On July 12, 1914, George Herman “Babe” Ruth played his first Major League baseball game.
Sports Illustrated points out 99 (because this was written last year) facts about Ruth, including …
9. The [International League’s Baltimore] Orioles sold Ruth to the Boston Red Sox on July 9, 1914 along with two other players as part of a fire sale by team owner Jack Dunn, who found himself in financial straits when the presence of a Baltimore franchise in the new Federal League obliterated the Orioles’ attendance. …
14. Ruth was a sidearming power pitcher who made 127 appearances on the mound before appearing at any other position in the field.
15. In Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball, noted journalist and author Dan Okrent said Ruth was “the best lefthanded pitcher of the 1910s, without question, in the American League.” Indeed, among AL lefties with at least 1,000 IP in the decade, Ruth had the lowest ERA (2.19) and highest winning percentage (.659) while ranking fourth in wins, tied for fourth in shutouts and ninth in strikeouts. …
18. In six seasons with Ruth, the Red Sox won three World Series titles. In 107 seasons without him they have won four [actually five, including 2013]. …
22. On June 23, 1917 at Fenway Park, Ruth was ejected by home plate umpire Brick Owens for arguing balls and strikes after walking the first batter of a game against the Senators. Ernie Shore replaced him. The baserunner, Senators second baseman Ray Morgan, was caught stealing, and Shore then retired all 26 men he faced in a 4-0 Red Sox win. Officially, Ruth is credited for participating in a combined no-hitter, but Shore is not credited with pitching a perfect game.
23. Ruth’s first major league home run came against the Yankees at the Polo Grounds on May 6, 1915. Exactly three years later, in the same ballpark, Ruth hit a home run in his first start at a position (1B) other than pitcher.
24. Soon after that first appearance as a position player, Ruth began to refuse to pitch, leading to tension with Red Sox manager Ed Barrow. In early July, Ruth attempted to leave the team and join a shipyard team in Chester, Pa., to avoid a fine from Barrow. Ruth quickly caved to the threat of legal action by Red Sox owner Harry Frazee and rejoined the Red Sox without playing for the shipyard team. …
26. Ruth is the only player since the turn of the 20th century to lead his league in Triple Crown categories as both a hitter and a pitcher and he did it in the span of three years.
27. Ruth held out in spring training in 1919, ultimately landing a three-year contract worth $10,000. He threatened a hold out again after the 1919 season, saying he was worth twice the salary he had agreed to before that season. Frazee, still in debt from his purchase of the Red Sox three years earlier, responded by selling Ruth to the Yankees on Jan. 3, 1920, for $100,000 and a $300,000 loan secured by a mortgage on Fenway Park. …
30. Ruth was one of 17 players Frazee traded or sold to the Yankees between December 1918 and July 1923, when he finally sold the team. On New York’s first World Series title team of 1923, half the regular players and six of the seven pitchers to throw more than a dozen innings were acquired from Frazee. …
43. The Yankees had never been to the World Series before acquiring Ruth from Boston, but they went to seven World Series in his 15 years with the team, winning four of them. Their first pennant came in 1921. Their first championship came in 1923 in the third of three consecutive World Series confrontations with John McGraw’s New York Giants. …
48. After losing a ball in the sun in the Polo Grounds’ leftfield on July 16, 1922, Ruth refused to ever play the sun field again, and he didn’t. His position thereafter was determined by the geographic orientation of the ballpark in which he was playing. For the rest of his career, Ruth played exclusively in rightfield at the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, as well as in Washington and Cleveland [where right field was in the southwest corner of the diamond; home plate was in the northwest or west corner of the diamond, similar to both Milwaukee County Stadium and Miller Park] but exclusively in leftfield at the other AL cities (Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and St. Louis) [where home plate was in the southwest corner of the diamond]. …
81. Ruth retired as the career record-holder in home runs, RBIs, total bases, walks, strikeouts, on-base percentage and slugging percentage as well as the single-season record-holder in home runs, total bases, walks and slugging, and he was briefly the single-season record-holder in RBIs during his career. …
88. Ruth’s career OPS of 1.164 remains the record, as does his career OPS+ of 206. The latter stat adjusts OPS for a player’s home ballpark and compares it to his league with 100 being league average. Ruth’s career OPS+ is thus more than twice as good as an average mark. By way of comparison, the last player to have a single-season OPS or OPS+ higher than Ruth’s career was Barry Bonds in 2004.
Today is the anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first public performance, at the Marquee Club in London in 1962. They were known then as the “Rollin’ Stones,” and they had not recorded a song yet.
If you’re going to record just one song that gets on the charts, ending at number one would be preferable, whether in 1969, or in the year 2525:
Today in 1979 was one of the most bizarre moments in baseball history and/or radio station history:
As one might conclude from reading my Presty the DJ posts, my musical tastes can be described as more than anything else what radio calls “classic rock.” (Independent of my unfulfilled career interest in being a rock radio DJ.)
I am one of those music listeners who might tend to confound classic rock radio station programmers. With few exceptions — of course, Chicago — I listen to songs, not bands. My new smartphone therefore has about 400 songs from probably 100 different acts, a few of which aren’t rock acts (for instance, Johnny Cash, the UW Marching Band and the London Symphony Orchestra).
So what is “classic rock”? It is, probably first, a radio station format. Nearly every radio station market has at least one — WKLH in Milwaukee, WAPL in the Fox Cities (which calls itself “mainstream rock”; their playlist tends to get more new at night), WIBA-FM in Madison, WTCX in Fond du Lac, WGLX in Wisconsin Rapids, and Eagle 102 in Dubuque are several I have heard on a semi-regular basis.
As a genre of music … that’s a more interesting question. It seems to start around the Beatles, but not include the Beatles’ more pop early works. It includes all of the Rolling Stones, because the Stones have been harder rocking at least since “Satisfaction,” though good luck finding “Route 66” on the radio. The “classic” part of classic rock seems to refer to a similar timeframe as “classic hits” (WOLX in Madison, Super Hits 106 in Dubuque, The Bug in Wautoma, the Great 98 in Mayville) or the relatively new “classic country” genre.
When I was in college I did a magazine journalism class story about Madison radio station ratings, which had Z104, then and now the pop music station, as number one. For that story I interviewed WIBA-FM’s program director, who said he was uninterested in any radio listener younger than 18. That was in the days when WIBA-FM’s playlist went from the Beatles and Stones to harder rock of those days.
The funny thing about WIBA-FM is that every time I hear it now, it appears to play almost exactly the same music as it did when I listened in high school and college. (With an exception I’ll get to later.) If they go so recently as Pearl Jam and Nirvana, I haven’t heard them on 101.5.
(WIBA-FM is owned by Clear Channel, and Eagle 102 is owned by Cumulus, and those two are the two biggest radio station owners in the U.S. So if their version of classic rock is more homogenized than others, that’s probably why. Both carry Bob and Tom — who are unlistenable for anyone with kids in the car, and really are not appropriate for a music format anyway — instead of an actual local morning show, and WIBA-FM carries Sixx Sense with Nikki Sixx, formerly of Mötley Crüe — who replaced Nights with Alice Cooper — instead of an actual local nighttime show. The evils of satellite radio and voice-tracking is a subject for a different blog, however.)
No one starts a band with the intention of becoming classic rock. It’s just sort of something that happens. Figuring out which genre a band fits into — is it techno or house? — has always been a tricky part of the music business. Identifying what’s classic rock is particularly challenging because it’s a constantly moving target, with very different kinds of music lumped together under the same banner. How the people who choose what music you hear — whether on the radio or an Internet streaming service — go about solving this problem reveals a deep connection between data and music.
To see what the current state of classic rock in the United States looks like, I monitored 25 classic rock radio stations operating in 30 of the country’s largest metropolitan areas for a week in June. The result, after some substantial data cleaning, was a list of 2,230 unique songs by 475 unique artists, with a total record of 37,665 coded song plays across the stations.
I found that classic rock is more than just music from a certain era, and that it changes depending on where you live. What plays in New York — a disproportionate amount of Billy Joel, for example — won’t necessarily fly in San Antonio, which prefers Mötley Crüe. Classic rock is heavily influenced by region, and in ways that are unexpected. For example, Los Angeles is playing Pearl Jam, a band most popular in the 1990s, five times more frequently than the rest of the country. Boston is playing the ’70s-era Allman Brothers six times more frequently.
To put today’s classic rock on a timeline, I pulled the listed release years for songs in the set from the music database SongFacts.com. While I wasn’t able to get complete coverage, I was able to get an accurate release year for 74 percent of the 2,230 songs and 89 percent of the 37,665 song plays. The earliest songs in our set date back to the early 1960s; the vast majority of those are Beatles songs, with a few exceptions from The Kinks and one from Booker T. and the MGs. A large number of songs appeared from the mid-’60s through the early ’70s. Classic rock peaked — by song plays — in 1973. In fairness, that was a huge year — with the release of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”(an album of classic rock staples), Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” and Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” — but the trend steadily held for the rest of the ’70s and through the mid-’80s. …
But clearly it’s not just when a song was released that makes it classic rock. Popularity matters, as does as a band’s longevity, its sound and a bunch of other factors. To find out why some artists are considered classic rock, I spoke to Eric Wellman, the classic rock brand manager for Clear Channel, which owns nine of the 25 radio stations in our data set. He’s also the programming director at New York’s classic rock station, WAXQ. Wellman said release years have nothing to do with what makes a song “classic rock”; the ability of the genre to grow based on consumers’ tastes is one of the things that’s given it such longevity.
The piece includes these fascinating graphics:
Some of these are, frankly, inexplicable. The Allman Brothers are part of the Southern rock genre, and certainly Boston meets no one’s definition of “Southern.” You’d think either Billy “New York State of Mind” Joel or Bruce Springsteen, from the Jersey swamps, would be number one in New York, but instead Springsteen is number one in Chicago. You’d think Yes’ popularity in Seattle and Pearl Jam’s popularity in L.A. would be reversed. Particularly amusing are the apparently enduring popularity of REO Speedwagon in Tampa, Paul McCartney and Wings (which stopped recording together around 1980) in Houston, and Kiss in Charlotte.
According to classic rock radio, here is your top 15 most played classic rock songs …
… and artists of all time:
Of the first list, I have only these four on my smartphone:
Of the second list, I will eventually have all of them, but not necessarily the songs people would expect from those groups:
What about Chicago? Glad you asked! WIBA-FM used to play a few early Chicago songs, such as “Make Me Smile” (only part 1 of “Ballet for a Girl from Buchannon”) and “25 or 6 to 4.” Since I live on the border of being able to hear them, I don’t know if they still do that. I’m guessing not if their playlist has slid from ’60s through ’80s to ’70s through ’90s rock. Chicago perhaps has been more pop than rock since probably the “Hot Streets” album, but “25 or 6 to 4,” “Questions 67 and 68,” “I’m a Man,” “Free” and “Dialogue” should count as rock.
Then again, one thing that’s always struck me as strange about the definition of classic rock is its emphasis on bands over their music. Classic rock stations play the Eagles’ “Lyin’ Eyes” and “Southern Skies,” even though they really are country songs. (How do you tell? The contraction of “cannot” is pronounced “cain’t,” which is odd for a band based in California. Then again, you’d never guess from their sound that Creedence Clearwater Revival came from California, not a Southern state.) I like Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire,” though I’m not sure that sounds like a classic rock song either; nor does “My Hometown.” Dire Straits gets a lot of classic rock airplay, but do “Sultans of Swing,” “Walk of Life” or “So Far Away” sound like what else is played on classic rock radio?
Classic rock is what used to be called “album rock,” the album (as opposed to single) versions of rock (as opposed to pop) songs. The album version of Chicago’s “Beginnings,” from the band’s first album, “Chicago Transit Authority,” is seven minutes long.
The single version, which was played on AM Top 40 radio stations, is about three minutes long. (And edited so badly as to be almost unrecognizable.)
Radio has gotten more segmented over the years, to the point where there are classic rock stations and there are current rock stations. (Any station that plays current music, of course, is at the mercy of today’s music. Listeners who think today’s music is of poor quality — Britney Spears? One Direction? — won’t listen.) Segmentation was an apparent response to a decrease in listeners (and corresponding drop in ad revenue), and yet listenership to music on the radio continues to drop. It’s not clear to me that this approach is working. Giving listeners less — less variety in music, fewer live and local voices — is not more.
To pick up on what I wrote 1,500 or so words ago, my tastes are more to songs than bands. You might be able to tell from the above-listed songs that I am not a fan of sappy ballads (which takes out a lot of Chicago’s work since “If You Leave Now,” the band’s first number one single), and not really power ballads, and not very many slow songs.
A proper rock band should have at least one guitar, a bass guitar, keyboards and drums. Plus, of course, a trumpet, trombone and saxophone, but you knew that.
The number one single today in 1960 was the first, but not only, example of the caveman music genre:
Today in 1962, Joe Meek wrote “Telstar,” the first song about a satellite:
Today in 1964, the Beatles appeared live on (British) ABC-TV’s “Thank Your Lucky Stars.” The appearance was supposed to be taped, but a strike by studio technicians made that impossible. The band had just appeared at the northern England premiere of their movie “A Hard Day’s Night,” requiring them to get to London via plane and boat.
The Morning Martini spent time (so you don’t have to) reading Imagine Living in a Socialist USA, which brought to his mind Mary Burke:
Two fallacious themes emerge:
First, the American economy is always substituted to mean capitalist. They often defend the efforts made in the Soviet Union and China in the twentieth century and claim that things went wrong because true socialism wasn’t achieved. I’d argue true or pure capitalism isn’t the name of the game in American business, either, on either side of the regulatory coin. For one, the buffet of rules and barriers to entry certainly hinder an unfettered market. On another note, a government overseeing a capitalist economy certainly would not have thrown billions of dollars at failing car companies — nor would it have produced something like the Affordable Care Act, whose influence on the market has been obvious.
Second, the writers are all of the belief that a socialist revolution would bring about a fundamental change in human nature. In place of capital production and the exchange of goods and services for money, individuals would be part of a market of services through which they would trade for whatever they need to be just happy enough — not too much, and not too little. Surpluses produced in factories and plants would be shared in a way decided by committee. In a horrifying and farcical fantasy, one author posits what a Thanksgiving meal would be like in this workers paradise, and it’s a doozey: everyone on a commune calls each other “cousin,” health clinics are called “canadas,” cigars are called “fidels,” but smoking in the house is illegal, and everyone graciously moves outside to smoke tobacco. What isn’t seen, obviously, is the state police kicking down the door and issuing a citation (or arrest warrant?) when someone does light up indoors.
The underlying belief is that the state is just as responsible for the individual as both the individual and his community are. It’s the same thinking coming out of the Burke for Wisconsin campaign, and it’s something to watch carefully.
Certainly Ms. Burke would not want to see her millions disappear for the community’s benefit, doled out by committee or by the government. I’ve applauded before her admirable philanthropy, and at the same time noted how phony her politics seem in light of her history of giving. Yesterday Wisconsin Election Watch reported that she’s still pulling income from Trek, though she doesn’t maintain a day-to-day role there. Getting paid for not doing any work certainly reeks of Democrats’ tired rich-getting-richer platitude. Will she have to apologize for her wealth as Hillary Clinton has since her disastrous book tour launched? And is there a double standard for women of wealth in politics?
It would seem that, as a philanthropist and business woman, Mary Burke makes for the perfect Democrat gubernatorial candidate who can placate the liberal base on social issues and swing fiscal conservatives who, as the loudest liberal voices and media declare, couldn’t give two hoots about gay marriage or abortion anymore. This is theater and a lie. Indeed, this may have been the case had she not been so closely held to typical Democrat standards. The doublespeak and inconsistency has been well-documented here, on issues like minimum wage,charitable giving, the role of government, and unions.
Placation and compromise are not in the Democrat handbook. Their game is one of lies and coercion. If Ms. Burke is little more than a DPW pawn, trotted out because her record looks good on paper and stands the best chance of toppling boogeyman Governor Walker, she will always be subject to the greater mission of Democrats and leftist acolytes, her record be damned. That mission is the elimination of dissent and the conscious establishment of the state as god in personal, cultural, and economic matters.
To paraphrase Leona Lansing, the fictional media executive in “The Newsroom,” Mary Burke is a hairdo.
Her campaign must lose because in the last three years Scott Walker has proven that conservative reforms work — it’s literally brought unionists to tears. But Burke for Wisconsin must fail because Wisconsin can’t afford economic and social regression or a return to the kind of governance that forces one to shoulder the burden of others. There are roles for charity and kindness and giving, but they’re not ones to be assumed by the state, and nor are they roles that must be fulfilled by law. This state and this country are full of truly good people with concern for others who have no interest in the fake high-mindedness and audacious moral superiority relentlessly preached by each and every liberal. It is this belief that makes me conservative.
I want the poor to succeed and for small businesses to thrive. I want freedom to worship and I want freedom of speech, even when it makes others uncomfortable. Comfort comes from healthy human relationships and personal fulfillment which, as hard as the government tries, are qualities it will never — ever! — be able to fill.
I want Mary Burke to lose and Scott Walker to win because I believe in God, the future of this state, and the power of the individual.
Life is hard. It’s harder still when an entire class of people with their hands out stands between you and success.
Unfortunately, that’s increasingly the problem, all around the world. A recent New York Times piecetells the story of a Greek woman’s efforts to survive that country’s financial collapse. After losing her job, she tried to start a pastry business, only to find the regulatory environment impossible. Among other things, they wanted her to pay the business’s first two years of taxes up front, before it had taken in a cent. When the business failed, her lesson was this: “I, like thousands of others trying to start businesses, learned that I would be at the mercy of public employees who interpreted the laws so they could profit themselves.”
This phenomenon isn’t limited to Greece, or even to capitalistic societies. Dissident Soviet-era thinker Milovan Djilas coined the term “the New Class” to describe the people who actually ran the Soviet Union: Not workers or capitalists or proletarians, but managers, bureaucrats, technocrats, and assorted hangers-on. This group, Djilas wrote, had assumed the power that mattered in the “workers’ paradise,” and transformed itself into a new kind of aristocracy, even while pretending, ever less convincingly, to do so in the name of the workers. Capitalists own capital, workers own their labor, but what the New Class owned was political control over other people’s capital and labor. Those Greek bureaucrats’ power didn’t come from making things. It came from being able to make people — like our pastry chef — jump through hoops before they could make things. …
Here in the United States, a lot of programs officially aimed at the poor look suspiciously like subsidies to the New Class, too. Among “means-tested” programs, Food Stamps, now officially called SNAP, cover about 46 million people up to 125% of the poverty line (set at about $16,000 for a single mother and child). Other programs, such as the Earned Income Tax credit, cover people at slightly higher incomes, up to 200% of the poverty line. When federal spending on the dozens of programs are added up and state and local contributions included, the budget for assistance is about $1 trillion.
If we simply handed those people, perhaps 60 million of them, their share of the cash, that would be more than $16,500 each. A single mom and her baby would get over $33,000, twice as much as a poverty wage. A family of four would land more than $66,000, $15,000 more than the average family income.
So where’s the money going? To people who aren’t poor, such as doctors paid through Medicaid or landlords paid through Section 8. And to tens of thousands of members of the New Class, people like social workers, administrators and lawyers who run more than 120 different means tested federal programs.
It’s not just poverty spending, of course. Higher education spending goes more and more to administrators, not to faculties, and, for that matter, NASA seems more interested in feeding its bureaucracy than in going to Mars, or even back to the Moon.
But the New Class isn’t just in the government, and it isn’t just about money. Along with the government employees are numerous others in related positions, all of which have something to do with facilitating political control: journalism, academia, the entertainment media. These people tend to have a degree of class solidarity; that’s why the news media overwhelmingly tend to define social problems in terms of government solutions, why academia favors a pro-government-power narrative, and why Hollywood productions have businessmen as villains far more often than bureaucrats. …
The problem for our society is that whenever political control of other people’s money and labor is allowed, it will tend to breed a class of people who use that control to establish comfortable positions at others’ expense. This is an aristocracy in all but name, one without the tempering effect of noblesse oblige.
A staffer for retiring state Sen. Bob Jauch (D–Poplar) is sending this to state media:
Three state Senators and Wisconsin’s longest serving governor got together recently to share ideas on how to return civility to Wisconsin politics. The Civility Summit was held at the farm of former Governor Tommy G. Thompson (R-Elroy) who was joined by state Senators Tim Cullen (D-Janesville), Bob Jauch (D-Poplar), and Dale Schultz (R-Richland Center). The three senators are not seeking reelection this year.
The idea for the Civility Summit grew out of conversations Thompson had with each of the three senators.
“The three of us have each been around state government in some capacity for over 30 years,” said Cullen. “We’ve each had a working and personal relationship with Tommy, and we kind of said, ‘Gee, if we could find ways to work together despite being from different parties over the years there’s got to be a way to apply that to what’s happening today.’”
Cullen served two stints in the Senate, the first included being Senate Majority Leader from 1981-1986, and he was then tapped by Thompson to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services. First elected to the state Assembly in 1982, Jauch served as Senate Minority Leader during his over 28 years in the senate. Schultz also began his legislative career in the Assembly in 1982, moving to the Senate in 1991 where he also rose to Senate Majority Leader.
“Tim and I may be from a different party, but first and foremost we’re all residents of Wisconsin. We’ve always found ways to be pragmatic with guys like Tommy and Dale,” said Jauch. “Over the years we’ve had some arguments, but we all knew we had to put the people of Wisconsin ahead of party and personal interests, and it’s frustrating to see that attitude in short supply today.”
The four spent the day discussing how they were able to achieve results, how they differed with others while still being civil and how they can help renew those tactics in a seemingly fractured political environment.
“We’ve all served in leadership in the legislature, and I think that gives you a unique perspective because you have to work with a lot of different personalities,” Schultz said. “I don’t think there has been anyone better at doing that over the years than Tommy Thompson.”
The former governor began his political career in 1966 with his election to the state Assembly where he rose to Minority Leader before beating the odds and winning a contentious primary and then defeating an incumbent to become governor. Governor Thompson was elected an unprecedented four times before being chosen by President George W. Bush to serve as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
“It was an afternoon of beef, beer and bull – all home grown in Wisconsin,” said Thompson. “We all have a passion, an excitement, for the state we so deeply love, and I’ve always been a doer. To accomplish great things you have to work together. We’re at our very best when we unite for the people of Wisconsin.”
The three senators said they will continue to speak across the state to both encourage their colleagues to engage in a more civil debate and to remind voters during this campaign season to challenge candidates for office to explain how they have or will practice bipartisanship in office which would lead to real results for the people they represent.
Let’s put aside for the moment the millions of Democrats who don’t want you to eat meat and the millions of Republicans who don’t want you to drink, and examine this deeper. You would think the hypocrisy in this news release demonstrates that there was a whole lot more bull than beef and beer.
Let’s start with Cullen and Jauch, who demonstrated their love for Wisconsin, not to mention their putting people over party and personal interests by leaving the state to prevent the Act 10 vote. That vote, of course, was the direct result of the steaming pile of manure that was state government finances when Cullen’s and Jauch’s party had total control of state government. The government unions told Cullen and Jauch to prevent Act 10 from passage by any means necessary, and a trip across the state line was the result. (Cynical Steve is surprised that Schultz didn’t join them; of course he got his cake and to eat it too as he has done nearly all of his legislative career, since he voted against Act 10 and it passed anyway.) Maybe this civility thing can start with Cullen’s and Jauch’s apologizing for their conduct and for being completely, totally wrong about Act 10, but don’t hold your breath.
I’m also unclear where Jauch suddenly became the voice of moderation in the twilight of his career. (Somewhere there is a video clip of Jauch being neither moderate nor civil during Senate debate on Act 10.) I’m sure all those people in his Senate district who would like to work in well-paying mining jobs probably don’t look at Jauch so favorably. Jauch (and Cullen and Schultz) took the views of the latte-sipping Volvo-driving Birkenstock-wearing deodorant-eschewing environmentalists instead of the less fortunate, chronically unemployed blue collar workers from Jauch’s Senate district who would benefit from actual jobs.
The other thing I find hard to stomach is Cullen’s and Jauch’s talk about civility when their party showed none of it. I’m not talking about this decade. For most of the 1990s, the Senate was in Democratic hands, under the control of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala (D–Madison). Over a decade Chvala morphed from being someone I not only voted for, but worked for in the grunt work that goes into a political campaign (for instance, painting a trailer and passing literature in parades), to being one of the nastiest bastards in the history of state politics. Maybe it was in reaction to Rep. Scott Jensen (R–Waukesha), the Assembly speaker most of that time; maybe it was in reaction to Thompson. But did Cullen and Jauch preach civility and moderation while they were in the Senate majority? There’s no evidence they did, and if Cullen and Jauch claim that politics is uniquely nasty now, they apparently weren’t paying attention in the 1990s.
I’ve written about Schultz in this spacealready. Thompson (for whom I voted five times, I point out, and we are Facebook Friends, at least until he reads this) could afford to be magnanimous because, like a parent, he always got the last word as the governor with the most veto authority of any governor in the nation. Because of that and his other political skills, I don’t think Thompson ever had to make a political deal he didn’t want to have to make. There was, for instance, the time when Thompson said he would sign a bill reinstituting the death penalty if it got to his desk. (Former Republican state Sen. Alan Lasee introduced a death penalty bill in every session of the Legislature.) No death penalty bill ever got to Thompson’s desk, even when Republicans controlled both houses of the Legislature, and I believe it’s because Thompson didn’t want it to get to his desk, and so it didn’t.
On the other hand, Thompson served during a period of growth in tax revenues (at one point, Wisconsin was number one in the nation not in football, but in taxes), and so he never had to make the kinds of difficult decisions for which Cullen, Jauch and Schultz castigated Gov. Scott Walker. The closest thing Thompson did to Act 10 was the Qualified Economic Offer, limiting growth in teacher salaries. The QEO went away after Thompson left for Washington.
I hope the Civility Summit included a mirror, but I’m betting it didn’t. Who is at fault for the decrease in civility in politics? I’ll give you a hint: Those at fault include men with the first names of Tommy, Dale, Bob and Tim.
Why is that? Because from the start of Thompson’s Assembly career to the end of Schultz’s, Jauch’s and Cullen’s Senate careers, state government (and local government too) has grown far beyond justified size given inflation and the state’s population growth. (Had we had limits on government spending tied to population growth and inflation since the late 1970s, according to the Tax Foundation, state and local government would be half the size it is today. However, Thompson never pushed for a Taxpayer Bill of Rights, either as state law or, more importantly, in the state Constitution.) During that time as well, state legislators became full-time legislators, and they are paid nearly twice what their average constituent makes. When the stakes go up in elections, the legislative process and campaigns get progressively more personal and nasty. (And therefore the more money gets spent on getting elected and reelected to office, which is a separate subject.)
Thompson, Schultz, Jauch and Cullen spent their entire adult careers in state politics. (I was 1½ years old when Thompson went to Madison, shortly before the Packers’ first Super Bowl win.) So maybe it’s natural for them to assume that every problem the state faces requires government to fix it. None of the four could ever have been accused as doing anything to promote, or even believing in, smaller government. (Thompson was a “compassionate conservative” before George W. Bush was.) Those four were in the same party — the Incumbent Party, which big government benefits most of all.
Out here in the real world, where people actually have to earn their salaries, government causes many more problems than it fixes. Unless you are a government employee, which means you’re paid for your work by taxpayers, no Wisconsinite has ever gotten his or her money’s worth from government.
The Civility Summit calls to mind an era of state politics that doesn’t exist anymore, if in fact it ever did. (Fighting Bob La Follette would have punched out anyone who called for civility in politics.) Politics, remember, is a zero-sum game. One side wins, which means the other side loses. If you don’t win, you have accomplished nothing for your constituents (at least those who voted for you) or your supporters.
Of course, I don’t elevate politicians like the state’s media does. I like politicians to the extent they do what I want them to do, and no more than that. (I particularly do not like politicians who refuse to place limits on their own power.) And I don’t love Wisconsin. You cannot love a thing, and Wisconsin is a thing — an overtaxed place with bad weather most of the year.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 