After the caucus scandal rocked the Wisconsin legislature in 2001, one would hope that politicians would have learned a simple lesson: Do not use any of the resources that the state gives you to serve Wisconsin residents for your own political campaigns.
Alas, Wisconsin's current Secretary of State Doug La Follette needs some lessons in remedial ethics.
Last week the State Ethics Board fined La Follette 500 dollars for improperly using his state- issued laptop to write a campaign announcement and send 75 campaign related e-mails. La Follette claimed that the violations were simply accidents and admitted that it was wrong to use his state- issued laptop for his campaign back in June. He pledged to not do that anymore.
But during its investigation, the Ethics Board discovered that many of the campaign-related e-mails had been sent after La Follette's admission of guilt and public apology earlier this summer.
Unlike in the caucus scandal, where politicians from both parties used state employees paid with taxpayer dollars to run their personal election campaigns, La Follette has not wasted any of the taxpayer's money.
La Follette's indiscretions were minor, but that is what makes this situation so utterly baffling. He had little to gain from using his state computer for campaign work that could easily have been done on a personal computer, but did it anyway, repeatedly.
La Follette is hardly the new kid on the block. He has been Secretary of State for 28 of the last 32 years and continuously since 1982.
Of course, the office of Secretary of State is not the prestigious position it once was. In 1974, the year that La Follette took office, the Wisconsin Legislature stripped the Secretary of State of its primary duty, running elections, when it created the Elections Board. In 1996, the office had its budget cut by 80 percent, from 47 employees to eight.
Today, to hear La Follette himself describe it, the Secretary of State office acts like the administrative assistant for the state bureaucracy in Wisconsin, directing confused citizens to the offices that actually do something.
However, the Secretary of State remains the third highest office in Wisconsin. The question remains: Do we really want somebody who seems incapable of adhering to the states high profile ethics policy, a heart attack and car crash away from the governor's mansion in Maple Bluff?
While he is not ripping off the Wisconsin tax-payers, his actions should at least make voters question the competence of a man who cannot follow relatively simple policy even after his indiscretions were publicly exposed.
But perhaps his campaigning muscles are a little rusty. For the first time since 1990 La Follette will face a democratic challenger, Scott Ross, in the primary on September 12.
