A plant?

You know it's been in the news within the past month or so that Sen. Hillary Clinton has been planting friendly people in crowds during debates and such to help solidify her support. Well Todd Stroger seems to have picked up on that strategy and it doesn't seem to help him look any better. He can do sit down interviews but the least he can do is not have someone talk up his unpopular tax increases...

Stroger has been under siege for nearly three months for having proposed a highly unpopular 2-percentage-point hike in the county sales tax.

After taking a few calls from unhappy taxpayers, Williams said he had time for one more caller.

On came "Jonathan from Chicago."

Jonathan talked intelligently about the county’s budget mess last year and then went on to defend the tax hike and cite a national study comparing cities across the nation.

"The last 15 areas that raised their sales tax saw actually no less than 25 percent growth in the year after they did it," Jonathan said. "A lot of this is just gloom and doom, the world’s going to fall in. But when you look at what’s actually happened, the world’s never fallen in."

The random caller, of course, wasn’t so random. It was Stroger’s $100,000-a-year communications director, Andre Garner.

Confronted later, Garner declined to comment but said, "Well, you guys won’t put this stuff in the newspaper," referring to his on-air comments.

This article courtesy of Clout Street.