Unreliable, Big Spending 'Conservative' Joins GOP Primary Field.
That should be the headline on former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson's announcement Sunday that he is a GOP presidential wannabe.
Upon joining Bush W's cabinet in 2001 in his fourth term as Wisconsin's Governor, Tommy Thompson left behind for state taxpayers a $3.2 billion state budget deficit.
And another $5 billion in unfunded major highway plans, so if that's reliable conservative political practice and leadership, the GOP is in more trouble than we'd thought.
One more Wisconsin/Thompson bit of history: Tommy's maverick brother Ed (not to be confused with Law-and-Order Fred), a politico and restauranteur from small town Tomah, Wisconsin, ran for Governor as a Libertarian in the 2002, post-Tommy gubernatorial election.
A more reliable fiscal conservative than Tommy, Ed publicly opposed many of the big highway plans that his free-spending brother had pushed into the deficit-ridden state transportation fund.
Until legislators shut down its so-called "indexing" last year, Wisconsin's excessively high gas tax, in the neighborhood of 31-cents a gallon, was automatically raised about a penny every year on April Fool's Day to finance Tommy's road-building boom, and had become the first or second highest gas tax in the nation.
Ed's presence on the ballot drew some conservative votes from a weak, acting Governor and helped get then-Attorney General Jim Doyle, a Democrat and Tommy Thompson nemesis, elected Governor with less than 50% of the vote.
Doyle was re-elected in 2006, and one of his touted, first-term achievements was closing the budget deficit he inherited from that reliable conservative, Tommy Thompson.