The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorially harrumphs:
Statistics by Public Policy Polling reveals a partisan trench in Wisconsin wider and deeper than in any other state, according to some number-crunching by the Journal Sentinel’s Washington Bureau Chief Craig Gilbert. We can, we should, do better.
Gov. Scott Walker’s approval rating among Republican voters: 92%. Among Democrats: 9%.
President Barack Obama’s approval rating among Democrats: 93%. Among Republicans: 4%.
Those divides are wider in Wisconsin than in the other 40 or so states the company has polled in since 2011.
The same results go for U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Janesville, the Republican candidate for vice president in the November election, for newly minted Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin and for Republican Sen. Ron Johnson. …
There is little doubt that the election of Walker in November 2010 and his decision to challenge the public unions pushed voters into their corners. Walker’s goal of bringing the state’s labor costs under control were achievable without the sort of radical attack on organized labor that he undertook, an attack that essentially ended collective bargaining for most public workers.
But signs of deep political division were evident even before Walker’s election. One example: The nasty 2008 state Supreme Court contest won by challenger Michael Gableman over incumbent Louis Butler, which saw conservative and liberal interests spend millions in a fight for control of the state’s highest court.
For those with short memories, believe it or not, Wisconsin politics wasn’t always like this. Former Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson was known as a dealmaker who would gladly reach across the aisle to get something passed. Politicians like that still exist – think state Sen. Tim Cullen of Janesville, a Democrat, who has worked closely with Republican state Sen. Dale Schultz of Richland Center.
Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them, as a column Monday by the Journal Sentinel’s Dan Bice made clear. Bice recounted a recent bit of nastiness between Republican state Rep. Steve Nass of Whitewater and Democratic state Rep. Andy Jorgensen of Fort Atkinson, who got into a heated email exchange over a minor bill that had bipartisan support.
The wounds of the past two years may take years to heal, but surely legislators can do better than that. And surely the state’s leading politicians can find common ground from which to do the will of the people who elected them. Is that too much to ask?
Well, uh, yes, it is too much to ask. We are a divided state, and we have been divided far longer than the Journal Sentinel has noticed. We’re divided between the People’s Republic of Madison and the rest of the planet. We’re divided between “water fountain” and ‘bubbler.” We’re divided between Wisconsin basketball fans and Marquette basketball fans.
That wasn’t what the Journal Sentinel had in mind. But this partisan and ideological divided has existed far longer than the 2008 Supreme Court election. The Journal Sentinel could have looked back to the 1990s, when Republican Speaker of the Assembly Scott Jensen and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala ran their houses like dictatorships. Jensen and Chvala may have figured out before other politicians that politics is a zero-sum game — one side wins, the other side loses. The most charitable observation about Chvala could be that he was doing what he could knowing that the most powerful governor in the country was able to undo whatever he didn’t like coming out of the Legislature.
(The Journal Sentinel inadvertently proved why governors make better presidents than senators. Governors are expected to get things done. Senators can, well, vote present.)
The fault lies in the parties. Each party benefits by demonizing the other to generate voter passion and, more importantly, money. Both parties have bought into the idea that government must solve all of our social ills, even if government cannot do that.
The Democratic Party is against reducing government. The Republican Party says it wants to reduce government, then doesn’t. There are numerous clear examples of how the state GOP, for example, has had the opportunity to cut government spending and has lacked the guts to do so. That makes one think they’re either frauds or in love with the political power the GOP has had since voters fired Democrats left and, well, left in 2010.
But at least as much fault lies in the media. Here’s a crazy thought for the management of the state’s largest newspaper: Whenever a statement floats into your email from one of the party’s chairs, or particularly their spokespeople, delete it. Every time the media quotes a party official, the media is providing free advertising for that party. Party officials contribute nothing, and have zero governmental authority, and yet the Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin State Journal and other offenders act as if we should care about what they think.
More broadly, the media is at fault every time it covers politics instead of government — when the media treats politics like something between a sporting event and a beauty pageant. The Journal Sentinel demonstrated this by wasting space on the snit fit between Jorgensen and Nass. Who cares? The media has also served the parties by exposing conservative Democrats and Republicans who don’t toe the current GOP line, as if issues should be decided on personalities instead of the merits of the issue.
Far too many stories written in the past two years were about how Walker’s or Democrats’ political fortunes would be affected by Act 10 or other legislation. Political non-nerds wanted to know how legislation will affect them, not on who gets along, or not, with some other politician, or who’s going to run for what more than one election cycle down the road.
The media should not stop covering government, since politicians spend (and more often than not waste) our tax dollars. But the media should strongly consider stopping coverage of politics, because it only encourages politicians to do things that will attract media attention.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 