David Blaska honors former Gov. Patrick Lucey, who died Saturday:

No one did more than Patrick Lucey to transform Wisconsin into a two-party state. He died Saturday at age 96, the longest-lived governor in state history.

Mr. Lucey was elected to the State Assembly in 1948, the state’s centennial, the same year as my grandfather John M. and a young Ruth Bachhuber Doyle, wife of Jim Doyle Sr. and mother of a future governor. All were Democrats. Warren Knowles and Mel Laird (still living!) were already veterans of the upper house when Gaylord Nelson joined them that year.

Pat Lucey played hardball in his politics, as did his allies, the Kennedys, who were never shy about lubricating the electorate if it would help them win. My friend John Nichols has written a lovely remembrance of the man, true as far as it goes, but Patrick Lucey was no populist, however much John may wish.

He was the last overtly pro-business Democrat to be elected governor of Wisconsin, elected from the hamlet of Ferryville, in picturesque Crawford County, where he was recently honored.

He was very definitely a one-percenter, like Mary Burke, but oh so much more accomplished. Lucey and his combative wife, Jean, deigned not to move into the governor’s mansion; it would have been a step down from their own Maple Bluff home.

In contrast to Ms. Burke, Lucey made his own money and knew how to encourage others to make wealth. It was he who enacted the Machinery & Equipment exemption from property taxes, which resulted in the Wall Street Journal naming Wisconsin “the [economic] star of the snowbelt.”

Yes, Patrick Lucey was a tax cutter, like his hero JFK. He grew the pie instead of cutting it into ever-thinner slices. The Democrat who chairs the party today, as Patrick Lucey once did in its glory years, calls tax cuts a “gimmick.” As my father (he also served in the Legislature) said near the end of his life, I did not leave the Democratic Party, it left me.”

Lucey did the hard work of getting the Democratic Party back into relevancy in the late 1940s, when Wisconsin’s two parties were the Republicans and the Progressives. For being the nation’s oldest political party, the Democratic Party in Wisconsin was rather irrelevant for a long time, until after World War II.

Tom Still, who covered Lucey as a young Wisconsin State Journal reporter (whose work was read by a young WSJ reader), adds:

Lucey, who died May 10 at 96, was elected governor twice in the 1970s before resigning late in his second term to become ambassador to Mexico. A few years later, disappointed in the Democratic president who appointed him, Lucey ran as independent John Anderson’s vice presidential running mate in an election won by Ronald Reagan.

It was his stint as governor, and his knack for campaign tactics and hard-nosed party politics, that defined Lucey much more than his time in the national limelight.

Along with a handful of other familiar names in Wisconsin politics – John Reynolds, William Proxmire, Gaylord Nelson and James Doyle among them – Lucey was an architect of the state’s modern Democratic Party. It arose in the late 1940s and early 1950s, just as the Progressive Party’s influence was waning, and quickly became a force in an otherwise Republican state.

In part, that was because Lucey took political organizing to a new level. During his years as director and late as chairman of the Democratic Party, Lucey made sure the party fielded candidates in virtually every race for the Wisconsin Legislature. That hard work paid off. When Democrats finally won the Assembly in 1958, it was the party’s first working majority since 1933.

Much of the political capital Lucey earned by working in party vineyards was available to spend during his years as governor. He dusted off the idea of merging the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which also included the UW Extension and campuses in Milwaukee, Green Bay and Racine-Kenosha, with the nine-campus Wisconsin State University System. At the time, both systems had a Board of Regents.

He believed a merger would control costs at a time when “baby boomer” enrollments were taxing most campuses, diminish duplication, improve education and give the combined UW System a larger voice.

The move was initially unpopular with legislators in both parties and many people within academia, particularly those on the Madison campus who believed it would water down the quality of the state’s flagship university.

Lucey cracked heads, cut deals, cajoled and threatened (“I had to be pretty heavy-handed – no merger, no budget,” he said later) and won in October 1971 by the slimmest of margins. In some ways, the “merger wars” of that era wage on, as evidenced a few years ago when a proposal to carve out more autonomy for the UW-Madison was shot down, basically from within the UW System itself.

Lucey rarely shied away from a fight. His push for changes in the state’s shared revenue system – the mechanism by which state tax dollars are redistributed to local governments – and the state aid formula for local schools were among other political rumbles.

And while Democrats were closely identified with labor unions then and now, Lucey was still governor in mid-1977 during events that led to a major state employee strike. He was generally suspicious of the civil service, in general, and not afraid to put political appointees in place within state agencies to make sure his policies were being carried out.

Although a tactician who loved the art of organization, Pat Lucey probably wasn’t a politician who would fit in well today. He joked about his own lack of charisma, wasn’t especially telegenic and often disagreed with his own party on major issues.

Lucey represents a bygone, more personally civil, and more politically independent era in Wisconsin politics, as opposed to what we’ve seen in this state since the Scott Jensen/Chuck Chvala era. For one thing, Lucey was a real estate agent, and no legislator until the 1970s had the words “full-time legislator” appear in his or her Wisconsin Blue Book biography. Lucey was the last governor who could say that Wisconsin’s per capita personal income growth exceeded the national average.

The Machinery & Equipment property tax exemption is a tax cut that would never be supported by Democrats today. The M&E exemption was a huge tax break for Wisconsin’s manufacturers, who obviously have a lot of capital tied up in machines. (Including Georgia-Pacific, owned by the Evil Koch Brothers.) Democrats today see business as a necessary evil at best.

Democrat Mary Burke refuses to support tax cuts, including business tax cuts in a state with one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the entire world. Which is interesting because her family organized Trek Bicycles as a subchapter-S corporation so that the company didn’t have to pay corporate income taxes. There is nothing illegal or inappropriate about that, just hypocritical for someone running for governor based on her business experience. It’s also disingenuous for Burke to claim that Trek never made decisions based on tax impact; if a business isn’t taxed on its income (sub-S shareholders get all the company’s profits and thus pay taxes on those profits), there are no tax decisions to be made. And as a manufacturer, Trek certainly has taken advantage of not only the M&E exemption, but of the later computer equipment exemption.

I’m not sure which is more ironic — the fact that Democrats desperately need more business presence in their party (instead of government employees and career politicians), or the fact that their supposed business candidate doesn’t espouse pro-business policies.