The Wisconsin State Journal endorsed Mary Burke for governor.

That says three things. Anyone who claims the State Journal takes conservative editorial stands cannot read. The State Journal made that decision because it was concerned about losing subscribers among Madison’s too numerous government employees. The previous sentence says everything you need to know about Madison — too much government, and intolerant of any non-liberal point of view.

Who has the correct view? The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto:

The most important single election next Tuesday is for governor of Wisconsin. The incumbent, Scott Walker, was elected in the Republican wave of 2010 and embarked in 2011 on a serious, substantive program of reform. He succeeded in his effort to eliminate “collective bargaining” for most government employees, a boon to the state fisc and a blow to politicians, mostly Democrats, who benefit from public-sector electioneering at taxpayer expense.

Because of the latter effect, the Walker reforms provoked furious outrage and extreme tactics. Democratic state legislators fled the state and hid out in Illinois to deny majority Republicans a quorum and forestall passage of the bill. Opponents tried to unseat a state Supreme Court justice and mounted a recall drive against the governor. Both efforts failed; in the 2012 recall—a rematch with 2010 opponent Tom Barrett—Walker expanded his margin of victory. Watching MSNBC that night was awesome.

(The recallers did succeed in capturing a state Senate majority for the Democrats, but the victory was Pyrrhic. The decisive recall came after the end of the 2011-12 legislative session, and the GOP retook the majority in November 2012.) …

With so much at stake, the campaign has been high-minded and substantive. Haha, just kidding. As we noted last month, Walker’s opponent, Mary Burke, put forward boilerplate policy proposals—literally copied from proposals used by earlier Democratic candidates in other states. In the tradition of Vietnam veteran John Kerry and businessman Mitt Romney, she is running what is known as a “biographical campaign,” one focused less on what she’d do if elected than on what she did before going into politics. Like Romney, her experience is in business. She was an executive at Trek Bicycle Corp., a privately held company founded by her father.

As Kerry or Romney could tell you, a danger of a biographical campaign is that it opens you up to criticism—fair or not—from people who had experience with you then. That’s what’s now happening to Burke. It began with a Tuesday piece from the Wisconsin Reporter, a nonprofit investigative-journalism website:

In attempting to explain her two-year work hiatus in the early to mid-1990s, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke has said she was just burned out after an intense period of leading European operations for Trek Bicycle Corp., her family’s Waterloo-based global manufacturer.

In fact, Burke apparently was fired by her own family following steep overseas financial losses and plummeting morale among Burke’s European sales staff, multiple former Trek executives and employees told Wisconsin Reporter.

The sales team threatened to quit if Burke was not removed from her position as director of European Operations, according to Gary Ellerman, who served as Trek’s human resources director for 12 years. His account was confirmed by three other former employees.

“She was not performing. She was (in) so far over her head. She didn’t understand the bike business,” said Ellerman, who started with Trek in 1992, at the tail end of Burke’s first stint as a manager at Trek.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel credited the Wisconsin Reporter for the scoop and advanced the story with its own reporting:

Two former high-level executives of Trek Bicycle claim that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke was forced out as head of European operations for her family’s business 21 years ago—an allegation that Burke and the company denied, labeling it a last-minute smear campaign.

“I’m not saying she was incompetent,” said Tom Albers, former Trek chief operating officer who left the company in 1997. “Maybe this job was too big for her.”

As in Kerry’s case, there are Trek veterans who see matters differently. Also as in Kerry’s case, Burke’s supporters are attempting to discredit her critics with a series of ad hominem attacks. A Journal Sentinel editorial makes that clear right up top in the headline: “Attack on Mary Burke: Consider the Source.”

The bulk of the editorial consists of six paragraphs, each of which begins “Fact” and all but one of which end “consider the source.” (The other ends “Indeed.”) Here are the first and third:

Fact: The initial report surfaced in The Wisconsin Reporter, a pseudo-journalistic publication bankrolled by conservative foundations. The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation gave the Reporter $190,000 in 2012 to help underwrite the website. The Bradley Foundation’s top executive is Michael W. Grebe, who also chairs Walker’s campaign committee. Consider the source. . . .

Fact: A second source, dug up by Journal Sentinel reporters, says it’s his understanding that Burke was “fired” from her job directing Trek’s European operations 21 years ago. . . . Albers left the company in 1997 and considers himself a conservative. He became the top executive at a Trek competitor, Specialized Bicycles. Consider the source.

That’s a bit awkward, isn’t it? The Journal Sentinel tells us we can’t trust what we read in the Wisconsin Reporter, then tells us we can’t trust what we read in . . . the Journal Sentinel. It’s the liar’s paradox! Though it’s easily resolved when you consider that in most major newspapers, the newsroom and editorial pages are separate operations. We leave it to the reader to decide which, in the Journal Sentinel’s case, is more trustworthy.

The editorial’s attack on the Wisconsin Reporter is entirely ad hominem; there is no criticism of the actual quality of the site’s journalism. If the editorial didn’t have such a transparent political agenda, one might suspect sour grapes over getting scooped. In the second paragraph, the “source” we are supposed to “consider” is not the Journal Sentinel, but the Journal Sentinel’s source, who turns out to be rather partisan (which we should note the news story made clear).

To be sure, the criticism of Burke is also ad hominem. But ad hominem arguments are not necessarily fallacious. Information that contradicts a candidate’s claims about her own qualifications surely is relevant to the question of how to vote. The motives of those making such counterclaims are also relevant, as the Wisconsin Reporter acknowledged in its original story: “Full disclosure: Ellerman is chairman of the Jefferson County Republican Party.”

The Journal Sentinel news story added that Ellerman “ran as a sham Democratic candidate” in one of the state Senate recalls, and Daniel Bice, a columnist at the paper, reported that Ellerman’s Facebook page included truculent postings about President Obama.

It’s reasonable to argue that Ellerman’s claims deserve to be heavily discounted because of his strong partisanship. Perhaps Albers even gets a slight discount because he “considers himself a conservative.” (That he works for a Trek competitor would be relevant only if there were some reason to think that Burke, if elected, would use her office to benefit her family’s company.)

Further, as noted above, Burke has defenders among her former colleagues. One is former CEO John Burke, who said: “Mary is a good person. Mary spent 55 years building up her reputation. All of a sudden, you get this character assassination.” Another is Steve Lindenau, who was managing director of the Germany office. From the editorial:

“I think given her work intensity, she would put in super long hours,” said Lindenau, who is now chief executive of Easy Motion Electric Bikes-BH Bicycles. “She was on a very aggressive growth pattern for Europe. It’s a family-run business. Maybe she just got burned out and needed a break.”

So what are Lindenau’s politics? The Journal Sentinel doesn’t say. What about John Burke’s politics? In terms of party and ideology, again we have no clue. But it seems a safe bet that in this election, he’s not supporting Gov. Walker, whose opponent is Burke’s sister.

The problem with the Journal Sentinel’s defense of Mary Burke is not that it is ad hominem but that it is one-sidedly so. And on that score the newsroom is as guilty as the editorial page. Guiltier, in fact, since editorialists are under no ethical obligation to be balanced.

The editorial bemoans the criticism of Burke as “a classic political trick, an October surprise of innuendo and half-truths” and avers that “no voter should base his or her decision on 20-year-old twaddle.” But such are the hazards of a biographical campaign.

Which raises the question: Why isn’t Burke running a substantive campaign? As Collin Roth of RightWisconsin.com observed in February: “Mary Burke has been largely incoherent on Act 10,” the collective-bargaining reform law. “Sometimes she opposes, sometimes she likes the healthcare and pension provisions, sometimes she wants to reinstate collective bargaining rights, and sometimes she simply didn’t like that the law was divisive.”

One possible answer is that she doesn’t think a full-throated campaign of opposition would win the election. Established Democratic politicians in the state seem to have agreed when they begged off on challenging Walker, leaving the field open for Burke.

Yet even if Walker’s reforms are secure, a loss for him next Tuesday would be a huge victory for Big Labor—a show of union power that would discourage other governors from undertaking similar reforms by sending the message that success is politically fatal. That’s why the race is so important even though the campaign isn’t especially edifying.