Madison, Wis. – National Review Online interviewed JoAnne Kloppenburg on Sunday night after she finished her rally. We were allotted five minutes by the campaign.
In brief, Kloppenburg believes that she can unseat state supreme-court justice David Prosser, a judicial conservative, on Tuesday. “The three of us who ran against Justice Prosser in the primary got just under 50 percent total, he got just over 50 percent,” she noted. “We have just magnified the reach of our message. We were building. I came out of nowhere in December. We have seen the momentum explode over the past few weeks.”
Here is an excerpt, via the tape, from our conversation:
NRO: What is your response to people who say, ‘Oh, you have all of the unions and labor activists behind you; you wouldn’t be independent.’
KLOPPENBURG: They can point to no word that I have ever said, to nothing that I have ever done in 22 years of working at the Department of Justice, to support any claim that I have anything other than a nonpartisan, independent and impartial approach to the law. To say that people who support me might be Democrats? There are also Republicans. There are many, many people; the people who are energized cross the political spectrum. I am not saying that I am different from Justice Prosser because of who is supporting him. I am using his own words, his own conduct. The kinds of things that he has tried to throw at the wall don’t stick. Nothing that he has said would stand up in court.
NRO: What is your response to Prosser’s continued criticism about your unwillingness to denounce the priest ad. You won’t swat back at that Greater Wisconsin Committee ad about his record as a district attorney. Why won’t you disavow that ad?
KLOPPENBURG: You know what? Third parties have First Amendment rights to run the ads of their own choosing. I’m not whining about all of the attack ads that are untrue about me.
NRO: Which ones are untrue?
KLOPPENBURG: All of them. They have been shown to be untrue by newspapers and by television stations in Wisconsin. But that’s not the message. People don’t want to talk about those third-party ads. They attack me, they attack him.
NRO: Even if it’s a personal attack against [Prosser]?
KLOPPENBURG: There are personal attacks against me. That’s not the conversation. People aren’t paying attention to those ads.
NRO: But…
KLOPPENBURG: Listen to me. Let me finish. They are concerned about the independence and impartiality of the court. Their confidence in the court has been eroded over the past years. That is the conversation they want to have with me, that is the conversation that I am having with them. We are not having a conversation about third-party attack ads.
NRO: Why not?
KLOPPENBURG: Because they are not germane.
NRO: If Prosser was running that kind of ad against you, wouldn’t you want him to disavow that ad?
KLOPPENBURG: No, because that is their First Amendment right and because my record stands up to those ads. People are not talking to me about that. The conversation that we are having, and that Justice Prosser should be having, is about the independence and impartiality of the court.
NRO: Do you really think that [Prosser] will be a tool of the Walker administration, if he continues to stay on the court?
KLOPPENBURG: He has said himself that he has the most partisan background — that the legislature is still in him. He sees the court as working in blocs, and that he is a member of one of those blocs. I am not running to be a member of any bloc. People I talk to around the state see the court as a collective entity of seven justices that should be working together to decide the most important legal issues in this state. He and his campaign have said many times that this race is just about preserving a 4-3 conservative majority. How does he know that cases will be conservative or liberal? How does he know that there will be a conservative majority? His message is to that small segment of voters who will vote for him because they know how he’ll decide cases.