Learning from Past Lessons

Our Words Always Matter

January 15, 2025

I thought long and hard last year before launching this campaign for Congress in Wisconsin’s 7th CD. I was fully prepared to retire last year, but the state of our democracy and the failures of our Congress seemed too important to ignore or sit back.

I asked for feedback from my friends and from colleagues who knew me and who knew my personal and political history. “Do I have the skills and ability and the stamina to run a competitive Congressional campaign and to excite enough people to challenge the political status quo in Northern Wisconsin?” Overwhelmingly the answer came back yes.

I’m running a campaign asking for truth and clarity from our elected leaders. Which means I have to conduct myself in a way that models transparency and honesty. In that spirit, I’m sharing details of a mistake I made that occurred during my previous legislative service.

In the summer of 2011, while making fund raising calls, a woman who I called (who was a previous supporter) rejected my request for a donation and said something very dismissive. Although she was fully within her rights to say what she said, I remember feeling stung by it. And when I thought I had hung up the phone and was only in the presence of my staffer, I said “I’d like to call her back and smack her around”. What I did not know was that the call had not ended and my words were recorded on her answering machine, and those recorded words were later sent to the Republican party.

I have never been violent or physically threatening to anyone in my life, ever. The thought in my head as I said those words would have been more accurately conveyed by saying something like, “I’d like to call her back and give her a piece of my mind.” But those were not the words I said - what I said implied violence.

When I learned my statement had been recorded and made public I immediately called the woman and personally apologized, and I wrote her a letter of apology, both of which she accepted. But there was no un-saying those words and I had to own responsibility for that error of judgement.

Mom always told us that our ability to recognize mistakes, own them, and learn from them is the real test of character. Today as I have entered a new campaign for Congress in Northern Wisconsin, voters deserve to know what happened and make their own judgement about what that says about me as a candidate.

And I’ve learned that wherever you are, even when we think we’re alone and even in tense moments, our words matter and the way we speak about others, whoever they are, matters very much.

I hope to represent you in Congress as someone who will work hard to represent you and be someone you can count on for ethical, honest, values-based representation. If you have comments or questions about anything I’ve shared here I invite you to contact me personally.

You can do so at fred@clarkforwi.com.

Sincerely,

Fred Clark

Candidate, Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District