Who Leaked the Hong Memo?

Last week the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a fawning piece on Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong. The big news in that glowing profile was that the paper had obtained a copy of a memo written by a consultant for presumptive Republican nominee Tom Tiffany.

In that memo the consultants tell their client that Hong is likely to win the nomination and that she has dangerous liberal ideas that are attractive to voters and which he’d better start attacking real soon.

Here’s the key passage from the story written by former Cap Times reporter Jesse Opoien:

It’s enough that consultants for U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany’s campaign are urging the Republican candidate to treat her as a “very probable nominee” whose “combination of grassroots momentum, unapologetically progressive ideology, and a platform centered on high turnout makes her uniquely dangerous in the general election,” according to a campaign memo leaked to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The subject line of the memo, prepared by consultants Clinton Soffer and Chris Hansen: “We Need To Take Francesca Hong Seriously.”

All of this was too good to be true for Hong. Having “grassroots momentum” and being “unapologetically progressive” never hurt anybody in a Democratic primary. And, for good measure, for those Democrats like me, who just want to win, the memo warns that she’s “uniquely dangerous in a general election.”

That memo could not have been better for Hong had she written it herself. She will get endless fundraising mileage out of it. To be both feared and hated by the evil Tom Tiffany, what could be better? In an era when politics is all about anger, this will bring the rage among Hong’s supporters and other Democrats to a fever pitch.

All of which makes me suspicious. The central question is who leaked the memo? And a follow-up question I have is why the Journal Sentinel didn’t write about that first question. The story gives no indication of how they came upon this internal document and yet that’s the most crucial part of the whole story.

Here are two things we know. It was very, very good press for Hong. And Hong is exactly the candidate Tiffany wants to face come November. While all seven Democratic candidates have some chance of beating him, I’d say there are five with a better than even chance of doing that and two — Hong and Mandela Barnes — whose chances are less than 50%. And between Hong and Barnes, Hong is easily the most beatable. She proclaims herself to be a socialist and she still defends the idea that we should defund the police. This makes her an excellent candidate for Mayor of Madison. For governor of a purple state, well, not so much.

So, since the leak was in both Hong and Tiffany’s best interests, where did it come from? Is it crazy to suggest that it was a set up? That the memo was ginned up by Tiffany’s consultants and then intentionally leaked as a way of boosting the candidacy of his weakest potential opponent?

It’s not like this would be a novel idea in politics. As a matter of fact, for years Democrats have been boosting the candidacies of the most radical candidates in Republican primaries with the hope of having a better shot in the general election. It is, in fact, sleazy, but it’s also politics where the bar for sleaze is somewhat low.

What troubles me about the Journal Sentinel article is that they expressed such little interest in exploring for their readers the central question: who leaked the memo and why?