Somehow I lucked into being on Ald. Bob Donovan's mailing list for his mayoral campaign. I do not understand this; surely he knows it's wasted postage. Whatever – I get a nice little window into what Milwaukee's most outspoken mayor wannabe thinks while he takes on incumbent Tom Barrett.

The big takeaway so far? Donovan likes bureaucracy. Also: graphs. Nice, full-color charts and bar graphs have graced every mailing I've gotten from him so far, graphs intended to make me fear for my safety. But I'll come back to those.

First the bureaucracy, which is honestly surprising to me. You don't look at someone like Donovan and think, "What this guy wants is bigger government."

Yet there it is. Donovan's big idea for improving everything, from jobs to crime, is creating a new cabinet-level post and, presumably, whole new departments under the new secretaries he would appoint.

Donovan promises to hire no fewer than four new top-level administrators, starting with a "Jobs Ambassador" and including new secretaries of Education, Commerce & Labor, and Urban Affairs.

Since two of these posts are jobs-related, you might think that Milwaukee is currently in some sort of unemployment death spiral, hemorrhaging jobs, residents and quality of life. That's just not true.

The Milwaukee metro region, of which the city is the thriving heart, is doing quite well according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose job it is to measure these things. In December of last year, the last month with data available, the metro region had an unemployment rate of just 4.5 percent, below the national average, and at the median for the country's largest metro areas. It is just barely higher than the state unemployment rate of 4.3 percent.

BLS only breaks down by metro area, though, and doesn't have good data on the city by itself, which continues to have employment challenges especially in its African American population. Donovan's mailers even cherry-pick some zip codes with high unemployment rates to highlight, including 53206, the city's most troubled zip code. Still, the premise that there is some kind of overall jobs crisis in Milwaukee right now is false.

Donovan claims his new "Jobs Ambassador" will somehow attract 10,000 new "good-paying jobs" to Milwaukee in the next five years. Over the last five years – admittedly, a little skewed because that goes back to the middle of the recovery from the Great Recession – the metro area has seen an increase of more than 40,000 jobs, according to BLS. Even going back to the pre-recession high in October 2008, Milwaukee is still nearly 10,000 jobs ahead, and the unemployment rate is lower today than it was then. I think Donovan's 10,000 jobs pledge is pretty weak considering the current state of the city's economy and recent history.

Moreover, Milwaukee is nationally recognized as one of the country's few major metro areas where jobs and population growth are happening in and around the Downtown center, as Bruce Murphy has pointed out. People want to live in Milwaukee already, and companies want to be here, too.

As I have noted, that's not necessarily true for all of Milwaukee. But Donovan's proposed "Secretary of Commerce & Labor" – who would, he says, work on cultivating a "more business-friendly environment" and duplicate efforts already undertaken by groups like Milwaukee Area Workforce Investment Board and the state's Department of Workforce Development – isn't going to magically undo generations of redlining, massive incarceration rates and systematic discrimination against minority communities in this city – all the forces that have left Milwaukee one of the worst cities in America for its black residents.

His "Secretary of Urban Affairs" might, I suppose. Based on the mailers I've received – it isn't online that I can see – this new secretary will be focused on poverty. He or she will "make reducing poverty in Milwaukee a priority" and "reduce poverty by 10% in five years, 25% in 10 years," among other things.

Oh, wait, the words "race," "racism" and "segregation" aren't in there at all. I appreciate that Donovan is concerned about economic inequality, but I cannot understand why he dances around what is by the far the biggest reason for Milwaukee's current economic disparities.

I could be all cynical and suggest that Donovan really does want to want to help black Milwaukeeans but needs the votes of white residents first. Or I could go all Kanye West on him and suggest that Donovan doesn't care about Milwaukee's black people. Either way, disguising Milwaukee's long-standing racial divide as merely an economic problem is reductionist and offensive.

As a teacher, I find Donovan's other new appointment, a "Secretary of Education," most intriguing, not least because the things he wants to do are really pretty far outside the purview of the Mayor's office. This is not a new thing for Donovan; I complained about his plan to appoint a city-wide education "czar" back in 2009.

You'll note that back then, I too was much less willing to come right out and say many of Milwaukee's challenges have an explicitly racist underlying cause; the evidence is just too great for me to maintain that now. But back to Donovan's plan.

Donovan wants his "Secretary of Education" to dictate curriculum to all the various school sectors in Milwaukee, including "anti-violence" and "anti-drug" curricula (he must not have gotten the memo that D.A.R.E. failed). His mailer says this person will "guarantee teachers have needed tools and resources," but if you read his website, this is clearly not about funding or technology or any of those kinds of resources that I wish I had in my classroom, but rather disciplinary resources.

"Many teachers feel they’ve lost control of their classrooms," his "Issues" page reads, "because they have no way to control disruptive students – this must change, there must be a no excuses policy for bad behavior and consequences that follow."

Later, his site indicates he wants to "find alternatives for disruptive students – possibly in the form of an alternative to suspension program." Wisconsin's got a reputation nationally as a state with a super-sized school-to-prison pipeline. We spend more on prisons than on higher education, and we have incredibly disproportionate suspension rates for black and white students in our schools. What Donovan's talking about here is essentially prison for disruptive students, removing them from regular schools the way jails take people off the street.

This is perhaps because Donovan has a real passion for crime – not committing it (though he has a record), but playing it up as a problem and demanding lots of get-tough measures to try to fight it.

At the top of this column, I mentioned all the graphs in these mailers about crime. Donovan includes graphs showing the rates of auto theft, robbery and violent crime between 2010 and 2014, and in the text claims that the city currently lacks a plan to reduce violent crime.

The graphs look scary because again Donovan is cherry-picking. If Donovan started his graphs in different years than 2010, he'd have very different-looking graphs. Violent crime overall is lower now than in 2007, for example, but higher now than in 2010. Auto theft has also been up in the last couple of years, but it's well below its mid-2000s high, too.

Donovan's tough-on-crime image is perhaps his strongest and best-known characteristic. He is a relentless critic of current Chief Edward Flynn and Mayor Barrett. There's also no question that, when it comes to homicide, Milwaukee outpaced the surprising national increase in the murder rate.

But Flynn has generally earned good marks from outside observers for his data-driven policing tactics, and Barrett has been working hard to add more officers to the Milwaukee Police Department since the end of the recession. Over the last four budgets, Barrett has added 180 officers, and Donovan voted no on every one of those budgets. Milwaukee has the highest officer-to-population ratio of all comparably sized cities except Baltimore.

Donovan wants more police and wants specifically to ramp up the "war on drugs." He can't really have it both ways, suggesting both a hard increase in incarceration associated with the war on drugs and also that he wants to help Milwaukee neighborhoods already devastated by Wisconsin's over-imprisonment of black residents.

So if you, too, want more – more bureaucracy, more police, more of the school-to-prison pipeline and, despite his online pledge to keep taxes down, almost certainly more taxes to pay for these things – go ahead and vote Donovan. Don't expect me to join you, though.