 2007 as chief of staff to Sen. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) before joining the Walker campaign in March 2009.

Walker has, however, brought in an outsider as communications director. Jill Bader, in her home state of Tennessee, worked on the campaigns of two U.S. senators – Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander – before taking a job as press secretary for the Senate Republican Conference in Washington D.C.

Calling on outside pros to run statewide races seems to be the trend, something that Baas, himself homegrown, laments.

“There was a time when everybody knew everybody. We were on the same softball teams,” he recalls. “You’d face off on the campaigns during the day, ditch your candidates and have a beer at night and talk about how bad your candidate sucked.”

Now it will be up to others to bad mouth the candidates.

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