Wisconsin and the Politics of "Winning" (duh!)

Noon, Wednesday, 6 April 2011

The Wisconsin Supreme Court election votes are still being counted and will be for hours, if not days. There will then be recounts and court challenges, no doubt. News reports and blogs—including my own—will cover each maneuver, every fiery soundbite, and all of the turns of fortune for Kloppenburg and Prosser along the way.  I’m just having trouble getting my partisan rant on right now.

I know this election matters, and it matters a lot.  Thousands of people in Wisconsin, some of them dear friends, will likely be affected by the outcome of this election.  Under normal circumstances, this election would have gone largely unnoticed by most folks within or outside of Wisconsin, if not for the bizarre and radical acts of the GOP legislators and governor since January.  

I voted in a dozen or more elections in Wisconsin during my adult years there: I cannot tell you the name of even one Supreme Court justice for whom I voted.  Were it not for the GOP attempt to bully public sector unions and pit the people of the Badger state against each other, I wouldn’t know their names now.

I care about the people.  Even though I do favor the Democrat, I’m just not feeling the suspense about the result. And I am beginning to understand why.  What is playing out in Wisconsin is a bad melodrama, not politics.  Can the corporate-backed GOP tie the unions to the train tracks?  Can the lonely middle class liberal stare down the evil richest-man-in-town and take him out in the final gunfight?  The great advantage the old black hat/white hat films had over the current political melodrama was at least the movies were silent.

7 PM, Wednesday, 6 April 2011

It now appears that Kloppenburg has prevailed in the first full vote count.  Again, while it is uncertain what will happen in the inevitable recounts and court challenges, some are trying to say what this outcome means to larger questions or forecasts other contests to come—particularly the recall challenges.  Speculation on how Kloppenburg or Prosser would rule on the injunction blocking the implementation of the “Budget Repair Bill” when it reaches the WI Supreme Court is the hot topic on blog posts and news reports tonight. 

Too bad that the value of these two seemingly capable and complex human beings have been reduced to how they would decide one legal issue.

Our elections have taken on a glamour, the illusion that they are referenda on a position, philosophy, or ideology.  Somewhere in my dim memories is a civics class where it was suggested that elections might be a process by which the person better suited to perform the functions of governing is selected.  That may be a lot less sexy, since in the short term only one direct winner identified: the prevailing candidate. Any benefit to the electorate is slow to develop and may be subtle.

But when an election is seen as a referendum on an ideology, then there are many vicarious “winners”: the candidate’s victory is a victory for the thought pattern her/his supporters have adopted.  Governing is beside the point. Serving the electorate is beside the point.  The office holder is only there to hold the office as a marker of the battle won.

The people of Wisconsin, and the interests that have used them as proxies in their own battles, have expended so much energy and money on a contest decided by a few hundred votes out of 1.4 million…less than one quarter of one percent of the ballots cast.  That much unsettling acrimony and bitterness for an election margin so razor thin that it settles nothing about the direction of a great state with a complex and important political history.

I am afraid that this race will add little to that history, because the battle in Wisconsin is about standing for something political only on the surface. How tragic that the mainstream political discourse has been reduced to a Charlie Sheen slogan.

The first problem with “Winning!” as a political philosophy is that you them have to portray opponents as “losers”.  Then, you wake up on the day after the election is decided and go to work or school or church with “losers” who used to be your colleagues and friends.

The second problem is that, once achieving “Winner” status, becoming a loser is an ever more terrifying fear.  Rhetoric becomes louder and more extreme, divisions more polarizing, and battles more fierce.  Resources, including the time and energy of legislators, are diverted from the needs of the people to the needs of preserving a majority.

If there is a ray of hope in the apparent election of Kloppenburg, it may be in the emotional, financial, and physical fatigue of both her backers and Prossers’.  Only when the politics of melodrama gets too tiring and too painful will the electorate again get the chance to decide between candidates on skill and experience, not ideological purity and the ability to shout it loudly.

Scott Walker's administration gave a state job and a 26% raise to the son of a major supporter

Not much I can say can top or amplify this.

Scott Walker's administration gave a state job and a 26% raise to the son of a major supporter

Looking for the Last Honest Republican

I am sincere in that headline. I used to vote for Republicans on those occasions where either: A) they were the incumbent and had served well, or B) someone I regarded as having integrity and ideas that their Democratic opponent lacked.

Where will I find such a candidate today? Not that all the Dem candidates are paragons of virtue, either, but I'm having trouble finding a major GOP figure these days who just does not repulse me.

Once upon a time, I liked John McCain. He spoke some hard truths about his own party and the nation as a whole back in the 80's and early 90's.  But since 2008, he has become a mealy-mouthed, duplicitous puppet of what he thinks is the GOP power base, diluting or reversing everything he said he stood for in previous decades (while denying that he was doing that!).

And that was about the time that Diogenes just hung up his lamp in despair for the whole GOP. Saddam Hussein's WMDs, domestic surveillance executive orders that use the constitution as a car floormat, Birthers, "Obamacare" boogymen, a VP candidate who couldn't tell you the policies of the president from her own party...


And then came the Wisconsin (and Ohio, and...) Disinformation-of-the-Week club that gives tax cuts to businesses, then blames teachers, nurses, and DMV employees for the state's budget deficit. One week, the measure to strip public sector unions of collective bargaining is a non-negotiable, vital "fiscal policy", then it isn't "fiscal" after all, so it can be approved by GOPs who can't even consider changing the bill. That approval came in a hastily called meeting that judges have twice ruled as a violation of Wisconsin law (which the responsible parties knew at the time, but ignored).  While Republican governor Walker gives lip service to obeying the judge's order, GOP Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald seeks to bypass the judge's order by intimidating the office responsible for publishing the bill. When they cave to the "request" by their boss, Fitzgerald announces that the law is in effect and the provisions effecting public employees' paychecks will begin in mid-April. As closely as these two worked together on enacting the legislation, it seems absurd to suggest that one Republican hand did not know what the other was doing. GOP Leader Fitzgerald leans on agency to publish bill despite judge's order

The despair continues as a sitting WI supreme court justice, a Republican facing re-election, knowingly distorts his opponent's record and inflates his own. When called on his utterly false and fiery rhetoric--delivered with disdain and anger in the debate--he said it was an attempt at "levity"...a "joke" no one laughed at in the hall, according to reports of those present. David Prosser ,Wisconsin supreme court justice says opponent's record limited

Ultimately, this judge will likely rule on the legal case about the union-weakening bill passed by his party cronies.

With the accumulating pile of falsehoods and duplicity, can the organizations currently allied with Badger State Republicans completely escape the nagging fear that, someday, their day will come, too?  Fire and Police unions did not oppose Walker in 2010 and were exempted from the legislation this time around. But the actions of members of these unions' actions in the first few months of 2011 indicate they may suspect their loyalty will not be rewarded for long.

Loyalty: I have been a loyal liberal for all my adult life, and when candidates of the party that generally stood for liberalism failed to earn my trust, I was willing to vote for others outside that party. Loyalty is a good thing, but not at the expense of faithfulness to law, fairness, honesty, and integrity. I hope my loyal conservative friends will consider the limits of loyalty, too.

Then maybe we won't be looking for the last honest politician of any party: they will step out of the shadows of their ideologue leaders and become our elected representatives. Regardless of party, when they step up I will vote for them.