Imagine having tickets to this concert at the National Guard Armory in Amory, Miss., today in 1955: Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley:
Today in 1957, while Jerry Lee Lewis secretly married his 13-year-old second cousin (while he was still married — three taboos in one!), Al Priddy, a DJ on KEX in Portland, was fired for playing Presley’s version of “White Christmas,” on the ground that “it’s not in the spirit we associate with Christmas.”
Two years ago around this time came the unbelievable news that Wisconsin football coach Bret Bielema, having just won the Big Ten championship game, was leaving to coach at Arkansas.
Two years later comes the less-unbelievable, though certainly unexpected, news that Wisconsin football coach Gary Andersen, having just lost the Big Ten championship game, was leaving to coach at Oregon State.
Perhaps it’s not unexpected for two reasons. Andersen’s entire career before now had been spent out West, which does play a different kind of football than the Big T1e4n, or at least the players Andersen inherited from Bielema.
The other thing is that it can’t be easy to coach in the shadow of athletic director and former coach Barry Alvarez. That’s probably less of an issue for, say, men’s basketball coach Bo Ryan (who is unlikely to be intimidated by higher-ups) or men’s hockey coach Mike Eaves (who has his own problems right now). But Alvarez is not only the football coach’s boss, he built the program from the dregs of Don Mor(t)on and his Veer from Victory offense.
The Wisconsin State Journal’s Tom Oates has some questions:
Gary Andersen pulled a Bret Bielema on Wednesday when he was hired as the coach at Oregon State after just two years on the job at UW. Just like in 2012, when Bielema jumped ship to go to Arkansas after seven seasons at UW, no one saw it coming. Not even Alvarez.
“I was very surprised,” he said. “I had no idea this was in the works.”
Andersen’s sudden departure raises many questions, but before I take a stab at why he left and who should replace him, what first comes to mind are these questions: When did UW become a steppingstone job for coaches? And what does Andersen’s abrupt departure say about the state of the UW job?
Ever since Alvarez turned the program around in the early 1990s, UW has thought of itself as a destination job. It’s not yet time to revise that thinking, but clearly this is no longer a place coaches go to grow old.
“The last two coaches have proven that; it wasn’t a destination job for them,” Alvarez said. “But it was for me, and is for (men’s basketball coach) Bo Ryan. Everybody’s a little bit different. I don’t worry about that. We’ve got a good job. We’ve got a good place. We’ve got a consistent program. We’ve got a lot to sell.”
Whatever it was UW was selling, Andersen wasn’t buying it. Still, he left for entirely different reasons than Bielema.
Upon his departure, Bielema talked about having more money for his assistant coaches and embracing the challenge of the Southeastern Conference. Alvarez said in his press conference that Andersen told him he was leaving for family reasons. Alvarez later told the State Journal that Andersen had grown increasingly frustrated over UW’s admissions policies for recruits, which are more rigid than some of its Big Ten counterparts.
Both of those reasons make sense for Andersen.
A Utah native who came to UW after coaching four seasons at Utah State, he never looked truly comfortable in Madison; he never seemed like a particularly good fit. Although Andersen is a genuinely nice man, he was a homebody who didn’t get close to boosters or fans. Also, it seemed likely that Andersen would want to return to the West at some point after living his entire life out there.
“I thought Gary was a good fit,” Alvarez said. “There was never any talk about, ‘Someday I’d like to get back to that part of the country.’ Maybe when you’re away for a while, that kind of settles in. I don’t know that.”
It also figures that Andersen had trouble recruiting the kind of speed and athleticism to UW that he had at Utah State, and not just from the junior-college ranks. Alvarez told the State Journal he and Andersen had an ongoing discussion about Andersen’s concerns over UW’s admissions standards and pointed to Sun Prairie defensive tackle Craig Evans as an example. Evans committed to UW, then changed his mind when it became apparent he wouldn’t be admitted. He is now a freshman at Michigan State.
Asked by the State Journal if Andersen had lost potential players because they couldn’t qualify, Alvarez said, “I know the one at Sun Prairie really bothered him.”
Alvarez joked that his next hire would be his last for the football program. To make that happen, he needs to make sure his next coach really is a good fit. For entirely different reasons, neither Bielema nor Andersen were ever truly embraced by UW fans.
For their next coach, the Badgers need someone who understands the program, the school and the state so he can play to UW’s strengths. They need a coach who can develop players and outcoach people, because the level of the talent recruited hasn’t changed appreciably through three coaches and 25 years.
And, of course, they need a coach who will stick around.
“Having ties to Wisconsin is not important,” Alvarez said. “I’d like to find someone that has head coaching experience. … I think it’s important that there’s a fit. I thought Gary was a good fit.”
But while observers debate whether Alvarez should pursue a coach with UW ties — Pitt coach Paul Chryst, Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell, Pitt offensive coordinator Joe Rudolph and UW defensive coordinator Dave Aranda come to mind — or go after a current head coach such as Al Golden of Miami (Fla.), Dave Clawson of Wake Forest or Justin Fuente of Memphis, a bigger question might be whether UW needs to change the equation in order to retain its coaches, up to and including altering its admissions policies.
Since those standards were good enough for Alvarez and Bielema to perpetuate a strong program, that seems neither prudent nor likely. Which makes it even more important that Alvarez hire someone who already knows first-hand how to operate within UW’s parameters.
It seems to me that Chryst is the ideal choice under Oates’ listed parameters. He is the best offensive coordinator UW has ever had. He was a success with less talent than other Big Ten teams because he was able to disguise UW’s usual plays through formations and pre-snap movement to an extent not even matched before or since him. He also is used to the strictures of working in Madison — namely, the academic standards and having Barry Arrogance as your boss.
Chryst replaced Dave Wannstedt, a thrice-flameout as a head coach (first Da Bears, then Miami, then Pitt), and has gotten that program to one game better than .500 and at least competitive now. He’s also likely to run an offense and defense better suited for the kinds of players UW can recruit, as opposed, perhaps, to the kinds of players Andersen wanted
One thing Chryst is not is very outgoing, unlike his father, former UW-Platteville athletic director George Chryst. (The story goes that George got Da Bears to move their training camp to Platteville by filibuster. Bears officials had planned on visiting Platteville and UW-Whitewater on the same day, and George talked so much that it got so late that the trip to Whitewater never occurred.) There is a degree of public interaction required of a big-time football coach, though I’m not sure how much Ryan gets out among the fans, and it hasn’t hurt him. Winning papers over personality issues.
The new coach will not have running back Melvin Gordon, but he will have running back Corey Clement. I’m betting the new coach will not have Andersen’s star quarterback recruit, Austin Kafentzis, although he says he’s taking a wait-and-see approach. I hope the new coach can find a quarterback, because it’s obvious there is not a Big Ten-capable quarterback on the roster. (Kafentzis, it should be pointed out, is not very tall. Neither was Russell Wilson, coached by Chryst. Wilson merely became the best quarterback in UW history based on, yes, one season.)
More on Chryst from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Jeff Potrykus:
“I thought Paul would surface here or Nebraska,” a source close to the UW program said. “What did you think when he didn’t take the Nebraska job? I think Paul knew this was in play.”
Chryst, 49, a native of Madison who played at UW from 1986-’88, was the Badgers’ tight ends coach in 2002. He worked with Riley at Oregon State in 2003 and ’04 but returned to UW in 2005 to run the offense. In his last three seasons as offensive coordinator (2009-’11), UW averaged 31.8 points, 41.5 points and a program-record 44.1 points per game.
Other candidates include North Carolina State coach Dave Doeren, the former UW defensive coordinator, who was spectacular in two years at Northern Illinois, and has had 3-9 and 7-5 teams at N.C. State, a basketball school. Then there’s Bevell, who apparently wants to become a college coach someday, but his career certainly hasn’t gone that direction. (Given the bad taste former UW basketball coach Stu Jackson left by bolting after two years to become a losing NBA coach, Bevell’s NFL experience probably hurts him at UW.)
A few names have come up that I hope don’t get the job, because there’s a reason they’re not where they used to be — Greg Schiano, who Potrykus said “bombed” at Tampa Bay after doing well at Rutgers, but is now out of coaching; Mario Cristobal, Alabama’s offensive line coach after getting fired (wrongly, many apparently claim) at Florida International; and Frank Solich, fired at Nebraska because he wasn’t Tom Osborne, but not all that successful at Ohio. As for Golden (who a member of my church, a Miami graduate, would like to leave), when you’re getting votes of confidence from your athletic director, that doesn’t make you very employable.
The next coach needs to win enough to keep fans in the seats. Football pays most of the freight for UW’s non-revenue-generating athletic programs. Neither Bielema nor Andersen were in danger of getting fired, but those coaches’ success levels are pretty much what the next coach needs to attain to keep his job.
Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and Secretary of Revenue Rick Chandler released 2014 Wisconsin Tax Relief & Reform, the results of their tour of Wisconsin earlier this year to find out how citizens feel about state taxes.
If you don’t want to read the report, here’s the punch line:
This report sketched a broad outline and common themes from their answers. Taxes are too high and too complicated. They hinder economic growth, discourage job creation, and burden family budgets. And though we’ve made great progress in the last four years, we still have a long way to go. After all, tax reform and relief are not only paramount to a clear and strategic path to economic growth, but also to the prosperity of our state and the happiness of our citizens.
The Walker administration has already made significant strides in lowering the tax burden on Wisconsin citizens. But even with these recent accomplishments, Wisconsin remains one of the ten highest taxed states in the nation. That is why we need to continue the tax reform conversation.
Moving forward, we will build off our recent successes and continue to propose budgets that will lower property taxes in Wisconsin, allow more discretionary income for our citizens, and create a tax climate that will not only encourage existing businesses to move to our state, but will also provide the setting necessary for new start-ups to grow and succeed in Wisconsin.
We will continue our commitment to lower the tax burden so our families can find work here, so our businesses can grow here, and so our seniors can stay here in the homes and communities they love. We believe Wisconsin citizens deserve not just the opportunity for employment but the opportunity for happiness.
OK, but what were the results of the tour? These five areas of concern, apparently in order of how often they came up:
Top 5 Areas of Concern
1. Property Tax Burden
2. Personal Income Tax
3. Complexity of Tax Laws
4. Taxes on Small Business
5. The Cost of Government
This too isn’t exactly news. That may have been the point of an email I got at work from the Democratic Party; I wouldn’t know because I delete emails from the Dumocrats immediately. Emails from Democrats vary between two themes: (1) Gov. Scott Walker is stupid and (2) taxes are not high enough.
The Walker administration pays attention to its constituent groups. You may recall early in this process it appeared that income taxes were going to be cut the most. Then a newspaper did a poll, and discovered that property taxes were far more hated than income taxes. So the property tax cut was four times the size of the income tax cut.
One thing not mentioned in the report is that the last point is directly attributable to our lack of permanent — that is, constitutional, not legislative — controls on government spending and taxation. Every level of government will overspend unless prevented from doing so. And fiscal responsibility should be mandated, not dependent on which party wins an election.
How will the Walker administration balance those five goals? (Of course, progress on points one through four won’t happen unless point five is dealt with, and better than it has been dealt with so far.) Well, this is what Walker wanted by running for reelection.
The number one album today in 1961 was Elvis Presley’s “Blue Hawaii” …
… while the number one single was a request:
Today in 1968, filming began for the Rolling Stones movie “Rock and Roll Circus,” featuring, in addition to the group, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, The Who, Eric Clapton and Jethro Tull, plus clowns and acrobats.
The film was released in 1996. (That is not a typo.)
That is a better headline for Timothy P. Carney than merely attributing the Democratic Party’s hammering in the South to racism, as some liberals will do:
Fritz Hollings, John Edwards, Zell Miller, Blanche Lincoln, John Breaux, Kay Hagan, Mark Pryor and Mary Landrieu. These eight Democrats have been senators from the South in the past decade.
If not for Southern Democrats, Republicans would have nearly had a filibuster-proof Senate supermajority after the 2002 elections, giving George W. Bush some real clout. Without Southern senators, Democrats wouldn’t have taken over the Senate with Jim Jeffords’ party switch in 2001. If not for Southern Democrats, Obamacare wouldn’t have become law.
For the foreseeable future, though, Democrats will have make do without Southern senators.
With Mary Landrieu’s gigantic loss on Saturday, following Hagan’s surprise loss and Pryor’s thumping, the Southern Democratic senator is officially extinct. In the House, there are no White Democrats from the South.
Why did it happen?
In short: Democrats waged a culture war against the South, trying to force Southerners to stop “clinging” to their guns and to God. When you try to make it illegal for people to conduct their own affairs according to their conscience, you tend to lose their votes.
The self-soothing story the Left tells itself is that it’s all racism, that Democrats have lost the Southern vote because they’re not as willing to be racist as the Republicans are. Liberal columnist Michael Tomasky cheered the Democrats’ loss of the South, which he lovingly called “one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment.”
Any full accounting of Southern politics has to involve race and racism, but it isn’t a top reason for the realignment.
Tomasky and other liberals may not have heard of Sen. Tim Scott, the first black Southerner elected to the U.S. Senate since reconstruction. South Carolina not only elected Scott to the Senate in a special election this fall, it gave him 757,000 votes — 85,000 more votes than his South Carolina colleague Lindsey Graham received the same day.
South Carolina’s voters re-elected their Republican Governor, Nikki Haley, nee Nimrata Nikki Randhawa. The state that defeated Mary Landrieu has had an Indian-American governor since the 2007 elections.
White racism can’t explain the GOP takeover of the South.
The best explanation comes from the mouth of President Obama himself. Speaking to San Francisco donors in 2008 about white voters in the Midwest, Obama lucidly expressed his low opinion of all non-rich voters in flyover country: “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion.”
Naturally, Democrats and the Left have tried to pry Southerners away from their guns and religion. Gun control has largely been a culture war effort for Democrats. “Some of the southern areas have cultures that we have to overcome,” was Congressman Charles Rangel’s explanation for why gun control was both needed and difficult.
The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten cursed the Second Amendment as “the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.”
Obama and his party waged this culture-war crusade with glee — and failed, but not before making it clear that they disapproved of the way Southerners live.
And the Democrats have made it clear that they are willing to use government to impose their morality on others. Through the courts, the Left has banned prayers at high school football games and forced states to remove the Ten Commandments from public grounds.
The Obama administration, through its birth-control mandate that includes abortifacient drugs, has told Christian employers that they can’t run their businesses as Christians.
There’s no mystery here, and no need to assign widespread racism to why Southerners have rejected Democrats. It’s simple: Democrats and the Left have tried to outlaw Southerners’ way of life.
Today in 1959, the four members of the Platters, who had been arrested in Cincinnati Aug. 10 on drug and prostitution charges, were acquitted.
Still, unlike perhaps today, the acquittal didn’t undo the damage the charges caused to the group’s career.
The headline is pretty much how Kurt Bauer of Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce describes state law up to now:
Unfortunately, Wisconsin doesn’t control its own economic destiny and wrong-headed federal policies and uncertain global economic and geopolitical conditions are holding us back. But, that shouldn’t be an excuse to take our foot off the reform accelerator in order to improve Wisconsin’s business climate. Here are some reforms the 2015-16 Legislature should consider.
Worker Freedom: Should joining a private-sector union be voluntary as it is in 24 states or should it be mandatory? Beyond the personal freedom component to this debate is the economic development argument. It is well-known that site selectors who decide where businesses expand or relocate shun closed shop states like Wisconsin in favor of Right to Work states like Iowa, Indiana and Michigan.
Regulatory Reform: A majority of the most expensive regulations that retard growth are federal, but there are two major state-level regulatory reforms that the Legislature should address.
The first is aligning the state and federal versions of the Family Medical Leave Act. Wisconsin enacted its version before President Bill Clinton signed the federal law in 1993.The Wisconsin law is now a duplicative compliance headache and should be replaced.
The second is Worker’s Compensation (WC) reform. WC costs in Wisconsin are higher and are growing faster than in almost any other state. Last summer, WMC formed a working group that includes health care providers, businesses (i.e., payers) and insurers to explore ways to reduce costs.
Taxes: Despite more than $2 billion in tax relief since Governor Scott Walker was first elected in 2010, Wisconsin is still in the top 10 of the highest taxed states, according to the most recent ranking from the DC-based Tax Foundation. Eliminating the highest personal income tax bracket, which was created by Governor Jim Doyle, would offer relief for many small businesses and should finally drop us out of the infamous top 10.
Infrastructure: Three of Wisconsin’s most important economic sectors – manufacturing, agriculture and tourism – depend on quality infrastructure. But as automobiles become more fuel efficient the gas tax is not generating the revenue needed to maintain our roadways, let alone build new ones. Bonding isn’t a long-term solution. The simplest way to fund roads is through a modest gas tax hike and increasing the vehicle registration fee.
Mining: Wisconsin doesn’t have shale oil, but we do have the sand used for hydraulic fracturing. As a result, Wisconsin is enjoying a sand boom that has created thousands of good paying jobs in largely economically challenged rural areas.
But the radical environmentalists who have so far failed to stop fracking have now targeted frac sand mining. Their goal is to stop sand mining by driving up local regulatory costs that create a patchwork of illogical rules. WMC will advance legislation to promote statewide regulatory certainty and uniformity.
Workforce Training: Wisconsin’s worker shortage will soon become a crisis, which is why Congress needs to act on immigration reform. At the state-level, Wisconsin should continue its impressive investment in worker training and rebuild our once strong apprenticeship programs.
The Republican Party is not on board with all of this. There appears an insufficient amount of support to get a gas tax increase passed, at least for now. Increase vehicle registration fees, and costs for businesses that use vehicles increase. And of course immigration is a dicey issue for Republicans now, splitting the business wing from the deport-the-illegals part of the party.
Imagine having the opportunity to see Johnny Cash, with Elvis Presley his opening act, in concert at a high school. The concert was at Arkansas High School in Swifton, Ark., today in 1955:
Today in 1961, the Beatles played a concert at the Palais Ballroom in Aldershot, Great Britain. Because the local newspaper wouldn’t accept the promoter’s check for advertising, the concert wasn’t publicized, and attendance totaled 18.
After the concert, the Beatles reportedly were ordered out of town by local police due to their rowdiness.
That, however, doesn’t compare to what happened in New Haven, Conn., today in 1967. Before the Doors concert in the New Haven Arena, a policeman discovered singer Jim Morrison making out in a backstage shower with an 18-year-old girl.
The officer, unaware that he had discovered the lead singer of the concert, told Morrison and the woman to leave. After an argument, in which Morrison told the officer to “eat it,” the officer sprayed Morrison and his new friend with Mace. The concert was delayed one hour while Morrison recovered.
Halfway through the first set, Morrison decided to express his opinion about the New Haven police, daring them to arrest him. They did, on charges of inciting a riot, public obscenity and decency. The charges were later dropped for lack of evidence.
Last week Badger fans were all atwitter because the basketball team was playing Duke in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, and the football team was playing for the Big Ten championship and a possible football playoff berth.
Instead, the Badgers lost to Duke (though they rebounded somewhat by beating Marquette Saturday) and were annihilated by Ohio State, 59-0.
(I saw neither game because I was announcing college basketball both nights. That was certainly a better use of my time Saturday, even with the 2.5-hour bus-flat-tire delay. And on Wednesday, the team I announced for won.)
I’m not particularly bothered by the Duke loss because Duke is good, and the Badgers aren’t playing that well, even though Wednesday was their first loss. Basketball teams don’t want to peak in December, and a loss to a power like Duke doesn’t hurt you much.
A lot of people are bothered by Saturday night’s nationally televised embarrassment, as Todd Milewski chronicles:
These are not the words you want associated with your team in a championship game:
Torched. Horrific. Embarrassed. Mismatch.
Yet that’s some of the wrath that was heaped upon Wisconsin after its worst loss in a generation, a 59-0 humbling by Ohio State in Saturday’s Big Ten championship game in Indianapolis.
It tied for the second-worst losing margin in program history, set in another 59-0 loss to Ohio State in 1979. Back then, however, the Badgers were unranked and headed for a 4-7 season under second-year coach Dave McClain while the Buckeyes were ranked sixth in the country.
(For the record, the Badgers’ worst loss was a 63-0 drubbing by Minnesota in 1890, the program’s second season.)
On Saturday, the Badgers were four-point favorites, but Ohio State made a statement to the College Football Playoff selection committee how much it wants to be part of the four-team lineup.
Put it this way: Ohio State had as many points at halftime Saturday night (38) as the Wisconsin men’s basketball team allowed all game against Marquette earlier in the day.
The reviews, naturally, were not kind.
Jeff Potrykus of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “To be blunt, UW won the pregame coin toss and the Buckeyes dominated from there.”
Vinnie Duber of CSNChicago.com: “Ohio State poured an avalanche of points on Wisconsin in a hurry to start the game, and the hole was massive by the time the Badgers could catch their breath.”
Patrick Vint of SBNation.com: “If the Big Ten West wanted to show that it belonged with its storied brethren in the East, it did not get far Saturday. The Badgers had won a de facto Big Ten West tournament over the season’s last three weeks, systematically knocking off Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota to lock up the division title. Whether it was exhaustion from those three previous games or just another instance of Wisconsin not showing up for half of a game, it did the Badgers, and the Big Ten West, no favors.”
Selfless decision by CFP selection committee member/Wisconsin AD Barry Alvarez to instruct his school to tank and boost B1G playoff hopes.
— Pat Forde (@YahooForde) December 7, 2014
Goodbye Heisman Trophy. Goodbye B1G Championship. Hello Gary Anderson criticism. The Badgers should be embarrassed.#Pitiful
— Bill Michaels (@Bill_Michaels) December 7, 2014
Sports Illustrated’s Brian Hamilton: “The defense chopped Wisconsin into pieces, but in an added indignity, it saddled Melvin Gordon with the antitheses of a Heisman moment: A second-quarter fumble by the Badgers’ 2,000-yard tailback was returned for a touchdown by the Buckeyes’ Joey Bosa. That put the score at 38-0 and left Gordon to contemplate how he’ll applaud politely while Oregon’s Marcus Mariota hoists the trophy next weekend.”
This was unfortunately predictable. I thought the oddsmakers had lost their minds by making Wisconsin a favorite Saturday, regardless of whom the Buckeyes had at quarterback.
One reason I never root for Big Ten teams, and especially Ohio State and Michigan, in bowl games is because of the depressing regularity of such hammerings at the hands of the Buckeyes and Wolverines and their pond scum coaches, Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler. That was in the days when the Big Ten was known as the Big Two and the Little Eight. Each year I hoped that the host site of the Michigan-OSU game would be nuked, and, failing that, that the Wolverines and Buckeyes would lose their bowl games and their planes would crash on the way home.
Notice that the previous paragraph includes no admission that maybe there were valid reasons for Bucky’s getting crushed by better teams — you know, better players. Those games were in the ’70s, when UW was worse than mediocre (just two winning seasons from 1970 to 1979) but not as bad as as the BADgers were in the late ’80s under Don Mor(t)on. That changed thanks to reductions in scholarship limits by the NCAA, as well as high school football players wanting to play immediately instead of waiting their turn, or never getting into a game except in garbage time.
One wonders how a defense gets to be rated second in the country when that defense gives up 59 points. (Though the defense gave up 52; the offense gave up seven on the return of Gordon’s fumble. Doesn’t that make you feel better?) As with many teams that run the ball well, the Badgers can stop the run, but pass defense is a bigger problem.
Truth be told, though, games like this between good teams happen with increasing frequency because of the increase in speed, and coaches’ being willing to exploit their offensive speed. (Time was when coaches always put their better athletes on defense, leading to a lot of boring 7-3 games.) Recall two years ago when Wisconsin blasted Nebraska 70-31 in the 2012 Big Ten championship game, or UW’s win over the Cornhuskers earlier this season.
The bigger issue to me — which exposes an issue that has been a problem for a long, long time — is how a team with a supposed Heisman Trophy candidate running back gets shut out. That suggests an inability to figure out how to move the ball down the field beyond handing off to your tailback. The fact that UW was able to beat lesser teams (other than Northwestern) and teams roughly their talent level (Nebraska and Minnesota) doesn’t mean this team doesn’t have serious deficiencies on offense. Apparently this offensive staff lacks the ability of previous offensive staffs (that is, those with Paul Chryst as the offensive coordinator) to maximize their strengths and disguise what they were doing — run the same plays but from different formations and pre-snap looks.
At the risk of offending Darlington Redbirds fans: Alex Erickson is not a number one wide receiver in the Big Ten, and he was obviously the best receiver (who played quarterback in high school) the Badgers had. As I wrote here earlier this season, the question of who should have played quarterback, Joel Stave or Tanner McAvoy, was correctly answered with one word: Neither. Neither Stave nor McAvoy should be the quarterback, though there is no guarantee that freshman D.J. Gillins or the supposedly bazooka-armed quarterback from Utah will be the answer behind center either.
Games like Saturday’s also makes you think that coach Gary Andersen’s recruiting approach isn’t working in other areas too. This year’s defense was supposed to be smaller but quicker than previous defenses. Giving up that many points means you have defensive problems. The traditionally strongest position grouping has been the offensive line, but on at least one night they couldn’t block, period, and their pass blocking has been a question beyond Saturday night.
Is this overreacting to one bad game? Or is a season like this — beat the teams you should, but never get better than that — as good as it gets at Camp Randall? The answer comes down to not wins and losses, but money. Andersen won’t be in trouble unless fans start coming up with something else to do besides go to Badger games. (Which is also why hockey coach Mike Eaves is in trouble.)
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin:
President Obama has been rotten for the Democratic Party. Under his presidency, both the Senate and House majorities were lost. Democratic governors went from 27 in 2009 to a measly 16. Democrats control only 11 state legislatures, the smallest number since the 1920s. Jon Thompson, spokesman for the Republican Governors Association tells me, “Under Obama, Republicans have increased their number of governors from 22 in 2008 to 31 in 2015, the most for either Party in 16 years. Nearly 200 million Americans will live in a state with a Republican governor in 2015, almost 2/3 of the country.” If not for New York and California, the Democratic Party would nearly be a bit player on the national scene. (Those two states give the Democrats an almost automatic 4 Senate seats, 84 electoral votes, two governors and nearly 58 million people.)
And the numbers go beyond seats won: The Democratic Party has lost the advantage according to polls in its ability to handle top issues ranging from the debt to foreign policy. Overall the party is at an all-time low in favorability at 36 percent. According to Gallup, Democrats are in trouble in affiliation as well. “Prior to the elections, 43% of Americans identified as Democrats or leaned toward the Democratic Party, while 39% identified as or leaned Republican. Since then, Republicans have opened up a slight advantage, 42% to 41%, representing a net shift of five percentage points in the partisanship gap.”
Can one president do this much damage to a party? There is another way of looking at this. It is not so much that Obama has been bad for the Democratic Party as the 21st century has been bad for liberalism. Faith in government has declined. The liberals’ historic national healthcare plan turned out to be an albatross around the necks of Democratic lawmakers. Only 37.9 percent of Americans approve of the Democratic Party while 52.5 percent disapprove in the RealClearPolitics poll averages.
The parties have become so ideologically polarized that for all intents and purposes the GOP is the party of conservatism and Democratic Party that of liberalism. With respect to the latter it is not so much the liberalism of FDR with a coalition of immigrants, workers, farmers and the poor but of green activists, media elites, trial lawyers, public employee unions and Silicon Valley and Hollywood moguls. (Jim Webb put it: “The Democratic Party has lost the message that made it such a great party for so many years, and that message was: Take care of working people, take care of the people who have no voice in the corridors of power, no matter their race, ethnicity or any other reason. The Democratic Party has basically turned into a party of interest groups.”)
Just as the political glue that united the party has dissolved, the intellectual backbone of the left has crumbled. Its most prominent think tank, Center for American Progress, has been hobbled by controversies and is seen as a political adjunct to the White House. (Much criticism comes from the left: “One former CAP staffer described ‘total synchronization’ between the administration and the think tank, which he said routinely allowed Team Obama to vet reports prior to publication. ‘We were constantly in touch with the White House,’ this person said. ‘Once I was on the phone with four White House lawyers who wanted to know what I was going to say [in an upcoming report].’”) It has been overshadowed by a bevy of conservative think tanks (while Brookings has become decidedly centrist on everything from defense spending to anti-poverty measures to the law of war).
The literary left has gone through convulsions. The New York Times was racked with accusations of sexism when it fired editor Jill Abramson. Newsweek failed on liberal doyenne Tina Brown’s watch. And now The New Republic – whose owner Chris Hughes won’t even call it a magazine – has eaten its own, laying off journalistic stars and earning scorn from both ends of the political spectrum. Commentary’s John Podhoretz recalls that the Weekly Standard, still going strong, was formed consciously as an intellectual opponent to TNR. There is no competition now. He vividly describes the pattern: “So I’d argue that what has befallen the New Republic is, in some ways, what has befallen liberalism writ large. It became unserious, and is about to become more unserious still, because that it what has happened to liberalism as a governing philosophy.”
And then there is the other great bastion of liberalism — higher education. Between speech code controversies, sexual assault allegations, sports and cheating scandals, their ongoing spasm of thinly disguised anti-Israel propaganda and discrimination it is evident once prestigious institutions have lost their intellectual and moral bearings.
What happened? Three trends are evident.
First, liberalism’s moral superiority led to intellectual laziness, a refusal to look at the way the world is (e.g. the failure of Keynesian economics, the nature of Islamic fundamentalism, the shortcomings of the liberal welfare state, disregard for the benefits of free markets). With that laziness came a distasteful tone. Twitter seems the perfect medium for the snarly left — filled with one-liners, personal attacks, snap judgments and just plain meanness. Identity politics, the last refuge of a movement with few policy innovations to offer, becomes the default mode for the left.
Second, the faults in liberal ideology became more acute as society became more complex. Yuval Levin (conservative philosopher, policy wonk and editor who has no liberal counterpart) writes: “But the size and cost of the liberal welfare state are a function of its basic character, and it is that character that is really at issue in most policy debates between liberals and conservatives. The fundamentally prescriptive, technocratic approach to American society inherent in the logic of the Left’s policy thinking is a poor fit for American life at any scale. The liberal welfare state ultimately cannot be had at an affordable price. It is not the architecture of one or another particular program that makes it unsustainable. It is unsustainable because the system as a whole must feed off of the innovative, decentralized vitality of American life, yet it undermines both the moral and the economic foundations of that vitality.” To be blunt, a set of assumptions about society and the world that were wrong but passable in 1960 are an obvious debacle in 2014. Giving the left power in the form of their dream president proved a fatal move, allowing all to see its gross shortcomings.
Third, the left’s disdain for limitations on its quest for power (the rule of law, factual accuracy, due process, personal civility) has proven to be unwise and self-destructive. Smash-and-grab politics cannot sustain itself. The president can’t simply make up facts and seize power from the legislative branch to achieve what he wants. The narrative cannot be accurate if the facts are wrong. Fair-minded people revolt against kangaroo courts and institutional railroading. And loss of polite debate and respect for opponents erode the public square and obviates the requirement for much needed self-reflection and reasoned argument. As universities fall down on their job of instilling ethical and intellectual excellence the failures of other liberal institutions (the media, the think tanks) leave a movement adrift and shallow.
This is analogous to Obama’s continuing to get awards from gun sales organizations as the Salesman of the Year, thanks to his continuing rhetoric against our Second Amendment rights.
The same situation has occurred in this state. When Obama was inaugurated president in 2009, Wisconsin had a Democratic governor and Democratic control of both houses of the Legislature, two Democratic U.S. senators, and four Democrats in the majority party in the House of Representatives. Since the 2010 election, Wisconsin has had a Republican governor and Republican control of both houses (except for the brief Democratic Senate majority during Recallarama) of the Legislature, one Republican U.S. senator, and five Republicans in the majority party in the House.
Democratic candidates tried to talk about the middle class and working families this fall. Apparently voters weren’t buying it, and it’s not hard to see why when your party is in fact in thrall to “green activists, media elites, trial lawyers, public employee unions and Silicon Valley and Hollywood moguls.” Wisconsin has neither a Silicon Valley nor Hollywood, nor many moguls, but certainly the rest applies to this state.
Predictions of the demise of a political party based on one bad-for-them election are foolish. (You may recall the GOP was supposedly dead after 2008 — and for that matter 1992 — and some people still feel that way for spurious demographic reasons.) It took the Democrats three losing presidential elections to think differently a quarter century ago. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Elizabeth Warren look like saviors.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 