Earlier this month, the Ripon Commonwealth Press published this letter to the editor:

Don’t hate teachers

TO THE EDITOR:

Why do people hate our teachers?

I think back to when I was in school and how much I learned from my teachers.

My band teacher was one of the most influential people to me. His influence helped me land a job in the music business working with the world’s top artists and was one of the greatest things that I have ever experienced.

If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have had this great opportunity to work for the Berlin School District as their AV coordinator/IT specialists.

My point to this is to not be angry at teachers over our current budget situation. They didn’t personally create the problem.

Everyone created the problem. Everyone drives on public roads, enjoys publicly funded parks, uses critical public services and yes even public schools.

If you ever learned anything in school from your teachers is that everyone should have to fix the problem together. …

We all understand that the budget needs to be fixed and have agreed to Walker’s request to pay more for retirement and insurance.

Taking away our right to collective bargaining is wrong! Please don’t support his agenda that hurts many people’s families.

Let’s find a way to fix this without hurting anyone. Don’t let hate ruin our wonderful schools.

A first read might make the reader wonder what is being taught in the Berlin schools. “Everyone created the problem”? How many readers agreed to spend $86 million per year to take land off permanently off the tax rolls? How many readers agreed to a tax and spending structure that has resulted in this state’s lagging the nation in per capita personal  income growth for the past three decades? How many readers agreed to pay government employees Rolls-Royce benefits, pay both employer and employee contributions to pensions, and allow government employees to retire after 30 years?

Moreover, unless the letter-writer is referring only to the Berlin teacher union when he wrote that “We all understand that the budget needs to be fixed and have agreed to Walker’s request to pay more for retirement and insurance,” that statement is false. Each school district’s teacher union has to agree to contract concessions, since there is no state teacher contract; the writer has no idea whether teacher union members in other school districts agreed to concessions or not. (Unless, that is, he blindly believes anything the Wisconsin Education Association Council tells him.) And as for his assertion about “our wonderful schools,” the fact that the students in schools in this country underperform the students of other countries in the industrialized world does not meet my definition of “wonderful.”

Having written that, neither I nor anyone I know hates teachers. To hate teachers as a class would be stupid. I had some very good teachers, and my wife and my children have had very good teachers during our years in school.

The problem with the letter-writer’s assertion is that he has committed the error of equating teachers and teacher unions. The former have chosen as their life’s calling expanding the knowledge and reasoning ability of their students. The latter have institutionalized not just self-preservation at the expense of those paying their salaries, but the concept that all their members should be treated the same regardless of their abilities and their performance. (The qualifier to “treated the same” is that the Last In First Out layoff concept shows that some teacher union members are more equal than others.)

Following is a list of examples I personally witnessed that demonstrate the pernicious power of teacher unions in Wisconsin. (To paraphrase “Dragnet,” the names are omitted to protect the innocent, but I believe none of the people mentioned are still employed by Wisconsin school districts.)

First period: the 1976 Madison teachers strike, the last in the state. (For now.) At the beginning of the strike, a mother of two grade-school-aged children went to their school to pick up some supplementary materials so that their children would not regress in schoolwork during a strike of unknowable duration. (The strike occurred right after winter vacation, so over four weeks Madison students had 30 minutes in the classroom.)

At the door to the school, the mother was accosted by the children’s art teacher, who loudly demanded to know what she was doing here, and how dare she cross a picket line, etc. The resulting exchange between the children’s mother and one of the children’s teachers could not be described as pleasant. (The teacher, however, was lucky that the exchange involved the children’s mother and not their father.)

Second period: During a presidential election year, a middle school decided to hold a class presidential election and create a class student council. Not all the classrooms in the grade participated, which offended the non-participants to the point where they embarked on a campaign to overthrow the class president, complete with posters that were displayed in school hallways for months. None of the teachers in this particular class, nor the school’s principal, nor the school’s assistant principal thought that what would now be considered bullying was enough reason to intervene. (The teacher who did intervene was a teacher who had been absent recovering from a heart attack; the coup d’etat campaign originated in his class with the approval of his long-term substitute.)

Third period: A high school journalism teacher refused to take his students, some of which were considering journalism as a profession, to tour the local daily newspaper, one of  the largest newspapers in the state. The reason: During a strike by its union, the newspaper hired replacement workers, effectively breaking the union.

Fourth period: A popular high school band teacher left just before the school year began for a job at a college. The band teacher had been at the high school two years, replacing a teacher who had changed jobs and then left teaching. The previous teacher, having decided his alternative profession wasn’t the answer either, returned to his old high school thanks to his union rights. The band students’ experience was nowhere near what it had been in the previous two school years.

Fifth period: A high school senior was accepted to one of the state’s private colleges. The college had a scholarship that would have paid for most of that student’s tuition expenses. The scholarship’s provisions required the student’s guidance counselor to fill in and submit the scholarship application. When the student asked her guidance counselor what happened to the application, the guidance counselor replied that he hadn’t sent it in. The student ended up incurring tens of thousands of dollars of student debt because her guidance counselor was too busy eating sweet rolls made in the high school kitchen to do his job.

Sixth period: A school district embarks on a campaign to build a new high school. At a public forum, one of the school district residents whose increased property taxes would have paid for the new high school asks the head of the school district’s teacher union whether the school district’s teachers would agree to a salary freeze of one or two years as their contribution to paying for the new high school. The teacher union president refuses.

These incidents are all examples where the teacher union triumphed over people who should matter more — students, school administrators (since management is there to manage, after all) and/or taxpayers. (And teachers, given that few Wisconsin school districts have merit pay for their best teachers.) Most of these incidents might reasonably be described as misconduct on the part of the aforementioned teacher-union members. Had comparable incidents occurred in the private sector, the people involved may have been disciplined or even fired. In none of these cases did the teacher union members suffer any professional consequences. (Except in the last case: the school district voters rejected the high school project.)

The final example, I suppose,  would be the teachers who have fled into retirement instead of making their own pension contributions and paying higher health insurance costs, as those who pay their salaries have had to do for several years. Few taxpayers get to retire after 30 years of work, but someone who has the financial wherewithal to retire after 30 years in the workplace has the right to do so. Teachers who retire early instead of taking the opportunity to teach new generations of students would seem, however, to forfeit the self-description as selfless public servants.

Teacher union sympathizers claim that teacher unions are a necessary counterweight against school district administration. I would be the last person to claim that every school district administrator is an example of enlightened leadership. (Many Wisconsin school districts employ too many administrators — taxpayers should be wary of any administrator who doesn’t have the word “superintendent” or “principal” in his or her title — and the choice of paying one administrator or paying two teachers is a self-evident choice.) Poor school leadership, however, is a problem for school boards to deal with, and if school boards are hiring the wrong administrators and principals, or insufficiently supervising school district leaders, well, that’s one reason we have elections. For that matter, I’ve seen instances where school boards were nothing more than the puppets of school district administrators, but that is ultimately the fault of the voters for not voting wisely in elections. The teachers ultimately have the last word because they have the ability to work elsewhere.

So if you think I’m sympathetic to the public-sector employees who lost their collective bargaining rights thanks to Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision … you’re wrong. I suspect readers can come up with more examples of teacher unions protecting bad teachers than benefiting their employers, the taxpayers.

Most of us have been told that character is what you do when no one’s watching. (Or so you think.)

So what can we say (according to the state GOP) about Rep. Fred Clark (D–Baraboo)?

Rep. Fred Clark (D-Baraboo), running in a recall election against Senator Luther Olsen, was caught on tape last week saying he would like to “smack around” a woman in his district.

The comment was recorded on the home answering machine of Sue and John Stapelman of Baraboo.  Clark phoned the family while making campaign calls, and had a short, curt conversation with Sue Stapelman.  Stapelman then hung up the phone, but her answering machine was still rolling, and caught Clark saying, “I feel like calling her back and smacking her around.”

The GOP helpfully (where is that sarcasm emoticon?) included a transcript and MP3 file of the phone call:

[Answering machine picks up the call, then Sue Stapelman picks up phone]
SS: “Yes”
FC: “Hi, this, uh, Ms. Stapelton?”
SS: “Yes it is.”
FC: “Hi, this is Representative Fred Clark.”
SS: “Ok.”
FC: “Yes, I just want to give you and John a call again tonight.  You may know I’m running against Luther Olsen here in the recall election in the 14th Senate District.”
SS: “Yeah, isn’t that a crime.” [hangs up]
[Answering machine still recording]
FC: “Ok.  I feel like calling her back and smacking her around.”

This news came out Monday afternoon, and I sent a tweet saying “Explain this, Fred.” Which seems like a reasonable request coming from one of his would-be constituents, right? (As of Monday night, when I wrote this, there was no answer.)

I did, however, receive three Twitter responses, each followed by my response of more than 140 characters:

Right after you explain Sen.Fitz calling people “goof-fuckers.”

I do not need to explain or defend anything Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald says. That’s because I’m not one of his constituents. Whatever he called the Capitol protesters (according to one report, “long haired goof fuckers”), he has the same First Amendment rights as his critics. (And I suspect his critics are exaggerating their sense of offense, given the four-, seven-, 10- and 12-letter comments I’ve read about coming from said protesters.) The more important distinction that appears to have escaped the aforementioned tweeter is that Fitzgerald’s comment didn’t threaten violence against a specific individual; Clark’s comment was about a specific individual, and I suspect police have at least investigated comments of that nature when brought to their attention.

If #GOP was concerned about domestic violence, they wouldn’t be cutting $ for victims programs

This is a two-headed argument: First, that your commitment toward any political issue is based on how much money you want to spend on it. That may be how it works in politics, but it certainly helps explain our state’s multi-billion-dollar deficit, doesn’t it? It is also a corollary to those who defended the extramarital behavior of the late U.S. Sen Ted Kennedy and President Bill Clinton by arguing that they were committed to women’s rights. (To the first, to quote the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, Mary Jo Kopechne was unavailable for comment.)

And then …

Problem with recording is that it isn’t Fred’s voice making those extra comments. Its a man on a diff. phone extension in house.

This would be the local variation of the Anthony Weiner my-Twitter-account-was-hacked-and-how-do-you-know-that’s-my-weiner-anyway excuse.

I have listened to the MP3 several times. Feel free to do so yourself

clark.mp3

I am not a sound engineer, but the person who felt “like calling her back and smacking her around” sounds to me like the same person who “just want[ed] to give you and John a call again tonight.” I had a landline long enough to know that just because you think you’ve hung up doesn’t mean you have. (Which is not an issue with a cellphone based on my experience; once you hit End, you have ended.) Obviously the Stapelmans have a landline since they have an answering machine. And obviously this is not a robocall, since no robocall I’ve ever heard referred to the recipient by first names.

So how does this change my opinion of Red Fred? Actually, it doesn’t, politically speaking. (Personally, well, to paraphrase a couple of Facebook comments, had Clark referred to my wife in that fashion, he and I would be having a very one-sided conversation … not that she needs my defense given that she castrated animals while in the Peace Corps.) There are plenty of reasons that have nothing to do with his classless phone etiquette to oppose Clark. My one political campaign experience of leafletting at parades and going door-to-door — not to mention common sense — says that when you run into an opponent, as you undoubtedly will, you simply thank  them and move on. Clark has absolutely no standing to complain about being caught saying something he should never have said, since, as we all know, politics ain’t beanbag.

At absolute minimum, Clark owes an apology to the Stapelmans specifically and all of the voters of the 14th Senate District generally. He should not throw out such excuses as the high emotions of the day and the vital stakes of this campaign getting control of his judgment, blah blah blah; simply put, he was wrong, what he said was inexcusable under any circumstances, and he’s sorry. Pulling out of the campaign because he should wait to run anyway until Olsen’s term expires after the November 2012 election would be too much to ask, I suppose.

The latest affront to Democracy during our current affront to democracy is last week’s revelation that the Republican Party is going to run “loyal Republicans” as Democrats against the Democrats running against Republican senators in recall elections.

Three thoughts come to mind. Wisconsin has, remember, an open primary, which means that voters can vote for candidates in whichever party they choose in a primary election, whether it’s for countywide office, the state Legislature, statewide offices, or even president. (It’s not entirely open, however, because a voter can choose candidates in only one party.) The Democratic Party has spent decades trying to kill Wisconsin’s open presidential primary, because, well, the national Democratic Party apparently doesn’t believe in democracy.

You may recall that one year ago Republicans were concerned that, thanks to our open primaries, Democrats would try to throw two primary elections toward Republicans they believed would be easier to defeat in the general election — specifically, gubernatorial candidate Mark Neumann and Seventh Congressional District candidate Dan Mielke. I do not recall any state Democrat claiming that such Democratic voting for less-electable Republicans was a mockery of the electoral process. Gov.  Scott Walker and U.S. Rep. Sean Duffy (R–Ashland) can testify that those efforts, if they existed, did not work. Nor did the Democrats similarly condemn the candidacy of “Republican” Andrew Wisniewski, whose candidacy was created to siphon off enough votes to prevent Democrat-turned-independent Rep. Bob Ziegelbauer of Manitowoc from winning. Rep. Ziegelbauer will tell you that didn’t work either.

There are two reasons why voters should applaud the GOP’s efforts to make Democrats run in primaries. The Democratic Party claims to be the party of diversity, of the racial, ethnic, sexual, living-arrangement and reproductive-rights-freedom kind. (I’m sure I’ve missed some.) The Democratic Party practically invented the concept of hyphenated-Americans. (And yet still insufficient, according to some.)

The Democratic Party, however, is not the party of diversity of the intellectual kind. The Democratic Party has worshiped at the altar (perhaps a bad metaphor since atheists are more likely to be Democrats) of the public employee unions (particularly the teacher unions), private-sector unions, environmentalists, misogynist feminists, the anti-trade movement, the surrender-America — sorry, peace — movement, ad nauseam, for as long as anyone reading this blog will be able to remember.

Wisconsin arguably has not had a pro-business Democrat since Gov. Patrick Lucey in the 1970s. (Lucey signed into law the manufacturing and equipment property tax exemption to benefit business. Wisconsin Democrats would sooner cut off their … well, you supply the answer … than support any kind of business tax break that is not tied to some sort of condition, because the prevailing position of the Democratic Party appears to be that, with the possible exception of “green” businesses, businesses are necessary evils.)

This state is not served well over the long run by unchallenged one-party rule, regardless of which party rules. But the last Democrat to dare to not worship from the same hymnal as the mainstream of the state Democratic Party was  Ziegelbauer, who is now an ex-Democrat after his former party basically threw him out. Wisconsin used to have anti-abortion Democrats; try finding one now.

The state Legislature has 14 Democratic senators and 38 Democratic representatives. Name one who has said in the past year that public-employee unions have too much power in this state. Name one who has said in the past year that this state’s business climate isn’t as good as it should be because of the excessive political power of unions.

The other, and most important, reason is that the recall process against Republican senators is an illegitimate attempt to undo the Nov. 2 election results. Recalls should be reserved for egregious misconduct in public office, including bugging out of the state (this means you, Dave Hansen and Jim Holperin!) and the continuing farce that is Weiner the Weiner. To be lectured to about being deceptive by the party that favors voter fraud (as shown by its opposition to voter ID legislation) is hypocritical, to say the least.

You have to be naïve to not have been able to figure out that voting for Republicans Nov. 2 meant a completely different political direction for the state. Recall that this state had a $2.94 billion deficit — one of the largest as a percentage of the state economy in the entire country — as of the end of the 2009–10 fiscal year, and a structural deficit of $3.6 billion heading into the 2011–13 budget cycle. By numerous measures, state finances were a high-speed train wreck thanks to those the voters fired Nov. 2 and those wise enough to leave office before voters fired them, and their favorite constituent groups listed several paragraphs ago.

Ask your favorite Democrat this: Two years ago, Democrats raised taxes in this state by more than $2 billion. Let’s say that my state senator who voted for this idiocy was a Democrat. Would your favorite Democrat support my Recall Red Fred campaign? Or would the Democrat haughtily proclaim that the people voted for him and therefore I have to wait until the next election to have my say?

Everything in that last paragraph other than Red Fred being my state senator happened. And the voters had their say Nov. 2. And that is burning a metastasizing hole in the souls of all the constituent groups of the Democratic Party. They were in power. They harmed the state. They lost. They deserved to lose. Those who didn’t like losing can run again Nov. 6, 2012.

Instead, those who lost Nov. 2 and their toadies are shoving a great big blue fist in the faces of the voters. In politics, to quote former UCLA football coach Charlie Sanders (and not, as inaccurately claimed, Vince Lombardi), winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.