First: Today is Felix Unger Day. Why?
The number one album today in 1965 received no radio airplay:
The number one British single today in 1968 was based on, but didn’t directly come from, a movie:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Nov. 13
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Readers of a certain age may recall the book listed in the headline that many of those of us of a certain age read in school.
It was either that, or insert a music video here:
The concept in each is what Charles C.W. Cooke refers to:
My colleague Jay Nordlinger likes to gripe that “you should run for president” is uttered far too swiftly on the right nowadays, the injunction tending to follow almost every instance of public-facing conservative competence. A man has made an impressive speech, full of critiques of which you approved? He should be president! A governor is doing well in a state that is usually run by the other side. Shouldn’t he be our commander-in-chief? We have someone in the legislature who is fluent in fiscal policy? Let’s remove him from his area of expertise and put him immediately into the White House. More often than not, it has to be said, this happens with minorities and with women — the tendency serving perhaps as the Republican party’s own form of affirmative action. If we could just parachute this gifted black man into a position of prominence, the thought goes, our image problem would be solved.
This proclivity is not entirely unwise, of course. Washington D.C.’s insider culture is certainly a real problem, and the abundance of career politicians and wannabe lobbyists does render substantial retrenchment unlikely. On occasion, we really do need outsiders to shake things up. But there are talented political newcomers and there are mavericks and then there are rank amateurs and flavors of the month, and the difference between these two types is the difference between a Dwight Eisenhower or a Rudy Giuliani and a Herman Cain or a Donald Trump. One would like to imagine that the prospect of an unknown’s being held up as the face of a centuries-old party and a timeless political movement would set loud alarm bells ringing in the ears of those who characterize themselves as “conservatives.” That for so many it does not is troubling indeed.
As a rule, we on the right like to tell ourselves that we are steadfastly opposed to heroes in politics, and that we are especially opposed to heroes who promise that their election to the executive branch will result in sweeping changes or in a post-partisan utopia. The United States, we argue, was set up in opposition to princes and to aristocrats, with the express recognition that politics will always be with us and with the explicit understanding that the influence of individual players would be strictly limited by the system. Long before anybody in the wider electorate so much as knew Barack Obama’s name, this instinct was a virtuous and a sensible one. But if we have learned anything from his presidency, it is just how prudent that conviction was. Somehow, however, the hope that a shining knight will come to save the republic from itself remains common within conservative circles. What gives?
I suspect that the impulse is in part the product of the way in which the Right sees politics. On Wednesday, Reihan Salam quoted Noam Scheiber’s invaluable observation that, unlike “interest groups on the left, which tend to accept the transactional nature of government, many movement conservatives have a genuinely coherent worldview they want to see reflected — in its entirety.” This is correct, and to an extent I am among them. An ugly consequence of this, however, is that individuals who line up with a given conservative’s worldview tend to be held up by that conservative as a rarity and as a savior — as an unimpeachable superhero who will not compromise in the face of identity politics or elite pressure and whose elevation to power will immediately stop the ratchet from moving ever leftward. Those who doubt this should see what happens when one criticizes Sarah Palin or Ron Paul. Right-leaning politicians who differ on a few important issues, by contrast, are quickly dismissed as “traitors” or “sellouts” or “fake conservatives.” To witness this process in action, consider just how far Marco Rubio has fallen in the affections of many who once greatly admired him. Rubio, who has an impressively conservative voting record and a generally winsome character, erred on the question of immigration last year. Did this error transform him in the eyes of the Republican base into a fair prospect with some unlikable traits? Or did this make him an unconscionable turncoat who should never have been elected in the first place? For too many, I’m afraid, it is the latter.
This inclination helps to explain why Ronald Reagan is so chronically misremembered, too. Reagan was an unquestionably great man, who, like Margaret Thatcher in Britain, not only helped to turn around the prospects of his own country but played a key role in freeing millions of foreigners who had been brutally enslaved by the Soviet Union. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, as the old saying goes. And yet, despite the common implication of those who revere him, Reagan was by no means a perfect president, and there is some truth to the common progressive jab that he would not get through a Republican primary today. For a start, Ronald Reagan compromised far, far more than conservatives at the time wanted him to — to the extent that some here at National Review considered him to be a failure. He signed an amnesty that we now regard as having been a disaster. He raised taxes when he thought it necessary. He signed gun-control bills, including one that outlawed the importation of automatic weapons. And, famously, he made deals with Mikhail Gorbachev that were slammed by many on the right as being little more than “appeasement.” It is all very well for conservatives to say, “If only Ronald Reagan were president,” but in doing so they have to take the rough with the smooth and to remember, too, that Reagan did not achieve as much as he did because he was a superman, but because he was part of a more general shift.
All in all, the “Reagan era” was an expression of changed public sentiment as much as it was the product of an especially capable president. At no point in Ronald Reagan’s tenure did Republicans control the House, and for six years of his time in office the Democratic party had a majority in the Senate. Despite this, he changed the country for the better and reset the ideological presumptions of the electorate for a generation — perhaps more.
Besides that: Should politicians be anyone’s hero? No politician — and that includes the politicians you like and vote for — enters politics for reasons that don’t include accumulating power for himself or herself, even for good reasons.
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One week removed from his reelection, Gov. Scott Walker has a few things to say to Congress (from Politico):
It’s put up or shut up time. Those were the words I spoke to the newly elected Republican majority in Wisconsin back in 2010. With both houses of the legislature and the governorship in Republican hands for the first time in more than a decade, it was our time to prove that the trust voters placed in us was warranted. That we would do what we had said we would do. That we would turn things around.
Those are the same words I share with Republicans preparing to lead both houses of Congress come January. Your election is a message from the American people that they want change. So go big and bold.
Before the November 2010 elections, Democrats in Wisconsin controlled the governor’s office, both houses of the state legislature, both U.S. Senate seats and a majority of the state’s House seats. In fact, a Republican had not carried the state for president since 1984. We were a blue state in tough shape. In the four years before we took office, more than 133,000 people had lost their jobs and 27,000 businesses had turned out their lights. The unemployment rate was 7.8 percent. The state’s finances were poorly managed, taxpayers were on the hook for a $3.6 billion deficit and the state owed millions in unpaid bills. Instead of providing solutions to Wisconsin’s problems, past leaders had chosen to raise taxes and pass the buck on difficult fiscal choices.
But Wisconsin Republicans changed that. We focused on the fiscal and economic issues facing our state and our country, and the voters responded in a big way. On November 2, 2010, I became the first Republican governor elected since the 1990s, Republicans regained the majority in the state Senate and Assembly, and we won a U.S. Senate seat and picked up the majority of Wisconsin’s House seats.
Days after the 2010 election, Republicans gathered in our state Capitol to elect their new leadership. At that meeting, I addressed the new majority caucuses and talked about the sea change that had brought us together; voters had made a dramatic shift because they wanted a government that would do the same. I told them we had to make changes worthy of voters’ faith in us, and that if we merely nibbled around the edges, instead of pushing real reforms, Wisconsinites would have every right to push us out of office.
To say the least, we did not nibble around the edges. We pushed full-scale, common-sense, conservative reforms and got to work beginning on day one. One of our first moves was to reform collective bargaining for public employees. Those reforms have saved Wisconsin taxpayers at the state and local level more than $3 billion to date, mostly through reasonable healthcare and pension contributions and the elimination of bid rigging. Now, schools can also make personnel and payment decisions based on merit, which means we can put the best and brightest teachers in our classrooms and pay to keep them there.
In my first term, we lowered taxes by $2 billion, streamlined government services, passed comprehensive tort reform, eliminated more than $300 million in government waste, fraud and abuse, invested more than $100 million in worker training so people can get the skills they need to get good-paying, family-supporting jobs and paid back past due bills left behind by the previous administration. And contrary to caricatures drawn by the left, more than 97 percent of the bills I signed into law garnered bipartisan support.
Four years later, the results are clear. Wisconsin has created more than 110,000 private-sector jobs and nearly 25,000 businesses, and our unemployment rate is 5.5 percent, the lowest it’s been since 2008. While we’re not done yet, Wisconsin is back on the right track. On Tuesday, voters here responded to the progress we’ve made, by reelecting me and giving Republicans a combined four additional seats in the state Senate and Assembly, for the biggest total we have seen since the 1950s.
The Democrats and their union friends spent tens of millions of dollars trying to defeat me—multiple times—but all of their advertising and special tricks couldn’t pull the wool over the eyes of Wisconsin voters: They were happy with what the GOP majority has done on their behalf.
The message Wisconsin holds for national Republicans is clear: Don’t be afraid to lead. …
Following Tuesday’s election results, President Obama told voters, “I hear you,” but he also said he wouldn’t give any ground on issues like Obamacare or his administration’s carbon regulations, which many Americans oppose. Democrats lost the majority in the Senate because voters are fed up with the Obama agenda. They’re fed up with government that takes more and more while taxpayers make do with less and less. So a message to Republicans in Congress: Don’t nibble around the edges. Push common-sense, conservative ideas. Lead.
What does that mean? First, take this opportunity to restore America’s economy. That starts with lowering the tax rate to put more money into the hands of the American people. It also means lowering corporate tax rates to encourage employers to bring jobs back to America. And it means passing a balanced budget.
Republicans in Congress should also enact a comprehensive energy policy that makes the United States less dependent on foreign oil—including approving the Keystone XL pipeline. Repeal Obamacare and offer an alternative that is driven by patients and not bureaucracies. Send funds for Medicaid and similar programs back to the states in the form of block grants to encourage innovation. Rein in those federal agencies that stand in the way of prosperity. Reform welfare programs to restore the dignity that comes from work.
The lesson from last Tuesday is that voters will affirm candidates who get things done. And they will keep leaders who do what they say they will do.
Following Tuesday’s election results, President Obama told voters, “I hear you,” but he also said he wouldn’t give any ground on issues like Obamacare or his administration’s carbon regulations, which many Americans oppose. Democrats lost the majority in the Senate because voters are fed up with the Obama agenda. They’re fed up with government that takes more and more while taxpayers make do with less and less. So a message to Republicans in Congress: Don’t nibble around the edges. Push common-sense, conservative ideas. Lead.
What does that mean? First, take this opportunity to restore America’s economy. That starts with lowering the tax rate to put more money into the hands of the American people. It also means lowering corporate tax rates to encourage employers to bring jobs back to America. And it means passing a balanced budget.
Republicans in Congress should also enact a comprehensive energy policy that makes the United States less dependent on foreign oil—including approving the Keystone XL pipeline. Repeal Obamacare and offer an alternative that is driven by patients and not bureaucracies. Send funds for Medicaid and similar programs back to the states in the form of block grants to encourage innovation. Rein in those federal agencies that stand in the way of prosperity. Reform welfare programs to restore the dignity that comes from work.
The lesson from last Tuesday is that voters will affirm candidates who get things done. And they will keep leaders who do what they say they will do.
Of course, some people hate Walker. They also hated Gov. Tommy Thompson, and Ronald Reagan. None of them seemed to care.
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Today in 1968, Britain’s W.T. Smiths refused to carry the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Electric Ladyland” …
… with its original album cover …
… although a different cover was OK:
The number one single today in 1983:
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The Wall Street Journal profiles Gov. Scott Walker:
‘Wow. First off, I want to thank God for his abundant grace and mercy. Win or lose, it is more than sufficient for each and every one of us,” Scott Walker said, taking the podium on Tuesday night at the Wisconsin state fair grounds after being re-re-elected for governor. It was a curious register, given that Mr. Walker’s religious faith, even though his father was a pastor, has never seemed central to his economic and political identity. But then maybe the intervention of a higher power is as good an explanation as any for the commanding victory that unions and liberals went all-out to prevent.
Mr. Walker suggests a more secular reading: “People actually saw, they saw with their own eyes,” he says. “Once they got past the myths and the half-truths and sometimes the outright falsehoods, they could see in their own families, in their own homes, they could see in their own workplaces and towns and cities and villages and counties that life was better.” In a word, despite the political convulsions of his first term, his reforms worked, and voters rewarded him for the results.
In a wide-ranging phone interview from Madison on Thursday night, Mr. Walker sounded exhausted but joyful after his third statewide election since 2010. The governor laid out how he thinks center-right reformers can succeed among Democratic-leaning bodies politic—Wisconsin hasn’t broken for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984, when he was in high school—and why he doesn’t think the same trend is inexorable in like-minded states in 2016.
The race Mr. Walker won this week was close-run and became a referendum on his first term. His opponent, Mary Burke, a former executive of Trek Bicycle Corp., ran as a not-Walker. The governor calls her “almost the bionic candidate,” in the sense that her intelligence, business experience, gender and noncommittal up-the-middle platform were focus-group-tested as the perfect foil for his agenda and his track record of the past few years. …
Surveys indicated that Mr. Walker and Ms. Burke were statistically tied through the summer and most of the fall, though Mr. Walker observes that “those polls consistently showed that the opinion of the state in terms of right-track/wrong-track was still very positive. A solid majority felt the state was headed in the right direction.” He was confident that he would receive those votes in the end.
Act 10’s collective-bargaining reforms allowed the state to balance the budget, and counties to restrain or even reduce the property taxes that had increased 27% over the decade before Mr. Walker. But the legislation also improved Wisconsin in ways that “wouldn’t seem quite as obvious,” he says. By eliminating tenure and seniority work rules, “we can hire and fire based on merit and pay based on performance, we can put the best and brightest in our classrooms—and voilà, graduation rates are up. ACT scores are up, now second best in the country. Third-grade reading scores are up. The left certainly doesn’t acknowledge this: Our schools are better.”
Mr. Walker also believes that the national intervention on Ms. Burke’s behalf—including visits from President Obama , first lady Michelle Obama (twice), Bill Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka —backfired. “Our opponent, you know she’s aligned with these Washington-based special interests, particularly the unions. I’m aligned with the hardworking taxpayers of Wisconsin,” he says, recapping his closing argument.
In an anti-Washington year, that may have made the difference: He won independents by a 10-point margin as some 56.9% of registered voters came to the polls this year, the second-highest share in the nation.
Mr. Walker also inspires acute loyalty among Wisconsin Republicans, and he has built a remarkably durable political coalition to overcome the state’s Democratic tilt. He won 52.2% of the vote in 2010, 53.1% in 2012, and won 52.3% to 46.6% against Ms. Burke. He prevailed in 59 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties four years ago, 60 two years ago and 56 this year, winning the same 54 all three times. Though you’d never know it from the media coverage, Mr. Walker’s support runs deeper than the antipathy of his opposition.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) attributes this loyalty in large part to the ruction over Act 10, a period that he recalls as “unbelievably vicious.” Mr. Walker notes that thousands of state protesters occupied not merely the capitol building in Madison but picketed his private family residence in Wauwatosa.
Yet Mr. Walker says that as he commuted the 75 miles on I-94 during that time, “handmade, hand-painted signs started to pop up out in the fields, these big four by eights, that would say ‘We Stand With Walker.’ You’d see one, and the next day you’d start to see some more, and so on, and eventually you’d see them not just in the fields, but then in the cities and little towns. It was a visible reminder of how intense people felt.”
Mr. Walker returns for his second term with larger Republican legislative majorities in the assembly and senate. “I said throughout the campaign that anyone who wants a job should be able to find a job,” and he will outline a pragmatic agenda to lower the cost of doing business, reduce the tax burden and promote “learn more to earn more” skill training. Mr. Walker pushed through both corporate and individual tax cuts last year, amounting to about $1.9 billion. Yet Wisconsin’s top personal income-tax rate is the 10th highest among the states and per capita state and local tax collections rank 12th, according to the Tax Foundation.
Republicans are often instructed that tax cutting, especially the rates on marginal income, is tapped out as a political issue, and that the GOP must find other methods to appeal to the middle class. “Boy, I don’t buy that at all,” Mr. Walker says. “Like the Midwest I come from, we respect quality in government, but we want a good deal for it.”
Mr. Walker has also been one of the few GOP governors to manage ObamaCare’s take-the-money-and-run Medicaid bribe competently. His Democratic predecessor opened the program to twice the poverty line, but lacked the funding to cover the flood of new patients. Mr. Walker reduced eligibility to 100% of poverty but also took everyone off the wait list. “Silly me, I actually thought Medicaid was meant for poor people,” he says.
Another politician from the Great Lakes region often says that when you die, St. Peter won’t ask you what you did to keep government small but he will ask you what you did to help the poor. “It’s probably not fair to ask the son of a preacher to use biblical metaphors,” Mr. Walker says. “My reading of the Bible finds plenty of reminders that it’s better to teach someone to fish than to give them fish if they’re able. . . . Caring for the poor isn’t the same as taking money from the federal government to lock more people into Medicaid.” …
In his victory speech, Mr. Walker went on to develop a “Wisconsin versus Washington” theme that notably differed in tone from his previous speeches and could be a prelude to a White House run. As a conviction politician with a substantive record and a chain of victories, Mr. Walker could be a formidable candidate. He has “put the state back on the right path and shows what we need to do in America,” says Sen. Johnson.
The challenge for Mr. Walker as a potential candidate and president would be broadening his appeal beyond regionalism, and persuading independents that he is not the radical monster of liberal caricature. Achieving the second goal, but maybe not the first, would be made easier because he is decent and affable in that familiar Midwestern manner.
But Mr. Walker is also notably redefining the progressive political tradition in Wisconsin, which was the birthplace of collective bargaining for public unions, in 1959. The progressivism that stretches from Robert La Follette to Sen. Tammy Baldwin has always emphasized protecting the common man from special interests, usually meaning business. Mr. Walker’s pitch is that government excess has emerged as the new threat. Though La Follette’s politics were “the polar opposite end” of Mr. Walker’s, the governor says that he belongs to “that proud tradition of people who are aggressive and not afraid to take on big challenges. I actually think I’m a progressive too, I think I fit in that tradition.”
In any case, Mr. Walker says he jokes with his wife that he is “kind of on a two-year campaign cycle”—he won a special election for Milwaukee county executive in 2002, the regular election in 2004, contemplated a gubernatorial run in 2006, and then the latest string of 2010, 2012 and this year. It may be that, in 2016, he’s due.
Walker also said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” that governors make better presidents. He’s correct, because unlike members of Congress, who get to vote “present” (see Obama, Barack) and who get to make votes that have no significance whatsoever, governors actually have to accomplish things, have to manage government, and either have to work with their political opponents or defeat them.
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The Wisconsin Reporter reports:
A business owner who helped promote a Republican state senator says a nursing instructor with union ties wrote a letter threatening her company with financial harm.
In the letter, the signatory, Allison Nicol, says she has stopped advising prospective students to receive training through Quality Healthcare Options Inc.
Nichol, who works at the Mequon campus of Milwaukee Area Technical College, doesn’t agree with company owner Sally Sprenger backing state Sen. Leah Vukmir, R-Wauwatosa, the letter says.
Nicol signed the petition to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2011, and that signature appears to match the signature on the letter, which asks staff at the taxpayer-supported technical college to follow her lead, according to documents obtained by Wisconsin Reporter.
“For many years, my colleagues and I have recommended that our future nursing students obtain their CNA training or take refresher courses through Quality Healthcare Options,” said the Oct. 10 letter to the Wauwatosa-based business. “I will no longer recommend your company to our students, and I am in the process of notifying our entire faculty as well as our program leadership of the same.”
As legal expert Rick Esenberg sees it, the apparent tactics of intimidation could be considered a violation of Sprenger’s rights under the First Amendment.
“(Sprenger) cannot be discriminated against based upon her decision to express her political viewpoints,” said Esenberg, president and general counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. “You can’t announce that you’re only going to award contracts to Democrats or you’re only going to award contracts to Republicans.”
Sprenger, who promoted Vukmir by allowing campaign signs at Quality Healthcare Options, has tried to file a complaint with the college since she got the letter. But she hasn’t gotten an official response.
Last week, Sprenger asked for a meeting with the MATC board of directors to review the threats.
Kathleen Hohl, communications director for MATC, told Wisconsin Reporter on Thursday the college is looking into the letter and is working directly with the writer to provide more information to Sprenger. But Hohl said the school hasn’t launched a formal investigation. …
“If (the writer) organized a boycott — either she did it on her own or did it in concert with her fellow faculty members at MATC — she’s acting as an agent of the state, she’s acting as an agent of MATC and she’s engaging in viewpoint discrimination in administering a government program,” Esenberg told Wisconsin Reporter.
Sprenger contends the writer referred to her affiliation with MATC by using the address for the Mequon campus on the letter’s envelope.
“Does (the writer) work elsewhere?” Sprenger asked Bonaparte in an Oct. 21 email. “Then what students does she ‘advise pre-admission’ to her nursing program? What colleagues and faculty of what school would she be notifying in her statement ‘our entire faculty as well as the leadership of the same?’”
On her LinkedIn page, Nicol, who did not return calls from Wisconsin Reporter seeking comment, lists MATC as her only employer.
Nicol has worked at MATC since January 2003 and was a member of the American Federation of Teachers Local 212 MATC until at least 2012, according to IRS tax documents. Nicol’s name does not appear on Local 212’s tax forms for 2012-13, a year after Walker signed Act 10, his signature collective bargaining reforms that eliminated forced unionization of most public-sector employees.
Local 212 does not disclose the identity of its members, said Kevin Mulvenna, executive vice president of the union’s executive board.
In the letter, the writer tells Quality Healthcare Options she would no longer recommend students to receive training through the company because she alleges Vukmir, a registered nurse, disregarded the Nursing Code of Ethics when she voted against a bill requiring health plans to provide the same coverage for chemotherapy pills.
It says she also had concerns with Vukmir’s “disturbing relationship” with the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization many consider as Public Enemy No. 1 to liberals and unions.
Vukmir, who easily won her re-election bid Tuesday, voted for Act 10, the driving force behind the 2011 and 2012 recall elections.
Nicol contributed $125 in 2012 to the campaign of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate who lost to Walker in the recall election that year. Walker also defeated Barrett in 2010.
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Besides the end of the War to End All Wars (which didn’t end all wars but led directly to the next war) and the day Americans remember and honor those whose service and sacrifice allow me to freely write this and you to freely read this, what else happened Nov. 11?
Today in 1954, Bill Haley got his first top 10 single, “Shake Rattle and Roll,” originally a Joe Turner song. Haley had changed the name of his band, the cowboy-motif Saddlemen, to His Comets.
Imagine what the Transportation Security Administration would have done with this: Today in 1969, the FBI arrested Jim Morrison for drunk and disorderly conduct on an airplane. Morrison and actor Tom Baker had been drinking and harassing stewardesses on a flight to Phoenix. Morrison and Baker spent a night in jail and were released on $2,500 bail.
Today in 1972, an era when pretty much everything would go in rock music, listeners got to hear the first example of what might be called “yodel rock”:
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Yesterday I posted here video of Packers touchdowns against Da Bears, and Jay Cutler interceptions by the Packers.
Those videos are now out of date by, respectively, seven touchdowns and two interceptions in the Packers’ 55-14 rout of Da Bears.
Which, predictably, makes the Chicago media not very happy this morning.
Our tour of truculence starts with the Chicago Tribune’s Dan Wiederer:
If the Bears had hoped to use their time off in Week 9 to sharpen their offensive attack, the first half Sunday night at Lambeau Field instead spoke to a team that had somehow found a way to get sloppier during its time off. Much sloppier.
On seven drives before halftime against the Packers, the Bears went scoreless and they had nearly as many penalties (three) in the first quarter as first downs (four).
A false start by Jermon Bushrod on third-and-11 on the opening series proved costly. Two possessions later, Bushrod was beaten badly for a sack by Clay Matthews, a play that also included an unnecessary-roughness penalty against Jordan Mills that pushed the Bears into a fourth-and-32 situation.
Quarterback Jay Cutler threw a first-quarter interception and also had a delay of game penalty himself.
And after vowing to make a greater commitment to offensive balance in the second half of the season, the Bears instead threw the ball or were sacked on 26 of their 38 plays in the first half.
As if their own offensive ineptitude wasn’t enough, the Packers’ ease in moving the ball only furthered the agony. Green Bay scored touchdowns on six of its first seven drives and at halftime had a 42-0 lead and a 358-162 advantage in total yardage.
That’s just half of it: Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers threw six touchdown passes in the first half alone, the first time in his career he had evenreached four before halftime. Two of those were deep balls to Jordy Nelson, who had TD receptions of 73 and 40 yards on his way to six grabs and 152 yards — in the first half. Nelson also drew a 53-yard pass interference penalty against cornerback Tim Jennings.
Nothing special: The Bears’ obligatory special teams blunder came with 11:49 left in the third quarter when safety Danny McCray slipped in punt protection right after the snap. That left Packers receiver Jarrett Boykin to get to punterPat O’Donnell so quickly that the Bears rookie never even got his drop to his right foot.
In fact, Boykin actually knocked the ball with his right foot first.
What was originally announced as a blocked punt was soon corrected to be an O’Donnell fumble and a Boykin recovery.
Boykin’s getting to the ball before the punter has to be seen to be believed:
Which prompts the Tribune’s Steve Rosenbloom, always a good source during Chicago sports disaster, to ask:
I started writing this at the end of the first quarter, hoping to get it posted by halftime because I wanted the Bears to fire Marc Trestman before the start of the third quarter.
Geez, it was 42-0, Packers, at halftime, so how much worse could it be if the coach had been whacked after two quarters? Trestman’s team has allowed 80 points in the last two first halves combined, so again, how much worse could it be without the guy?
Trestman deserves it. Bears fans deserves to see him whacked. What happened on Sunday night in front of God and NBC was a pathetic excuse for preparation and execution by a coach who has become a disaster at preparing his team to execute.
The Bears organization, however, deserves to see Trestman stay because those wonks are too stupid to know how awful this is. If they cared, they’d have listened to me when I screamed that Trestman should’ve been canned after the Dolphins game. Certainly after the Patriots game.
But no. Nobody at the toxic waste dump that is Halas Hall did a thing about it. Bears wonks have a high tolerance for being a laughingstock, as we all know.
And that’s how you get a 42-0 national TV embarrassment against the Bears’ biggest rival in their biggest game of a death-spiral of a season. Trestman’s Bears came out bad and stupid, and then looked like they quit or wanted to.
In the first quarter alone, Trestman’s offense was flagged for a false start, delay-of-game, and a personal foul.
Oh, and Jay Cutler threw his regularly scheduled interception and the Bears ran Matt Forte just twice in the first eight plays against the worst rushing defense in the league.
That’s some valuable work Trestman and his staff did during the off week, eh?
You know how little the Packers feared the Bears offense? They went for it on fourth-and-goal from the 1 way back when the game was scoreless. They didn’t value the field goal. The Packers knew they’d get the ball back without trouble.
And they did. And they scored TD after TD after TD.
Trestman’s defensive coordinator still can’t teach his players to communicate checks and coverages. This goes back to Chris Conte and last season’s finale against the same Packers. This is an on-going embarrassment and now a national joke.
Bad enough that Mel Tucker and his defense are too stupid to double-cover Jordy Nelson, but they’re also too inept to even single-cover him for more than five yards. Nice coaching, teaching and execution.
That’s some complementary football, Coach Trestman.
But wait. There’s more stupidity. Trestman’s special teams coach continues to tell his guys to bring the ball out of the end zone on kickoff returns when nobody can get to the 20-yard line without Uber.
At 3-6, the Bears are done. They are hopeless. They are leaderless. They appeared heartless at times in the first half Sunday. How much more damning evidence does Emery need?
Emery has to fire Trestman now. He has no other option if he wants to keep his job, and even then, Emery still might get whacked.
Emery’s odd choice of coach has destroyed all hope for the next three years because the Trestman decision was tied to the $54 million the GM guaranteed to Cutler.
Emery could’ve franchise-tagged the erratic quarterback for one year and let him walk if he played as badly as, well, he has played this year. Emery could’ve whacked Trestman, too, and started over.
How good would that option be now? How dreadful will the remainder of Cutler’s contract feel now?
It’s over. Trestman’s career here. Emery’s career here. Maybe Ted Phillips’, too. Maybe they can get a group rate for the national convention of village idiots.
The Chicago Sun-Times’ Rick Morrissey agrees (did they work together on this in the Lambeau Field press box?):
The right thing would have been for general manager Phil Emery to make his way down to the Bears’ locker room at halftime and inform head coach Marc Trestman that his services would no longer be needed for the second half of Sunday’s game and beyond. And then for Emery to fire himself too.
From there, it would have logically followed that the McCaskeys would see the error of their ways and divest themselves of their ownership of the Bears and go into something better suited to their unique talents. Butter churning, perhaps. Or pizza delivery.
But that was never going to happen, even though the Bears were trailing the hated Packers 42-0 at halftime, an embarrassment of such epic proportions that one of the McCaskeys was rumored to have blushed.
My guess is that the Bears will cut a third-string cornerback after Sunday night’s debacle, but I suppose a ritual sacrifice of defensive coordinator Mel Tucker is possible. The obvious result of the inexcusable 55-14 loss to the Packers should be Trestman’s dismissal at the end of the season, but that is not going to happen.
It’s not how the McCaskeys work. They work at the speed of elevator music, and Trestman is only two years into a four-year contract. What happened at Lambeau Field on Sunday is a fire-able offense, but it will not end that way for Trestman because these are the Bears. It’s why they haven’t won a Super Bowl in 28 years and won’t anytime soon.
This game is a complete repudiation of the Trestman Way, whatever that is. After all the hue and cry following a miserable 51-23 loss to the Patriots and after a bye week, this is how the Bears respond? In the fetal position on national television?
“Based on what I saw this week (in practice), I was confounded to see the type of play we had (Sunday night),’’ Trestman said after the game. “Our coaches did a tremendous job preparing our guys this week, and our guys did a tremendous job of preparing. But none of it translated to the game.’’
The fact that the Bears have struggled offensively in the first half in three straight games? Trestman called that “confounding’’ too. A confounded coach — not a good thing.
The Bears have enough talent that a clobbering of this magnitude should not happen. But when your coach talks about “mutual respect’’ and “humility’’ and seems to want to inspire his troops with sonnets rather than sledgehammers, something like Sunday night can happen very easily.
A 3-5 team with its clichéd back against the wall? A season riding on the outcome? I’m sorry, but this falls directly on Trestman. The Bears look unprepared, overmatched and not very much in the mood to play football. And I know is who’s responsible.
“You ask about what’s going on during the week?’’ Trestman said. “Our guys are locked in – as good a team at working, meetings, being compliant, doing the things we’re asking them to do. This is a really good group of men.’’
Oh, brother.
Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers threw six touchdowns in the first half. Six. Two of them were to Jordy Nelson, who was so open on both scores that he kept looking for the “Candid Camera’’ crew.
The Bears are stuck with Trestman and Jay Cutler. It’s why Emery won’t fire Trestman. He’s responsible for the presence of both men. He hired the coach, and he gave the quarterback $54 million in guaranteed money over three years. Admitting he was wrong twice? He might as well tell the world he doesn’t know the first thing about football.
The other reason Trestman isn’t going anywhere isn’t a very good one. But Cutler doesn’t need a new offensive system. He needs continuity. I know: This continuity stinks. But this is where the Bears are. They’re stuck with a quarterback who is very, very average, a coach with all the motivational skills of a goalpost, a general manager who doesn’t see what the problem is and a family of owners that doesn’t have the foggiest idea about anything, including fogs.
Have I left anyone out?
The Tribune’s David Waugh throws gasoline on the fire:
You’re on the clock, Bears Chairman George McCaskey.
Call the family together. Close the doors. Discuss the future. It’s time.
It’s time to re-evaluate everything: your team president, Ted Phillips; your general manager, Phil Emery; your head coach, Marc Trestman; every aspect of the family business; every member of the coaching staff; and every player in the lineup. Everything.
Spare the niceties. Forget protocol. Follow your gut, not some time-honored tradition of management philosophy written in a dated policy handbook. It’s time to restore some pride in an organization in which it’s gone missing, to do something that stamps this trend as unacceptable. This is still the team George Halas founded in 1920. Remind the NFL that heritage still means something, convention be damned.
I know it’s only November and the idea sounds rash to an organization that prefers a more deliberate approach. I know it’s the middle of the season, but this one ended for all intents and purposes Sunday night in Wisconsin. I also know desperate times call for desperate measures and no word better describes the state of the Bears after a third straight loss.
You’re on the clock, George McCaskey, not so much because your football team stinks — and boy, they stunk worse than a block of Muenster in a 55-14 laugher Sunday night at Lambeau Field — but because they failed to compete. They packed it in against the hated Packers, who led 42-0 at halftime. They showed up scared and it only got worse with every awful series.
Bear down, Chicago Bears, like the song says? What rhymes with cower?
You cannot ignore what has happened to your grandfather’s team, George McCaskey, the team so many Chicagoans invest so much time, money and emotion in every Sunday — the team that makes Chicago a Bears town every day of the year. You cannot embrace the status quo after giving up 106 points the last two games. You cannot respond to such an absence of heart on the field without using your head at Halas Hall.
If you believe the Bears possess better talent than their 3-6 record suggests, hold Trestman accountable for failing to put those players in position to succeed. If you believe the Bears roster lacks the playmakers and depth necessary to compete with playoff teams, pin that on Emery. If you believe it is a combination of both, start plotting for a complete overhaul that might be necessary to fix this mess. Those who think the Bears’ problems lie only with Jay Cutler haven’t been paying attention.
Is Phillips the right president to lead the next phase or would the organization be better served led by a football guy? Is Emery, the man who hired Trestman over Bruce Arians, the right football architect to rebuild this team into a playoff contender it obviously isn’t? Is Trestman capable of regaining the respect in the locker room he so clearly never had this season?
Fire defensive coordinator Mel Tucker immediately? Give play-calling duties to offensive coordinator Aaron Kromer? Cut or bench somebody?
At this point, no option should be taken off the table. The table has no legs.
At this point, a correction: I reported the 51-23 loss to the Patriots represented rock bottom for the Bears under Trestman. Obviously, Sunday’s embarrassment made that statement inaccurate. The Tribune regrets the error.
Sports Mockery contributed a bunch of Cutler jokes during the first half:
Jay Cutler’s pass intended for the Packers nearly picked off by Bears
Drinking game, every time @AaronRodgers12 throws a TD or #JayCutler throws a pick, take a drink. PS, you should be drunk by now.
At this rate, Jay Cutler may have his jersey retired by the Packers before Brett Favre.
If a Bears player is open in the woods and no one is around to cover him, does Jay Cutler still throw an interception?
The Sun-Times’ Patrick Finley acts as if someone died:
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to bury the Chicago Bears.
Lord knows, the Packers did the same to them Sunday night.
The Bears’ 55-14 loss in front of a Lambeau Field record 78,292 fans, dressed in funereal black winter coats, has to be among the most embarrassing in their history.
Jay Cutler threw a pass off his own right guard’s head, which ricocheted to the Packers and turned into an 82-yard interception return. He threw an interception in the first quarter, too, when the game was close, and later fumbled when sacked by Julius Peppers.
He completed 22-for-37 for 272 yards and one touchdown, but never seemed comfortable. And the offense never seemed competent, moving away from their run-first strategy in the first quarter.
“To play like that, it’s embarrassing,” said Cutler, who has beaten the Packers only once.
And that was after a bye week in which the Bears vowed to fix the flaws that had led to a 28-point loss in New England. Cutler said he couldn’t remember if that had ever happened to him.
“Or maybe,” he said. “I just don’t want to remember.”
There’s little reason to think the 3-6 team will improve enough to finish .500 this season. Playoffs?
Aaron Rodgers threw six first-half touchdowns, each more humiliating than the next. The first came on fourth-and-goal from the Bears’ 1, the next — after Micah Hyde’s interception of Cutler — on third-and-1 from the Bears’ 3.
When the Bears blew coverage and let Jordy Nelson to run wide open for a 73-yard touchdown catch, it came immediately after the break between the first and second periods. The Bears had time to prepare, and messed up.
Nelson then caught a 40-yard score, wide open again. And Eddie Lacy took a screen 56 yards for a touchdown.
Up 35-0, former Bears star Julius Peppers sacked Cutler, forcing a fumble and setting up an 18-yard touchdown pass to Randall Cobb with 14 seconds left to play in the half.
The second half wasn’t much better: Bears punter Pat O’Donnell fumbled the drop to his foot, leading to a Packers field goal.
The Arlington Daily Herald’s Bob LeGere:
In the latest in a long line of Bears teams that could not defeat the Packers and quarterback Aaron Rodgers at Lambeau Field, Sunday night’s nationally televised humiliation was the most embarrassing loss of all.
The 55-14 final score doesn’t begin to describe the depths to which the Bears plummeted.
It was 28-0 Packers less than 18 minutes in.
Several thousand Bears fans were among the Lambeau Field-record 78,292 in attendance. Years from now, none of them will admit they paid money to see this fiasco.
While losing 11 of the previous 14 meeting with the Packers, the Bears had been pummeled by double digits five times.
But this one was worse than any of them. Way worse.
“The level of play is not anywhere near where it needs to be, and it starts with me,” coach Marc Trestman said. “The bottom line is we weren’t good enough in all three phases. We broke down in all three phases.”
It was 42-0 at halftime and, if the game was played with Illinois high school schools, it would have been a running clock after halftime. That could only have helped an outclassed and overmatched Bears team that plummeted to 3-6 with its fifth loss in six games.
Never, ever should “Bears” and “playoffs” be mentioned in the same sentence for the remainder of the season.
The Daily Herald’s Mike Spellman adds:
What in the name of Chester Marcol was that all about?
Just call it the …
Lambeau “Bleep.”
Wasted energy:
Yeah, you can rage about that historically hideous, epically ugly joke of a game, but first a question: The Bears sure played like they didn’t care, so why should we?
You know it’s bad when …
You hear, “This is downright embarrassing” from NBC analyst Cris Collinsworth — less than a minute into the second quarter!
The Herald’s Barry Rozner agrees:
Unless you believed the Bears would go 7-1 in the second half and make the playoffs, you knew the season was over three weeks ago.
All that remained was to see if Marc Trestman could use the remaining games to convince his bosses — and his players — that he really is an NFL head coach.
It continued Sunday night to look as though he belongs on a CFL sideline as the Packers hit the Bears early and often in a fight that could have been stopped — in a merciful world — 12 seconds into the second quarter when Green Bay took a 21-0 lead en route to a ferocious rout, a 55-14 shellacking at Lambeau Field.
Yeah, you only thought the New England game was bad, until Sunday when the Bears looked like a high school team playing a Packers squad that marched up and down the field as if they had no opponent.
For all intents and purposes, they didn’t. The Bears had no intention of matching up with Green Bay and their only purpose was to view the monuments in a hallowed hall featuring the ghosts of so many greats.
The Bears looked like they had seen a ghost as Aaron Rodgers shredded the defense for an opponent’s record 6 touchdowns in the first half, while the Bears’ offense under the leadership of Trestman and Jay Cutler looked as hopeless as they’ve been helpless the last three games.
“We’re not a good football team right now,” Trestman accurately assessed in his halftime interview with WBBM 780-AM. “We played 30 minutes of terrible football in all three phases. We have to just start over. That’s all we can do.”
That’s what owner George McCaskey has to do.
But to believe the Bears would make a change at the top after this season is to also believe that the Bears don’t care about the significance of shaking the stability Cutler finally has after so many years of change.
He’s had more than a dozen head coaches, offensive coordinators, QB coaches and offensive systems since he entered the league nine years ago. And while it’s true that the continuity from last year to this has done nothing to improve Cutler’s decision-making, it would be a gamble to change yet again when the Bears have spent so much money to lock up their “franchise” quarterback.
Nevertheless, the Bears are just 3-8 going back to the final two losses of 2013, when a single victory would have put them in the playoffs.
And if anyone’s going to evaluate Trestman, who seems to have no idea what he’s doing, then GM Phil Emery deserves just as thorough an examination.
At the very least, he reached for Trestman when better candidates were available, and his drafting remains bizarre at best and dreadful at worst. Emery — along with Jerry Angelo — is the reason the Bears have had to spend in free agency, trying to fill holes as a result of poor drafting.
The contrast to Green Bay is striking, with the Packers owning the most players in the league that have played only for them, and the Bears have the fewest homegrown players in the NFL.
But the sad reality remains that without a quarterback it doesn’t matter.
Green Bay has the best player in the league in Rodgers, while the Bears have Cutler, who is the same QB he was when he arrived in Chicago, and if the reason for keeping Trestman is Cutler, it’s no reason at all.
ESPN Chicago’s Jon Greenberg wants everyone gone:
If Virginia McCaskey sent me a telegram asking for my advice on how to fix the Chicago Bears, this is what I’d write back to her:
Fire everyone you can. Cut the rest. Sell the team.
Sure, that’s harsh advice for the proud matriarch of Papa Bear’s franchise.
But after another blowout loss for a completely listless squad, it’s an idealistic checklist of what the Bears need to do in the next couple of months to right this sinking ship.
Fire coach Marc Trestman and his staff and general manager Phil Emery. Get the new guys to blow up the roster. Convince the McCaskey family to sell the franchise to someone with a couple of billion dollars and a clue.
Or you know, just keep practicing hard and praying for good results. Whatever works.
I don’t want to overreact in the wake of a nationally televised 55-14 debacle to the Green Bay Packers on Sunday night at Lambeau Field, but what else is there to say about a team that is not just bad, but awful in every phase of the game?
Fans hate watching this team, and it’s the second week of November. …
Two weeks ago, the New England Patriotstook a 38-7 lead into the locker room en route to a 51-23 shellacking. After a blissful bye week for Bears fans, Aaron Rodgers and the Packers led 42-0 after two quarters, which tied the 1983 Packers for the second-biggest halftime edge in NFL history.
No team had given up 50 points in back-to-back games since the 1923 Rochester Jeffersons were walloped by the Chicago Cardinals and Rock Island Independents en route to an 0-4 season. At least Rochester fans had to suffer through only four games before going out to practice their Charleston.
Self-flagellating Bears fans have seven more games to go, three of which will be broadcast across the country. …
The Bears are 3-6, and after watching this game, one wonders how they won three. With playoff-caliber talent, especially on offense, they are arguably one of the worst teams in the NFL. That’s what should be a call for change. The Bears have lost with bad teams before, but losing like this with a decent team is shameful. …
In all seriousness, I’m loath to ever seriously ask for someone to be fired or cut. But I can’t see much of an argument why Emery and Trestman hold the solutions to this team’s many, many problems.
I was all for re-signing Cutler last season, because the team had mortgaged its present to build an offense around him. And thanks to his “elite extension,” Cutler is a Bear for another two years. But he’s looking more and more like a sunk cost. Cutler is essentially a good arm attached to a mediocre quarterback.
All the Bears’ problems boil down to this: The people who run this organization aren’t very good at running a football team.
When you have a former accountant acting as team president and a former ticket executive running the family business, who’s to say they would hire the right people anyway?
One thing is for sure, the status quo at Halas Hall is not working and the ritualistic sacrifice of coordinators and assistant coaches might not be the answer this time.
The Score’s Dan Bernstein:
It turns out that not playing football is indeed the best thing for the Bears, because any lukewarm attempt to do so is a convincing argument for regime change. Swiftly.
To say the Bears quit in a 55-14 loss to the Packers on Sunday night that dropped them to 3-6 would be unfair, because it would assume that anything was ever even begun at Lambeau Field. This is what the Long Quit looks like – the culmination of weeks of steady, noticeable erosion of a team’s belief in its coach and, in turn, itself.
The seeds for this game were planted in training camp and sown by a weak, permissive culture devoid of authority and accountability. Trestman’s spinelessness and circle-talking prattle, general manager Phil Emery’s manufactured arguments in support of bad players who he thinks are good, Jay Cutler’s inherent blithe indifference and Brandon Marshall’s over-romanticized pathological narcissism have conspired to bring them here.
And here is beyond bad.
There’s nothing for Trestman to say, now. Any previous buy-in from any hopeful player in that locker room has been sold short, cashed out at a loss. Not one word from him can stop that at this point, nor can one from any other Bear trying to take the lead by posing in front of reporters. What was the word Marshall used that time, again?
“Unacceptable.” That’s it. There are others applicable, too.
“Downright embarrassing,” analyst Cris Collinsworth declared on NBC. “This is a proud franchise that’s being humiliated here tonight.”
And that was early in the second quarter, before it got historic.
“This much talent and nothing to show for it,” is what Collinsworth concluded, just ahead of the 82-yard interception return for touchdown that made it 55-7, Packers. Afterward, Collinsworth could only offer a quiet, “This will not sit well.”
Professional football teams aren’t allowed to perform so unsatisfactorily without some kind of response beyond the plaintive wails and acid invective of insulted fans. No teams are, but particularly one that had just completed its midseason break for introspection and recalibration.
Trestman’s vaunted “toolbox of concepts” is empty. Even in the mythical Pandora’s Box, after the release of all its similarly hideous contents upon the world, the Spirit of Hope remained at the bottom. Not so in this case. There’s no reasonable cause for anything like that. Not anymore, and not one bit.
The Bears were built to win now, don’t forget. This very time is the dead center of the championship window, for which a quarterback was locked in, an aging receiver rewarded and at least one over-scouted veteran defensive lineman signed.
This was supposed to be really good. Not just meh, not bad and certainly not whatever this has become. The contemplation of longer-term ramification of such abject failure is so much more than sobering, especially when any look at the Bears’ current reality demands first the consumption of some strong stuff.
If anything is to be salvaged from the wreck – and it’s possible that nothing can – it starts with a cold look at who is under contract and what voices may need to be heard to get the best out of some sunk commitments. You have heard that before, I understand, and all too recently.
But these coaches, at least and in this moment, have been reduced to useless ciphers. This group won’t be here when and if the Bears ever pull out of their unconscionable tailspin and contend for anything important.
If this isn’t enough, what does enough look like?
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RedState starts by listing the predictions of Gov. Scott Walker’s imminent defeat:
Permit me this little amusement. All bolding mine.
- The Daily Beast, August 25, 2014 (“The Tea Party Governor Backlash of 2014″): “Wisconsin’s Scott Waker is frequently talked up by RNC types as a leading 2016 contender, but he’s fighting for his political life at home, beset by a tsunami of scandals and running neck and neck with Mary Burke. Walker’s most-favored Midwestern governor status in D.C. is in trouble despite a misguided arrogance born of his surviving a recall attempt. His efforts to rein in the public sector unions have been successful, but his style and tone—and did I mention scandals—could make him an unexpected loser on Election Night.”
- NPR, October 28, 2014 (“In Wisconsin Election, Gov. Scott Walker Fights To Hold On”): “[Craig] GILBERT: Well, you know, one thing that we’ve seen in all the public polling is that, as divided as the state was in the middle of that kind of raucous recall fight, it’s even more divided now. It has not got – there hasn’t been a lot of healing in Wisconsin. And Governor Walker hasn’t really added to his coalition, politically, since those elections. And if you think about 2010 being a really conservative wave election, and you think about 2012 – winning a recall where some voters, you know, had reservations about Governor Walker but didn’t like the recall process – you can sort of see how this election really ought to be closer than those two elections and is.”
- Politico, October 29, 2014 (“Scott Walker limps toward 2016″): “The politician who confidently lectured Mitt Romney in 2012 (“He has to say that I’m a reformer like Scott Walker,” Walker told The Weekly Standard) has tumbled into yet another fight for his political life. Far from a conservative Clark Kent, Walker is visibly straining in the closing days of his race against Mary Burke, a wealthy former Trek Bicycle executive and member of the Madison School Board.”
- The New Republic, October 28, 2014 (“Scott Walker Is Scared He Might Lose—and He’s Already Blaming His Fellow Republicans”): “The polls are generally not trending well for Democrats in the final days before the 2014 midterms, but it’s increasingly looking not inconceivable that the party’s loss of the Senate could be accompanied by a loss for one of the party’s biggest bête noires: Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. If polls showing him effectively tied with former Trek Bicycle executive Mary Burke weren’t enough, Walker has been giving off the distinct vibe of a man in a bit of a panic.”
- Salon, October 30, 2014: (“5 Tea Partyers who could lose reelection next week”) “Walker was never going to glide to reelection in a state that in 2012 elected progressive Democrat Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)4%, the nation’s first openly gay U.S. senator.”
- Slate, November 3, 2014 (“The Most Important Race in America”): “On a portable stage in the parking lot of a strip mall in front of the Eau Claire GOP field office, sandwiched between a Curves and an Office Products Co. store, Gov. Scott Walker is keeping his chin up. After the beating he’s taken, that’s no small feat. Walker, Wisconsin’s incumbent Republican governor, is in a tough statewide contest for the third time in four years, and this one is much closer than it was supposed to be.”
- ThinkProgress, November 4, 2014 (“A Pro-Environment Candidate Could Kick Scott Walker Out Of Office Tonight”): “With the final polls showing an extremely close race between incumbent Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) and challenger Mary Burke (D), an influx of last-minute donations and high-profile supporters indicate the importance of the race on a national scale.”
- Wonkette, October 25, 2014* (“Scott Walker Gets Some Chris Christie All Over Him, On Purpose”): “With a little over a week to go before Election Day, Scott Walker is increasingly a man in need of a helping hand.”
The result?
52.3 to 46.6, or Walker +5.7. And, in case you were wondering: in the 2012 recall election the final score was 53.1 to 46.3, or Walker +6.8; and in the general 2010 election the final score was… 52.3 to 46.6, or Walker +5.7. Which basically means that every stupid thing that Democrats and progressives went through for four years – the marching, the protesting, the abuse of property rights, the extended temper tantrum, the expensive and pointless recall election, the licking of wounds, the picking of a new candidate, the concerted efforts to manufacture scandals, the half-open conspiracy to target conservative groups, the abandonment of whatever dubious progressive principles energized this original dispute in the first place, and the decision to simply focus down into a monomaniacal desire to just get rid of this one, solitary, insufferably Republican son of a [redacted] – all of that?
ALL OF THAT DID NOTHING. Nothing at all. It was like the Left wasn’t eventhere. And this was the one election that the Activist Left absolutely, totallyneeded. For their own pride’s sake, if nothing else; sure, they could not get back the House, lose the Senate, even maybe lose a few governor’s races – but this one. This one, the progressives needed. Just to show that they wereworthy of victory.
:pause:
…I don’t even need to write it, do I? Not at this point.
Recall the claims (probably accurate) that some of Walker’s 2012 votes were from people who didn’t like Walker but didn’t think he deserved to be recalled. Based on those vote percentages, those voters totaled all of 0.8 percent of the electorate.
Why should this be surprising? The total of Mary Burke’s campaign was: I’m Not Scott Walker. Burke never gave one demonstration that she was capable of being governor beyond maybe getting elected. There are Democrats who might be capable of running the state, whether or not you’d vote for them. Burke isn’t one of them.
Why didn’t Sen. Kathleen Vinehout (D-Alma) run for governor? Maybe Winnebago County Executive Mark Harris should have run for governor instead of losing to the seemingly beatable Sen., now U.S. Rep-elect Glenn Grothman. Or maybe a Democrat with demonstrable business experience should have run instead of Burke. (If such a person could be found.) Or Democrats should have convinced Sen. Dale Schultz (Dale Schultz Party-Richland Center) to run for governor as an anti-tea party independent.
Any of the people in the previous paragraph were not likely to have not merely lost, but dragged down the rest of the Democratic ticket, as Burke did.
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The number one single today in 1958:
The number one single today in 1975 …
… the day of this event commemorated in music:
The number one British album today in 1979 was Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 