Dog tracks were sure bet for Tommy

Either the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has a short institutional memory or it uses a very narrow definition of gambling, judging from its Sunday story about gambling-related contributors to candidates for governor.

Here's the sentence in question:

When Republican Tommy G. Thompson was governor from 1987 to 2001, he received about $200,000 in contributions from gambling interests.

Thompson got much more than that in one campaign cycle from would-be dog track owners, as he auctioned off the state's first dog track licenses in the late 1980s.

At the time, everyone believed having a dog track license was like having a license to print money. There were projections of hundreds of millions of dollars in profits every year for the lucky handful who were licensed.

Thompson's campaign systematically raised money from anyone with an interest in obtaining one of those licenses -- from the well-heeled, sometimes mob-connected, out-of-state investors, those who would build the tracks, the people who would blacktop the parking lots, practically down to the hot dog vendors.

The news media was oblivious, so, during the 1990 campaign for governor, Tom Loftus's campaign did the research, put it all together, and presented it to the Milwaukee Journal. It showed hundreds of thousands of dollars in dog track donations to Thompson. My recollection is that it was at least half a million and perhaps three-fourths of a million tied to dog track interests. [UPDATE: The total was $280,000 to $409,000.]

The newspaper, after checking the information and eliminating some donors Loftus had lifted, on the basis that they may have given for some other reason (a standard no longer in play), eventually ran a story about how much Thompson's shakedown of dog tracks had produced. It was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it was a one-day story, as I recall.

I don't know the exact number the paper used. I don't have the records or enough interest and ambition to look through microfilm to find it. But surely the clipping from 1990, although not online, is right in the newspaper's library/morgue for some enterprising reporter to find.

I say this not to employ the "everybody else did it" defense, but simply in hopes that someone might set the record straight, for historical purposes if nothing else.

The ironic postscript to the dog track story, of course, is that they didn't make any money but lost huge amounts once casinos came onto the Wisconsin scene. No one had anticipated that would happen. And now the battle is whether to convert a dog track into a casino. What would Tommy do? One thing we know for sure; he would raise a lot of money.