Category: Wisconsin politics

A couple weeks ago, I attended a League of Women Voters candidate forum in Ripon, featuring candidates for mayor, Common Council and school board.

Two of the candidates seemed to have sufficiently impressive résumés and messages to get elected. Neither won last night. And I think it’s because of an affliction, if you want to overstate, common to some conservative candidates for office — their inability to appeal to voters. Or, put another way, it’s not always what you say; it’s how you say it.

I don’t know the split between extroverts and introverts in the public, and I suspect people are extroverts or introverts along a spectrum than merely “garrulous” or “painfully shy.” (For those who care, I’m a Myers–Briggs ESTJ, which is, somehow, a supervisory personality. My children will be really happy to hear that should they ever learn about Myers–Briggs.) Candidates who lost last night (who deserve credit for running, and who will find out that losing an election is not the worst thing that can happen to you, says the last place finisher in the 2003 Ripon Board of Education election) and who intend to run again might be well served to evaluate not just their message, but their message’s messenger.

Ronald Reagan is lionized among Republicans for numerous reasons, not the least of which is that he got elected president twice. He wasn’t perfect, but he was perhaps the ideal conservative spokesman of the day, irrespective of how he governed. He clearly loved his country, he spoke the conservative message (whether his own or a speechwriter’s, and the former more often than his detractors wanted to admit), and he was optimistic — he had faith that the U.S., the “shining city on a hill,” could solve any challenge if we put our minds to it.

Many of those qualities applied as well to Gov. Tommy Thompson. That is an amazing thing to say for those who knew him during his pre-governor days. I interviewed him once when he was Assembly minority leader — I was shocked that he answered his own telephone — and the interview went fine, but he didn’t strike me as a particularly great communicator compared with whoever I was talking to on the opposite side. Suffice to say the state’s political media was stunned when Thompson not only defeated the more media-friendly Jonathan Barry (or so we thought) in the GOP primary, and then beat Gov. Anthony Earl in the 1986 election.

And then Tommy Thompson, lawyer and minority-party state representative from western Wisconsin, known as “Dr. No” in Madison, became “Tommy!” I saw him speak a few times, and it was as if someone had flipped a switch to activate the state’s number one cheerleader and enthusiast. I once saw him during a state tourism conference in Appleton after getting out of his State Patrol car, seemingly fatigued from the two-hour trip, but once the TV lights came on, he practically burst from talking about how great it was to be from Wisconsin, and how things are getting done in Madison, and how the economy is really taking off, and once he was done he seemed like he had enough energy to run, not drive, back to Madison. It was a sight to behold.

Reagan and Thompson had in common enthusiasm that didn’t go over the top (although those who heard “stick it to Milwaukee” about the Miller Park tax might disagree), optimism, and the ability to relate to whoever they were talking to, to appear interested in what they had to say. Similar, though not exactly the same, qualities applied to Bill Clinton. I’ve never met Clinton, but I’ve heard and read enough about his personal magnetism to be able to understand how he could get elected president twice when he was interested much more in his own career than in his party, and his other, shall we say, character flaws.

In the cases of Reagan, Thompson and Clinton, their second-in-commands suffered in comparison. George H.W. Bush was a war hero and had an impressive enough résumé that if you were hiring a president, you’d pick him. He also benefited from running against someone with even less charisma than him. But that was in 1988; in 1992, despite a successful Operation Desert Storm, out went Bush.

Thompson was replaced briefly by Scott McCallum, who just couldn’t cut it as a candidate even when his own party was doing well.  (Recall that before McCallum lost the 2002 gubernatorial race to James Doyle, he lost a U.S. Senate race to William Proxmire.) Al Gore should have been able to easily win the 2000 presidential election given how things were going in the country; the fact he didn’t demonstrates how poor a candidate he really was.

Thompson changed from Tommy Who? to Mr. Enthusiasm. Jimmy Carter went the opposite direction — the guy who seemed decent and smart in 1976 was embittered by 1980. Regardless of how the November elections turned out, there’s no question the 2008 Barack Obama of Hope and Change is not the 2012 Barack Obama.

One reason why Thompson is favored to win the Republican primary, depending on how new candidate Eric Hovde turns out, is because his opponent of highest name recognition, Mark Neumann, is an example of today’s headline. Neumann had better economic development ideas than his 2010 gubernatorial opponent, Scott Walker, but Walker came across better in public.

I heard a GOP campaign veteran say that Neumann’s problem is that he doesn’t like people. Neumann would probably deny that, but you have to at least act as if you have some degree of human warmth to present yourself the right way to those you want to vote for you. And attacks on your fellow party members don’t help either.

To say that Democrats care more about people than Republicans is a fraudulent statement. (If you really cared about working families, you wouldn’t put the state nearly $3 billion in the hole, since someone has to pay for that.) But that’s the stereotype that Republicans have to get over to succeed in elections. (At Monday’s Rick Santorum campaign appearance in Ripon, a misguided soul had a sign that said “Obama Cares!” I resisted the urge to go over to tell him that Obama cares, all right, about getting your vote and your money.)

One way to do that is to make your message an optimistic message. (Pessimists may be happier, to paraphrase George Will, because either they’re satisfied that their predictions of bad things were correct or they’re pleasantly surprised that Doomsday didn’t happen, but pessimists make poor candidates.) The grotesque federal budget deficit and debt is certainly threatening to topple the nation to turn our bad economy into a comparative Utopia. But unattached or persuadable voters don’t want to hear that fact put that way. They want a candidate to tell them how better things will be for ourselves and, more importantly for parents, our children if we get our fiscal house in order and the government stops siphoning so much money from our pockets. That’s how Reagan addressed federal finances, and he left office with a considerably smaller deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product than we have now.

So what does this mean for those running for city councils and school boards? First, regardless of whether or not you’re a people person, you have to get out and see your voters. Those things your parents nagged you about — stand up straight, look people in the eye, speak up, and shake hands firmly — all apply in public. You also have to listen to who you’re talking to, not merely race through your front-doorstep speech.

Beyond all the high school forensics, tips, you have to represent your positions in the right — that is, correct — way. If, for instance, you think spending needs to be cut, you present a picture of what people can do with more money in their pockets. And you don’t talk about budget cuts as much as running whatever municipality you’re running to represent more efficiently, to add value for the voter’s tax dollar. You don’t even talk about how your incumbent opponent is screwing things up; you talk about how things need to be done better and run better. Most voters don’t want change; they want improvement.

We can agree that presidential debates get far, far too much attention in the political media. Candidate forums at the local level, however, might be the only opportunity for people generally uninterested in politics between elections to see who you are and what you represent. Presenting yourself well in the media and the public isn’t complicated — for instance, going into a candidate forum knowing in advance points you want to be sure to get across — but it takes preparation and practice. Talking to yourself in a mirror or in the car on the way over will feel awkward, but it will make you feel better prepared.

Having better ideas than your opponent doesn’t help much if your opponent communicates his or her ideas better than you communicate your own ideas. It’s not just what you say, it is very much how you say it.

Apparently Wisconsin isn’t the only state dealing with self-entitled, thuggish government-employee unions.

So, according to the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn, speaking to Hillsdale College, is New Jersey:

Many scholars are better versed on the history of public employee unions than I am, but there is one credential I can claim that they cannot: I am a taxpayer in the People’s Republic of New Jerseystan. That makes me an authority on how public sector unions—especially at the state and local level—are thwarting economic growth, strangling the middle class, and generally hijacking the democratic process to serve their own ends rather than the public. …

It’s not that I don’t consider the unionization of federal workers to be an issue. Plainly it is an issue when the teachers unions represent one of the largest blocs of delegates at Democratic conventions, when the largest single campaign contributor in the 2010 elections was the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, when union money at the federal level goes at an overwhelming rate to Democratic candidates, and when the Congressional Budget Office tells us that federal employees earn more than their counterparts in the private sector. Nonetheless, I believe that the greater challenge today—to state and city finances, to democratic representation, to the middle class—is at the state and local level. This is partly because state and city unions have the power to negotiate wages and benefits that their counterparts at the federal level largely do not. More fundamentally, it is because we cannot reform at the federal level without correcting a problem that is bringing our cities and states to bankruptcy.

When I say we need to change our understanding, what I mean is that we have to recognize that public sector unions have successfully redefined key relationships in our economic and civic life. In making this argument, I will suggest that the elected politicians who represent us at the negotiating table are not in fact management, that our taxing and spending decisions at the city and state level are in practice decided by our public sector contracts, and that when you put this all together, what emerges is a completely different picture of the modern civil servant. In short, we work for him, not the other way around.

Let me start with the relationship between government employee unions and our elected officials. On paper, it is true, mayors and governors sit across the table from city and state workers collectively bargaining for wages and benefits. On paper, this makes them management—representing us, the taxpayers. But in practice, these people often serve more as the employees of unions than as their managers. …

Scarcely six months after he was elected, Governor [Jon] Corzine appeared before a rally of state workers in Trenton in support of a one percent sales tax designed to bring in revenues to a state hemorrhaging money. Not cutbacks, but a tax. Naturally, Mr. Corzine’s solution was the one the public sector unions wanted: Get the needed revenues by introducing a new tax.

The twist was that there was someone in the New Jersey government who understood the problem—who understood that a new sales tax wouldn’t do much to fix New Jersey’s problems, and that the only way to get a handle on them was to get state workers to start contributing more to their health care and pensions.

These were the pre-Chris Christie days, so the author of this bold proposal was the Senate president, Stephen Sweeney. Mr. Sweeney is not only interesting because he is a prominent and powerful Democrat. He is also interesting because in addition to his political office, he represents the state’s ironworkers. And what Mr. Sweeney proposed for the public sector unions was something private union members such as his ironworkers already paid for. It was also common sense: He knew that if New Jersey didn’t get a handle on its gold-plated pay and benefits for its government employees, it would squeeze out the private sector that hires people such as ironworkers. …

Manifestly, the problem is not that Mr. Corzine and other elected leaders like him—mostly Democrats—do not understand. In fact, they understand all too well that they are the hired help. The public employees they are supposed to manage in effect manage them. The unions provide politicians with campaign funds and volunteers and votes, and the politicians pay for what the unions demand in return with public money.

In New Jersey as elsewhere, most leaders of public sector unions are not sleeping with the politicians who set their salary and benefits. They are, however, doing all they can to install and keep in office those they wish—while fighting hard against the ones they oppose. And until we recognize the real master in this relationship, we will never reform the system.

…  Not only have the public unions too often become the dominant partner in the relationship with elected officials, but the contracts and the spending that goes with them are setting the other policy agenda. In other words, even when we recognize that the packages favored by public employees are too generous, we think of them simply as spending items. We need to wake up and recognize that in fact these spending items are the tail wagging the dog—that they set tax and borrowing decisions rather than follow from them. …

That leads me to my third and final point: If I am right that the public employee unions are in fact the managers in the relationship with politicians, and that public sector spending is driving tax and borrowing policy, the inescapable conclusion is that you and I are working for them.

That’s not how we usually understand and speak of public service. Traditionally, the idea of a public servant is someone who is working for the public, with the implication that he or she is sacrificing a better material life to do so. But can anyone really define today’s relationship this way? Especially when health care and pensions are included, government workers increasingly seem to live better than the people who pay their salaries. How many of you walk into some local, state or federal office these days and leave thinking, “The men and women here are working for me”? …

Across the nation we have governors and mayors trying to solve their public employee problems with varying degrees of seriousness, from Chris Christie in New Jersey to Jerry Brown in California to the great experiments going on in the Rust Belt—in Indiana, which has done the best, and Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. Only Illinois, led by Democratic Governor Pat Quinn, has opted for business as usual with a mammoth tax increase that is now being followed up, in today’s typical way of Democratic governance, with tax breaks for large companies threatening to leave Chicago because of the tax burden.

In most of these places, there’s probably little we can do about the contracts that exist. What we can do is bring in new hires under more reasonable contracts and pro-rate contributions for existing employees. Even marginal changes can have a big impact, as Wisconsin found out when Governor Scott Walker’s collective bargaining reforms for public workers helped restore many of the state’s school districts back to fiscal health.

On Saturday, while those who pay their salaries were out doing normal weekend activities, Da Union and its toadies were out protesting the one-year anniversary of their being forced to pay smaller percentages of their benefits than private-sector workers — and, as Ann Althouse chronicled, in always classy fashion:

What is the protesters’ alternative plan for fixing multibillion-dollar budget deficits caused by, among other wasteful spending, excessive employee compensation?

Yes, these are the faces of those spending your tax dollars. And, by the way, “your” includes those who are members of private-sector unions, of whom David Blaska writes:

Real people in economically depressed Northern Wisconsin are paying the price for the Democratic Party’s fealty to government employee unions. Who has declared war on the middle class? Democrats have.

That is the upshot of this week’s party line vote in the state Senate to defeat the mining reform legislation — with one defection by quasi-Republican Dale Schultz to give the Democrats a 17-16 victory.

For the minority party, recalling Scott Walker is Job Number One. Creating conditions that would produce 700 family-supporting jobs that the Gogebic Taconite iron mine would have brought to Mellen, in Iron County? Not even close.

Legislative Democrats defeated the mining bill in order to sabotage the governor’s job-creation efforts. Those Democrats intend to play working men and women off each other: they’ll happily trade the industrial unions, whose numbers have been declining for decades, in exchange for the more numerous and more prosperous teachers unions and AFSCME affiliates.

For, make no mistake, the blue collar unions wanted the $1.5 billion mine in Mellen.

“We had an historic opportunity to pass mining legislation that would have ensured thousands of new jobs in the state at a time when jobs are scarce and we blew it,” lamented Terry McGowan, business manager of Local 139, Operating Engineers. His was one of five unions to endorse the mining legislation offered by Republicans.

A close second in importance to public sector union support is the well-heeled Environment First, People Last movement.

The professional environmentalists of the Sierra Club, One Thousand and One Friends of the Environment, et al., want to keep The North Woods their happy hunting grounds and exclusive playground. …

Retaining current law is, in effect, a prohibition of mining. No new iron mine has been opened since its passage in 1974. Existing law allows the professional enviros to tie up proposed mines for years by making unlimited and open-ended appeals to administrative law judges. …

This was all about politics, not science.