Today in 1925, RCA took over the 25-station AT&T network plus WEAF radio in New York, making today the birthday of the NBC radio network:
Today in 1965, the Rolling Stones made their U.S. TV debut on ABC’s “Hullabaloo”:
Today in 1966, the Doors agreed to release “Break on Through” as their first single, removing the word “high” to get radio airplay:
The number one single today in 1980:
Slate actually wrote this headline: “Bulldogs Are Inexplicably Overrated. Why Not Adopt a Welsh Springer Spaniel?”
This chart from David McCandless compares a dog breed’s popularity to its “utility” based on intelligence, longevity, ailments typical for the breed, costs, grooming difficulty and how much it eats.
As for the headline: We can certainly attest to the quality of the Welshie. We had two, Puzzle and Nick, both raised by Mrs. Presteblog’s sister. Puzzle was a character beginning with her diagnosis of hip dysplasia, which ended her dog show/breeding days. She had spindly little back legs but an oversized chest. Due to her back legs, she couldn’t jump up, but she could jump out, and she had great ability to hit a part of her male owner that her male owner didn’t want her to hit. She wouldn’t bite, but she would ram you with her open mouth, usually drawing blood on the bridge of my nose.
Nick too was a character. He was a show dog, but ended up one point shy of champion status due to an unfortunate attempt to eat something frozen that he shouldn’t have attempted to eat. (You don’t want to know.) We’d take them on walks, and Nick, probably due to his show experience, would walk straight, while Puzzle would tack left and right like an America’s Cup yacht looking for wind. Nick also would fetch, while Puzzle lost interest about three-fourths of the way back.
Welshies are water dogs. Nick loved to swim. Puzzle did not, probably because of her back legs. Welshies also are hunting dogs. Or so we thought, until a parade where the local American Legion post fired their guns and the two of them became cowering fur-covered lumps of Jell-O. That’s also what Puzzle did during thunderstorms, to the extent of getting on our bed, which she wasn’t supposed to be able to do.
As for the other dogs on the chart … the West Highland White Terrier was my parents’ last dog. Small, but fierce, particularly when you got between her and her food. Dolly was preceded by Curly the English Springer, a dog that is, according to this chart, more popular but less utilitarian. There was a Newfoundland in the neighborhood; huge, but docile, though his drool threatened to drown Leo the Fat Chihuahua.
My aunt and uncle owned several hunting dogs — a golden retriever, an Irish setter and an English setter. Brandy was the golden; she might be the sweetest dog I have ever known, and a dog that loved to hunt though in her later years she needed painkiller shots to hunt. The setters once stayed the weekend with us. Having three girl dogs around pleased Nick. Having another dog not named Nick around made Puzzle really jealous. (Somewhere there is a photo of the four of them arrayed around me waiting for treats.)
Our current church has a chow — very s-l-o-w yet affectionate — and a part-German shepherd that makes toddlers look lackadaisical. Our previous church had Norman the yellow lab, who would dive for rocks at the bottom of Green Lake. Really.
The chart at the beginning is for purebred dogs. There are definitely reasons to adopt mixed-breed dogs too. The potential problem is that you don’t know what you’re going to get as far as dog behavior; you might get the best aspects of the breeds, and you might get the worst.
The number one single today in 1960:
The number one British single today in 1981:
The number one British album today in 1981 was “Queen Greatest Hits”:
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s David Haynes has decided after the election that our politics are too fractious:
Fresh off the election, one of my Twitterati sent me this greeting:
@DavidDHaynes nice try to knock off Walker, again, you socialist a——. Hahahaha.
I thank him for his comments. But a small correction: I’m actually a lot closer to an Eisenhower Republican than I am to a socialist. And I’ll leave it to my friends and co-workers to decide whether I’m an a——.
Passions run hot during any campaign, but messages such as that didn’t used to be so common. They are now. And they’re just as likely to come from liberals as conservatives. But if people understood that both sides of the political divide are driven by values and then tried to find ways to accommodate those disparate values, could we change the tune being played in Madison and Washington, D.C.?
Jonathan Haidt believes we could. He’s a social psychologist who teaches ethical leadership at the Stern School of Business at New York University and the author of “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.”
Before I get to his ideas, though, it’s important to understand the polarization that grips Wisconsin. I see the anecdotal evidence every day washing up in my in-box, of course, but the Journal Sentinel’s Craig Gilbert proved it. In a terrific reporting project earlier this year, Gilbert found that the Milwaukee area is arguably the most polarized metro area in the nation. I don’t doubt it for one moment.
This state is deeply divided over voter ID, abortion, the minimum wage, the role of government, immigration, guns. Urban vs. rural. Black vs. white. Rich vs. poor. Men vs. women. Young vs. old. Our politics is divided by education and perceptions of where the country is headed, by whether we go to church on Sunday and even whether we’re married or not.
In an exit poll on Tuesday, voters were asked: “Compared to four years ago, is the job situation in your area better today, worse today or about the same?”
Sixty-six percent of voters for Republican Gov. Scott Walker said it was “better today” compared with only 15% of voters for Democratic candidate Mary Burke. And that’s on a question that has a quantifiable answer.
We simply do not agree. But the question I’ve been asking is this: Do we have to be so disagreeable about it?
Haidt doesn’t believe that we do. But he says for that to happen, we need to take time out from demonizing one another to try to understand one another.
He argues that we can learn from our political foes. As a liberal, he has disappointed his brethren by asserting that the reason Republicans win elections has a lot to with their understanding of “moral psychology,” which Democrats either don’t get or don’t try to get. Conservatives, Haidt writes, have a broader set of moral tastes and thus more ways to reach the public.
His research found that there are certain core ideas upon which all cultures base their moral foundations: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. All Americans are moved by these ideas, but depending on your spot on the political spectrum, you are moved by some more than others.
Liberals care more, Haidt found. Conservatives are more moved by fairness, by the idea that people get what they deserve. Both value liberty. But conservatives value the other three moral foundations more than liberals and thus have a bigger vocabulary to draw on when they discuss them. Conservatives can offer a wider selection of food for thought at the ideas cafeteria.
That’s why it’s wrong to assume that Republican politicians somehow dupe voters into casting ballots against their own economic self-interest, which was the thesis of the 2004 book by Thomas Frank “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Haidt writes that “rural and working-class voters were in fact voting for their moral interests.”
Both sides are driven by their values. “Everyone cares about fairness, but there are two major kinds,” he writes. “On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality — people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.”
Conservatives can learn from liberals as well — recognizing the effect of special interests on politics and government might be one example.
“The first step we all need to take is to understand that the other side is not crazy, they are not holding their positions because they’ve been bribed, because they are racist or whatever evil motive you want to attribute,” Haidt told talk show host Bill Moyers earlier this year.
Haidt is part of a group of academics that founded Civil Politics, a nonprofit that hopes to educate the public about research on improving relations across divisions. I poked around the site recently and found ideas for how individuals can improve political discussion and insights into the pressure points for change (hint: blue state Republicans might be one).
But I wonder if Haidt’s ideas are practical. The value of the spoils that go to the victor in winner-take-all politics makes compromise and civil discourse very difficult. And unlikely. In the Moyers interview, Haidt pointed out that those Eisenhower Republicans and Stevenson Democrats were all members of the Greatest Generation who were bound together against common enemies: the Great Depression and fascism. Their children, the baby boomers, cut their eye teeth on conflict — whether their country was evil or not. They grew up differently.
Politicians prey on divisions and exploit them; the hands of neither side are clean. Think of how liberals score points when Medicare reform is raised. Or how conservatives pounce whenever a liberal talks about gun control. The media (that includes me) often feeds partisan appetites by focusing on extremes. And the media is fractured: Voters have dozens of outlets for their opinions on talk radio, social media, newspapers and websites. More channels mean more division into like-minded enclaves. We’ve even self-sorted ourselves into neighborhoods where we all agree with one another. And I continue to think that a languid economy has left us all in a surly mood.
We certainly need to know and understand our fellow citizens better, and legislators of every stripe need to get to know one another. That once happened. It happens far less often now, and that’s too bad, because out of knowing can come understanding, and out of understanding can spring compromise and progress.
This prompted George Mitchell to reply:
During the 2011 hysteria in Madison over Act 10 I sent an email to Journal Sentinel Managing Editor George Stanley. I observed to Stanley (and others) that opponents of Governor Scott Walker hurt their cause by resorting to thuggish behavior (death threats, nails in driveways, obscene graffiti, comparisons of Walker to Hitler, etc.).Stanley responded that “both sides” were guilty. When I asked, “Are you suggesting that the behavior of Walker supporters is comparable to that of his opponents?” Stanley responded, in part, “I prefer honesty to bulls—.” After I sought clarification of that comment, he wrote, “…[Y]ou’re just full of s—, that’s all I’m saying.”
Stanley wasn’t finished. For good measure, he recommended I consider “turning honest…I like to think that every soul can be saved.” …
There is much irony in such a theme being advanced by a leading editor at the Journal Sentinel. Apart from Stanley’s decidedly uncivil exchange with me, has Haynes not read some of the caustic emails Stanley sent this year to readers who objected to the paper’s John Doe coverage?In light of its recent track record, the Journal Sentinel surely should think long and hard before casting aspersions about a lack of “civility.” Indeed, the paper itself has contributed to the divisive climate that Haynes decries.
Nothing illustrates this better than the paper’s four-year stretch of reporting on John Doe investigations involving Governor Walker. During that time the paper has trashed many principles of journalistic fairness.
For example, in the early years of the John Doe Journal Sentinel reporting relied heavily on sources who transmitted illegally leaked information. Stories cast many individuals in a negative light, including people who were legally prohibited from comment. The people portrayed unfavorably in the Journal Sentinel didn’t know who had spread negative information to the paper. For legal and practical reasons, they could not effectively respond. Consequently, readers received a sliver of information — the opposite of transparency and balance (or journalistic “civility”).
The paper’s stream of damaging innuendo was a key ingredient of the decidedly uncivil stew that contaminated the recall election campaign that Walker faced in 2012. Relying on Journal Sentinel coverage, Walker opponent Tom Barrett urged the Governor to “come clean.” Following Walker’s recall election victory, Democratic Party Chair Mike Tate predicted that because of the John Doe Walker would see the “inside of a jail.”
Was there an overriding public purpose that justified setting aside the traditional journalistic principles of transparency, balance, and fairness? None whatsoever. To the contrary, relying on the unlawful release of selective information corrupted and eroded concepts central to our justice system. This was anything but “civil.”
Fast forward to the current phase of the John Doe investigation, one premised on a “criminal theory” that is at direct odds with federal constitutional jurisprudence. Haynes’ editorial board and Stanley’s newsroom are sympathetic to this theory. The result? A series of articles and editorials that cast a dark cloud over activity that two judges have found to be legal. The Journal Sentinel’s reporting and commentary have led several national media outlets to put Governor Scott Walker at the center of a “scandal.” This dogged Walker throughout his successful re-election campaign. Yet Haynes now positions himself apart from — and distinctly above — the rancor and divisiveness spawned in part by the Journal Sentinel.
Near the end of the recent campaign Haynes personally fell off the civility wagon. A week prior to the election, an online media outlet (The Wisconsin Reporter) quoted a former longtime executive at Trek Bicycle Company as claiming Mary Burke had been fired from the firm. A day later another former Trek executive effectively confirmed this story, thus exposing the media’s failure to examine thoroughly the portion of Burke’s resume central to her campaign. Haynes responded with a lengthy editorial under the mantra “consider the source.” Because the executives have conservative political leanings, the paper judged them suspect. In an attempt to paper over its failure to vet Burke, Haynes and the Journal Sentinel effectively framed the news as a last-minute smear.
Haynes’ essay describes a time when “we [knew] and [understood] our fellow citizens better, and legislators of every stripe [got] to know one another.” Set aside, for a moment, that this amounts to an airbrushing of actual history in Wisconsin and nationally. To the extent Haynes is correct about bygone days, he also might have referenced an earlier era in Milwaukee journalism. For example, I recall well the 1960s and 1970s, when I was a journalism student, a reporter, and later an official in state government. The Milwaukee Journal of that period, led by editors such as the late Dick Leonard, was a model for the kind of discourse Haynes advocates. Leonard would not have resorted to the kind of epithets that Stanley now throws around.
I have met neither Haynes nor Stanley. I therefore can’t say if Haynes is an a——. I heard Stanley hang up on Charlie Sykes on the air, which was dumb for Stanley to do, so perhaps Stanley is an a——. Remember this: Anyone whose title includes the word “editor” is by design an a——. (Me too, you ask? Especially me.) And as someone who has lost his temper with members of my audience (something I’m not proud of doing), I think someone above Stanley should tell him that he needs to not express his inner a—— with his employers — that is, Journal Sentinel readers — or find another workplace in which to be an a——.
As for the John Doe: It apparently is illegal to leak information from an investigation, though I don’t believe it is illegal for the Journal Sentinel to print said information. The Journal Sentinel didn’t do anything to vet the accuracy of their information, and spent not a second questioning the motives of their leakers, which is an odd lack of cynicism from what should be a cynical organization. Conversely, the Journal Sentinel decided the last-week revelations about Burke’s role, or lack thereof, at Trek Bicycle had to be politically motivated, without finding out if they were correct. The Journal Sentinel also couldn’t be bothered to investigate why Democratic Gov. James Doyle extended Indian tribal gaming compacts to perpetuity, something that, regardless of the politics involved, failed Negotiations 101.
Haidt certainly has the most interesting insight in these two pieces about “moral interest.” One of the worst features of today’s liberals is their condescension, seen last week in all those Wisconsin Democrats who believe that voters for Republicans are stupid. Since voting began people have wanted to have their opinions reflected in their elected officials. That may be why a majority of voters were willing to give Walker a pass for not reaching his 250,000-jobs goal. And maybe for 52 to 53 percent of Wisconsin voters for the past four years, Walker represents their moral views better than Tom Barrett or Mary Burke did.
Neither piece really explores the root cause of all of this. The root cause of political nastiness is the excessively high stakes in politics today. Statewide elected officials and members of Congress make salaries far higher than the average Wisconsinite, and even state legislators make more money by themselves than the median family. When was the last time you saw a state- or federal-level politician exit office poorer than when he or she got elected? There is also serious money to be made as a lobbyist or consultant. And of course the media benefits by having something to report, along with money for campaign advertising.
More importantly, politicians at every level, regardless of party label or lack thereof, have too much power over our lives. Haynes’ observation about winner-take-all politics didn’t go far enough; it’s actually zero-sum politics — one side wins, therefore the other side loses. Part of this is, to be candid, because of us — for instance, a homeowner complaining to his or her alderman about the condition of the house across the street — and our inability or disinterest in dealing with problems ourselves. The media is embedded into government because media people cover government. Too many reporters sit at meetings and report on what a city council or school board does without asking whether whatever happened really needed to happen.
Haynes’ observation about the difference between his parents’ generation and his (and those that follow) demonstrate how the civility genie will never be put back in the bottle. For one thing, the Journal Sentinel is the only print newspaper in Milwaukee and the largest in Wisconsin, so no more can liberals write (or complain) to the Journal and conservatives do the same to the Sentinel. It’s sort of a paradox that thanks to social media opinions are easier than ever to express, and yet people today are more prickly and quicker to take offense to, well, anything, ranging from an opinion with which they disagree to being stuck in a line or having an unsatisfactory customer service experience.
What would make people become more civil to each other? Nothing that is likely to happen.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza picks the worst campaign of the 2014 election from a mostly-Democrat lineup:
Wendy Davis was, by any measure, a massive disappointment — not even breaking 40 percent of the vote against state Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) in the Texas gubernatorial race. Martha Coakley lost a second sure-thing bid for higher office in Massachusetts, a defeat that effectively ends her political career. Anthony Brown somehow came up short in his run for governor in Maryland despite the fact that he was running in one of the most Democratic states in the country.
Then there was Ed FitzGerald, the Cuyahoga Country
ProsecutorExecutive who had been groomed as the next big thing coming out of Ohio for Democrats. The man who would vanquish Gov. John Kasich (R). Um, not so much. There was the story about FitzGerald in a car with a “close family friend” — a woman — at 4:30 in the morning in a deserted parking lot. Or the one about him not having a valid permanent driver’s license. Or his atrocious fundraising. It was a disaster from beginning to end — and by end I mean when FitzGerald won just 33 percent of the vote last Tuesday.And yet, not even FitzGerald was bad enough to claim the prize as the absolute worst candidate of this election. That “award” goes to Iowa Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley, who, through sheer force of personality, not only lost a very winnable open seat race but lost it badly. Some races are a failure of the campaign. This was a failure of the candidate.
It started way back in January when the conservative opposition research group America Rising obtained video of Braley speaking at a Texas fundraiser. Here’s part of what he said:
If you help me win this race, you may have someone with your background, your experience, your voice, someone who’s been literally fighting tort reform for 30 years, in a visible or public way, on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Or, you might have a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school, never practiced law, serving as the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In the space of two sentences, Braley managed to: (1) insult popular Sen. Chuck Grassley (2) insult farmers and (3) sound as super-arrogant as humanly possible. And, according to the final Des Moines Register poll conducted in the race, voters never really forgave Braley or forgot the comments. Forty-five percent of likely voters called the comments about Grassley one of the worst mistakes Braley made on the campaign trail.
And the hits kept coming. In the spring of this year, Braley got into a dispute with his neighbors over wandering chickens. Yes, you read that right. Here’s Phil Rucker’s write-up of the back and forth:
Then this spring, Pauline Hampton’s chickens roamed onto Bruce and Carolyn Braley’s vacation property on tranquil Holiday Lake. Hampton said she did not know this until she walked over one day to offer Carolyn a dozen fresh eggs. To which she said her neighbor replied, “We aren’t going to accept your eggs — and we have filed a formal complaint against you.”
Carolyn took her complaint to their neighborhood homeowners’ association board meeting in May. Her husband, Bruce, then called the association’s lawyer, Thomas Lacina, to say that he believed “chickens are not pets and should not be permitted at Holiday Lake,” and that he wanted to “avoid a litigious situation,” according to an e-mail Lacina wrote. Braley denied that he threatened a lawsuit.
Then there was the story in mid-July revealing that Braley had missed 75 percent of the hearings of the House Veterans Affairs Committee over two years — a revelation that came in the wake of the national controversy surrounding the VA. One of the committee meetings Braley missed, according to the Des Moines Register, was on a day he held three fundraisers for his 2012 campaign.
The overall effect on Braley of this series of unforced errors was profound: Voters saw the episodes as a window into his personality — and it was a view they didn’t like. He came across as arrogant and dismissive, two of the worst traits for any candidate. It didn’t help Braley that he was running against Joni Ernst (R), an Iowa state senator who was his opposite in terms of personality and approach on the campaign trail. (Monica Hesse described Ernst as the “biscuit-baking, gun-shooting, twangy, twinkly farm girl and mother” in a profile of the candidate last month.)
Because Braley’s personality became the focus of the race, the fact that he was probably closer to the average Iowan than Ernst on the issues didn’t matter. People liked Ernst. They didn’t like Braley. On election day, the race wasn’t close; Ernst won by eight points.
Braley’s loss was so horrible for two reasons: (1) it was a seat that Democrats badly needed if they had any hope of holding the majority (they didn’t) and (2) it was so avoidable. Braley deserved what he got because he simply didn’t perform close to expectations as a candidate in a race with massive national import. And for that, he was the worst candidate of the 2014 election.
Comments provide other choices …
Anthony Brown and Martha Coakley enjoyed 2/1 and 3/1 Democratic registered voter advantages respectively, and still managed to lose. In Brown’s case by nearly 10 percentage points in a State that had elected a Republican only once in almost 50 years.
Chris you didn’t mention Charlie Crist (D) who was running for governor of Florida. Charlie lazily started his campaign, had a management shake up, kept an arrogant Omar Khan as his central planner who predicted “we are lightyears ahead of the Republicans in data mining and social media”, and got beat in a very winnable Florida governors race. He gets my vote as the Worst Candidate of 2014!Really, the worst? And not on that list, Mark Pryor who having all the advantages of incumbency, his family name AND more money behind him than not only his neophyte challenger but just about every other person on the list …. He got crushed by 16 points. How bad do you have to be to get a result like that? And [Amanda] Curtis in Montana … really was her campaign every anything but a cynical, twisted joke? Hey we’re going to loose the state to the Republicans anyway so why not pick the most radical, hateful, out of touch, man-hating leftist we can find in the state see if we can help them run up the score on us just for the fun of it … just about sums up what appears to have been the Democrats game plan there.
Braley certainly wasn’t the top candidate of arrogance, that would be a 10 person tie by any measure. The true number one losers were all the pollsters who tried to manipulate the voters with their pretense that virtually all races were too close to call. Sure worked in a constant flow of donations to known losers though.
You know the depths of stupidity out there is politician land when the moronic Alison Lundergan Grimes can’t even make the Bottom Ten despite repeatedly dodging the question about whether she voted for her party’s president on “Constitutional right of voter privacy” grounds — then bragging about voting for Hillary. She also made the minimum wage a core issue — except her father was paying wait staff in his chain of ‘Hugh Jazz Burger’ restaurants about a buck an hour. No way that’d be seen as hypocritical. But the real ‘winner’ was Wendy Davis. After her imbecilic empty wheel chair ad she went from Democratic Party Glamor Girl to radioactive even for MSNBC. What a half wit.
… but then there’s this:
I’m a card carrying Democrat and watched Braley in action in the House while I was a staffer early in his career. Everything you said about him is true, and it didn’t start with the campaign. It was all there in plain sight.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 