Walker gets it backwards, moves political operative in county executive's office

So Jim Villa, former Scott Walker chief of staff who left to start a political consulting business with Walker as a main client, is coming back to be Walker's chief of staff.

As someone who has put together a lot of campaigns and helped move personnel, including myself, back and forth from government to politics, I am baffled.

Two political types the Journal Sentinel asked, T. Bob Murphy and Jeff Fleming, gushed about what a great idea it was and how wonderful Villa is -- "Karl Rove without the baggage," said Murphy, who must be looking for some business.

Without the baggage? We'll get back to that in a minute.

But first the big picture. In most campaigns, when it gets to be campaign time and things heat up, an officeholder moves his top aide out of government and into the campaign. That's what Walker did with his re-election campaign for exec last year; Villa left the exec's office and ran the race.

It's what Jim Doyle did when Susan Goodwin moved from the AG's office to his gov campaign almost two years before the election. He did the same thing with Andy Cohn in his AG races. Tommy Thompson did it with Scooter Jensen. I could go on, but you get the idea. The time to move someone from a campaign job to a government job is after you win the election, not when you're running. When you're running they move in the other direction, from government to the campaign.

One reason to do that is for a candidate to put the person he/she trusts and relies on the most in charge of the campaign, which, frankly, is more important to the officeholder at that point than whatever government job the candidate currently holds.

The other is to get rid of all of those questions about whether the campaign is being run out of the candidate's government office. Putting Villa there now will guarantee that those questions are asked every day. He will be working under the microscope.

Now, back to the "no baggage" claim.

Let's start with this, from the Journal Sentinel story:

In an Aug. 25, 2004, interview, Walker acknowledged Villa's role as a conduit between Walker's office and political operatives setting up a Chicago campaign fund-raiser for him in January 2003, when Villa was in his first stint in county government as chief of staff. County e-mail records reviewed by the Journal Sentinel showed numerous contacts between Villa and P. Nicholas Hurtgen, a former Chicago investment broker who helped set up Walker's Windy City fund-raiser on Jan. 31, 2003.

In the 2004 interview, Walker said he hadn't been aware of Villa's apparent campaign work from the courthouse, which he said was "inappropriate." However, Walker said it appeared to have been only "a couple of times" that Villa replied to campaign-related e-mail from his courthouse computer instead of referring the writer to a campaign e-mail account.

Hurtgen, who was seeking county municipal bond business at the time of the Walker fund-raiser, is now under federal indictment on allegations of extortion and mail and wire fraud in connection with a hospital construction project in Illinois.

Villa last year said his e-mail exchanges with Hurtgen and others on the fund-raiser "may have been an inadvertent mistake" and were "a fairly isolated" accident. He wrote that in an Aug. 25, 2004, e-mail response to a reporter's question.

"Generally speaking I insisted that people contact me at home if they wanted to discuss politics," Villa wrote. "I had enough official business on my plate to keep me busy during the day."

No baggage? Just working on the taxpayer's dime to organize a fundraiser with a guy who is now an indicted felon?

Just last week, I revealed that Villa, while a political consultant working for Walker, had advanced and organized the controversial Walker Harley ride, paid for by taxpayers, in 2004.

If Walker thinks that having Villa in his office, making those arrangements, would have made the trip non-political, we are in for a very fun year.

One thing this does say: Walker is feeling the heat, feeling things are out of control, and reeling from the ongoing negative media coverage he's gotten from this year's Harley ride. By the way, Villa helped plan the 2005 ride, too, meeting in the county exec's office on Nov. 29 with Walker and others to discuss the route and plans, according to a document released as part of an open records request. More to come.

One more thing: I doubted it could be true, but Jessica McBride had the scoop on this move yesterday, Jessica syndrome notwithstanding.