How Ed Garvey helped elect Herb Kohl

This note from the Capital Times' recent canonization of Ed Garvey had some veterans of Herb Kohl's 1988 campaign chuckling:

Garvey has been more closely associated with the La Follette legacy than any other figure in the past quarter-century. His campaigns for the U.S. Senate in the 1980s renewed the progressive coalition in the state that made possible the victories of Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold. His 1998 campaign for governor, run against odds every bit as daunting as those faced by La Follette in 1924, drew tens of thousands of disaffected voters to the polls - helping to re-elect Feingold to the U.S. Senate and to elect a young progressive named Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. House.

Garvey, who got 11% of the vote and finished third in a four-way primary that year, "made Kohl's victory possible" by running an attack ad on TV -- "Attack of the Brain Polluters" -- that showed people running from monsters with TV sets for heads. The TVs were showing a Kohl commercial.

I'm pretty sure that must be what put Herb over the top in November. They were so bad they probably did help him win the primary.

I don't recall whether Garvey even got around to endorsing Kohl after the primary, and he certainly didn't campaign for him.