August 15, 2011
Review session
By Bill Kraus
The protest itself was inspiring, hopeful, and puzzling. Inspiring to see so many people so heavily engaged for whatever reason. One could hope that the era of 30-second messages and couch potatoes might be over.
It ended in a whimper not a bang when the recall elections which were the instrument chosen for a referendum on the governor, the Legislature and the radical agenda and steamroller process came up short.
There are those in the Democratic Party who think the fat lady hasn’t sung yet. They are trying to tell us that the purpose of the recalls was satisfied when two hopeless incumbents were ousted sooner rather than later and because the challengers to the four incumbents who survived actually won because they ran competitive but losing races in difficult districts. Really? Do I not hear the sound of spin doctors whistling past a graveyard.
A lot of lessons, other than that there are some things that just don’t spin, were learned.
• We learned that the voters are not as mad as some of us thought they were. Observers on all sides and on the sidelines wouldn’t have been surprised if all the rascals had been thrown out. That the voters were that angry. They weren’t and they aren’t.
• We learned that the voters are not as radical as we thought they were. On sober reflection the voters seemed to have told us that clearing the structural deficit and passing a balanced budget on time is better than the flim flam trickery that preceded it. The voters who kept the crucial four incumbents in office liked that. The defanging of the public unions and other paranoia driven issues like concealed carry and voter fraud were regarded as sideshows.
• Will we hear more about and from the public unions’ power and legitimacy? You can bet on it. One of the reasons you will is that the governor himself was willing to give up on all the things that will make life difficult for the public unions except negative checkoff during the negotiations to bring the emigrant Democrats back home. Will they ever be the 500-pound gorillas (“actually they were more like 600-pound gorillas” one former Democratic legislator told me) who subjugate some legislators and terrify the rest again? Not likely. They will not go away, however.
• The most unsurprising lesson from the recalls is the more money that goes into campaigns the more disgusting the campaigns are likely to be.
• The question whether recalls are an appropriate weapon when they are brought to bear on people and matters that don’t reach the “high crimes and misdemeanors” level which is what recalls were intended to correct seems to have been answered in the negative. The tradition of rejecting bad actors in regularly scheduled elections seems a better idea. Adding recallphobia to the long list of fears that inhibit and warp the legislative process does not get us closer to the goal of having a government that works. The below-the-radar phenomenon in legislative politics that is obscured by the steady flow of proposals that get into bill form and get introduced every year is that many legislators do not like to vote. Introducing bills is good. It creates fodder for the advertising for the next campaign. It shows action beyond mere talk on things that constituents say they want. But getting those bills to the floor where votes have to be cast brings into play one of the major differences between life in the public sector and life in the private sector. If you are selling something nobody wants in the private sector they don’t buy it. If you are voting for something nobody wants in the public sector the people who don’t want it are likely to mount a campaign against you.
Most of the veteran Democratic partisans I talked to during the recall frenzy allowed as how mass recalls looked like an opportunity that they couldn’t resist, even though it was questionable public policy.
Will recalls go back on the shelf where they belong (along with, one hopes, the overzealous use of the similarly recently abused impeachment process) to be brought into play only in extreme circumstances?
I would hope so.
Which leaves the other unaddressed and unanswered question that was raised by the winter of our discontent: What about the really remarkable thing that happened last winter. The physical protest itself. No organization. No delegates. No meetings. No agenda. Just social media and pretty raw emotions brought tens of thousands of people out of their homes into the streets and not just in politically inflammable Madison.
Given the right issue this can happen again. It could even become a standard part of political participation.
Is it a good thing? It sure is a lot better than outsourcing political activity to professional hired guns and voting for candidates based on what we hear and see on TV.
Are we in danger of becoming the Middle East where mob politics makes most of the noise and news?
Not yet. But we know the possibility lurks.
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The erstwhile liberals essentially wanted a Mulligan on the election. That rarely works. Had they been half so motivated during the real election Walker would not have been elected and some of the GOP may have been tossed at that time.
What can one say about the Dems and that pitiful election of 2010? AWOL on ideas, message, lack of a gubernatorial candidate that actually seemed to want the office, etc. etc. etc. Now they want to tap into the various grievance committees. As always with the Dems, a day late and a dollar short.
-Griebnotz Doerkpfester | (Glad) I Escaped, WI. | August 15, 2011
Republicans and their spin meisters in the press cannot have it both ways. Either the recall elections are just like all other elections or recall elections are their own category. If they are regular elections, then Democrats knocked off one-third of the Republican incumbents and protected all of their own. If they are recall elections, then for the first time in history two legislators were recalled on the same day and they both happened to be Republicans.
Eithter result is quite remarkable, and can be accounted for only by anger over Walker's union busting bill. To pretend otherwise is quite dishonest and, frankly Bill, makes you look rather foolish. We are accustomed to seeing the editorial page editors of the state's daily newspapers looking foolish, but not you. You are better than that.
Sure, some believed or hoped there was so much anger across the board that Democrats might be able to win all of the recalls or at least enough of them to regain the majority in the Senate, but that does not mean the Senate majority was sole purpose of the recalls and that anything short of that is failure.
Eighteen Republican senators voted for Walker's bill in March and now two of them are gone because of it. Fourteen Democrats left the state to protest Walker's bill and all of them are still here. No matter how you parse the results or your words, you can't get around that.
-Ms. Forward | Madison, WI | August 18, 2011
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