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by NeonLX » Wed May 30, 2012 1:32 pm
by JackRiddler » Wed May 30, 2012 2:40 pm
NeonLX wrote:Just an observation:
Walker's TV ads outnumber those for his opponent Barrett by about 8 to 1. This is based on my highly unscientific survey from sporadic TV-watching.
Sometimes, two different 30-second spots for Walker will run back-to-back during the same break.
You can go for hours and not see any Barrett ads. Walker ads are on almost every commercial break.
by NeonLX » Wed May 30, 2012 3:47 pm
by seemslikeadream » Thu May 31, 2012 9:22 am
May 30, 2012
"Now Make Me Do It"
Obama’s Wisconsin Betrayal
by ANDREW LEVINE
When all else fails, Obama apologists conjure up what FDR is supposed to have said to some of his liberal supporters: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” In the early days of the Obama presidency, this was a call to action. It quickly degenerated into a blame-the-victims excuse.
If you are among the multitudes who are “disappointed” because the Nobel laureate morphed into President Drone, champion of perpetual (and secret) war, or because the banksters and Bush (and post-Bush) era war criminals are not just unpunished but still marauding shamelessly, or because the Constitutional Law professor turned out to be even more disdainful of Constitutional protections than George W. Bush, or because he’s done nothing or almost nothing for the “progressive” constituencies who voted him into office or for poor people or for organized labor, or that he deports “illegals” at record levels, or that the last time he did anything positive for African Americans was when he and his family, “the next first family of the United States,” stepped out onto the stage at Grant Park – well, it’s your fault. You didn’t make him do it.
Then came Wisconsin – masses of people, from all walks of life, including all sectors of the labor movement, rising up against Governor Scott Walker’s brazen, corporate-driven assault on public sector unions. It was of a piece with the (contemporaneous) Arab spring and a direct inspiration for last fall’s Occupy movements and their continuations to the present moment.
What happened in Wisconsin – and then in Ohio and elsewhere — was as sustained an effort to make him do it, to make him stand up for those whose interests he is supposed to champion, as could be imagined. And yet the Change and Hope President remained serenely detached.
When, months later, the swelling Occupy movement struck a chord that Obama couldn’t ignore, there was a detectable up-tick in the “populist” tone of a few of his speeches. But that’s all that changed. Even the Occupy movement didn’t “make …[him] do it.” And now reports are trickling out that his administration’s repressive apparatus, ever vigilant in its determination to keep change at bay, has the Occupy movement in its sights – in much the way it targets Muslims and, in line with longstanding FBI traditions, the entire Left.
The Wisconsin case is especially illuminating because Obama is still at it – doing his best to damn Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate running against Walker in the
June 5 recall election, with feint support. The Democratic National Committee, led by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the darling of the MSNBC evening lineup, is towing a similar line. It seems that national Democrats have better uses for their time and money.
If Barrett loses, liberals will blame the Koch brothers and their zillionaire comrades. They’ll have a point. Those miscreants will spend what it takes to get their way, and they have it to spend. But, at least, they don’t dissimulate. Their strategy is not, like Obama’s, just to fool some of the people all of the time.
* * *
It is too soon, of course, to write an obituary for the Wisconsin insurgency. People power could still keep the worst from happening. But if the worst does happen, if Walker emerges stronger than ever from the events of the past year and a half and therefore more able to do harm, the malign neglect of the forces of hope and change will have much to account for. It won’t just be the Koch brothers’ fault.
Obama’s conspicuous disinterest is important for what it betokens, a point to which I will return. The same holds for his relations with the Occupy movement, where he may be up to worse than mere neglect. But before reflecting on what Obama’s aloofness reveals, we should remind ourselves of some of the many ways that people power, the only antidote to plutocratic malfeasance and political corruption, tends to dissipate and become enfeebled.
There is, first of all, something like a law of human history, a regularity almost as infrangible as a law of nature, according to which progressive ventures that seem unstoppable but that, for one reason or another, fail to reach immediate consummation give rise to reactions that usually prevail, at least in the short run.
Recent history abounds with examples – from May 68 through the Arab spring. In the Western tradition, the unhappy transition from action to reaction has been a theme of literary and historical writing from Greek antiquity through Shakespeare to the present. Ralph Waldo Emerson got the wisdom of the ancients and the moderns right when he wrote: “if you would strike a king, you must kill him.”
Barring a revolution, which no one contemplated and which was never even remotely in the offing, this meant, in Wisconsin, where politicians can only be recalled after they have served at least a year in office, that anti-Walker energies were bound to dissipate.
It also meant that they were bound to be channeled into an electoral contest between a Democrat and a Republican — a sorry prospect even in the pre-Citizens United days and a dreadful prospect now, in a political culture where the main beneficiaries of our preposterously inegalitarian capitalist system have free rein to buy electoral outcomes.
Long ago, George Carlin asked why when we have fifty choices for Miss America and thirty-one flavors of ice cream to choose from (he meant at Baskin Robbins, where there are now many more), we must choose between just two people for President? A similar question might be asked about gubernatorial elections.
That there are only two parties that have any chance of winning elections has nothing to do with anything resembling a law of nature. It is, if anything, a convention imposed against nature; one of many examples of the real “exceptionalism” that deforms our political life. We live unnaturally under a semi-established duopoly party system installed and sustained by the parties themselves and underwritten, now more than ever, by the ill-gotten gains of an increasingly aggressive ruling class.
It doesn’t have to be that way. To cite just two examples still in the news, think of the many party choices available to voters in France and Egypt in their recently concluded presidential elections. In the end, there are runoffs, and the outcomes are often not much better than the outcomes here; but at least fewer voters are disenfranchised because they have no one to vote for, and the political culture is all the better for it. If nothing else, the spectrum of respectable (non-marginalized) opinion is broader.
Add to this another sad fact: that Democratic voters, more than Republicans, tend to internalize the debilitating constraints that afflict us by gravitating “strategically” to the dead center. This is why we ended up with John Kerry as the Democratic standard-bearer in 2004, and why Wisconsin voters, intent on ridding their state of the Walker menace, selected the most “moderate” of the major contenders in the primary that concluded early in May.
The idea was to get more than just “Madison liberals” on board; to get those vaunted “independents” to vote Walker out. No matter that Madison liberals are a generally anodyne group; Democrats flock invariably around the conventional wisdom. No wonder, then, that they lose so often, even to the likes of Scott Walker. Voters who deemed Barrett’s main rival, a quintessential Madison liberal, too left to win were begging for an enthusiasm deficit, and inviting defeat.
Republicans, to their credit, are not as inclined to pull their punches. And so, in Walker, they have a candidate they not only deserve, but also ardently desire.
In their case, though, it may be a case of too much of a good thing. It was the unwillingness of Republican voters to strategize that turned the Republican primaries into the circuses they were, forcing Mitt Romney, the plutocrats’ favorite son and therefore always the likely winner, to assume positions he cannot easily etch-a-sketch his way out of, and is bound to regret.
Because they hate Obama for all the wrong reasons, Republicans are now doing their best to coalesce round Romney. It remains to be seen, though, how long they will be able to hold their noses. To get to November with a candidate so many of them despise will be a daunting task. Come November, there are likely to be enthusiasm deficits on all sides.
But in Wisconsin next week the deficit is all on the Democrats’ side. How consequential this will be remains to be seen. Since Walker is about as execrable a candidate as can be imagined, revulsion might just save the day. Or not.
The polls say the race is close, with Walker slightly ahead. Were Obama to deign to campaign for Barrett, this would almost certainly change the dynamic; there are still plenty of Obama fans in the Badger state. No matter how much money the Koch brothers throw at the race, a jolt from the White House, and some DNC cash, would, in all likelihood, result in a resounding Walker defeat.
But don’t hold your breath.
* * *
One would think this would be a no-brainer for Obama and the DNC. A Walker defeat would all but insure that Wisconsin, a battleground state, would again go Democratic. It would demoralize the Republicans nationally, and (re)energize the forces that put Obama in office in 2008. But there’s the rub.
Obama needs the people who enthused over him four years ago to enthuse over him again; that’s where the votes are. And so we can count on him trying to reel the base back in. Therefore expect more of what we got two weeks ago on gay marriage: encouraging words. Some of those words may even come packaged in a vaguely populist register.
And why not? There is no percentage, after all, in pissing potential voters off or in offending labor leaders, especially when they are prepared, as always, to mobilize their members to do yeomen’s work in behalf of Democratic candidates. Obama needs the active support of the old lib-lab coalition; he knows that without it Democrats will get “shellacked” again, and he along with them.
But the last thing he or Wasserman Schultz or any other national Democrat wants is for the people to call the shots. It’s not just that they want to run the goings on from the top down as in 2008. More than that, they want to make sure that popular mobilizations don’t get out of control – to the point that they threaten the interests of the fraction of the one-percent whose favor Obama and the DNC assiduously court.
Their concern for the interests of the richest of the rich should surprise no one; it is in line with a tradition Bill Clinton made central to the Democratic Party’s identity. It is pitiful, however, to see Democrats court in vain whenever Republicans manage, despite the obduracy of their base, to put up candidates the party establishment can abide.
Romney is such a candidate, obviously, and arguably so was John McCain. But McCain chose a bona fide ditz for a running mate, someone no self-respecting plutocrat would want just a heartbeat away from heading what Marx called “the executive committee of the (entire) bourgeoisie.” Unless Romney repeats that mistake, it is a sure thing that Obama doesn’t have enough abject servility in him to get the plutocrats back on board.
But that won’t stop him from trying. Although the anti-Walker insurgency was defensive in nature, it developed into a movement that began to name the enemy, the plutocrats behind Walker and his fellow over-reachers. From there, it is not a great leap to move on to Obama’s plutocrats, the ones who fund him already and the ones he still seeks to enlist.
This, of course, was what the Occupy movement, drawing on the Wisconsin experience, was about. And this is what Obama and Wasserman Schultz cannot abide, even if it means acting against their own electoral interests.
No doubt, some national Democrats are simply confused or cowardly or both. Perhaps they think that Big Money is always going to prevail, and that even when people power erupts, it will soon become spent, and fall short of victory. In other words, they may believe, in all innocence, that, for “pragmatic” reasons, Democrats should side with economic elites and against the people when push comes to shove as it did in Wisconsin; or at least that they should abstain, allowing the conflict to run its course and wither away on its own.
But even if well intentioned, this way of thinking is reprehensible. It is also self-defeating. This is so obvious that it is hard to impute such thinking to anyone not terminally obtuse. It is plain that Obama and other Democratic bigwigs are smarter than that; they didn’t get where they are by being stupid.
This is why, I think, they know what they are doing, and that they are doing it despite the harm to themselves. They are doing it because they are good soldiers in the class war, fighting on the wrong side.
It may once have been possible to argue that Obama kept his distance from popular struggles out of simple cowardice or wrong-headedness. The Rorschach candidate of four years ago, the man upon whom voters yearning for ‘change’ projected their hopes, remained inscrutable enough long enough to fool all (or nearly all) of the people all of the time.
In progressive circles especially, but also in the labor movement and among persons of color, there is still a lingering belief, a baseless hope really, that whatever he does, he is ultimately one of “us”; that he’s on the peoples’ side.
But, after Wisconsin, it is hard to see how anyone who is not willfully blind can avoid drawing the obvious conclusion: that Obama is not a tragic figure– a good man, moved by good reasons, who is somehow obliged to do ill – but that he is instead, like everyone else integral to the “bipartisan” consensus that makes our politics so odious, not one of us at all, but one of them; and that what he does, he does for them, not for us.
FDR could say: “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me …” without clear-headed observers gasping in disbelief. Obama cannot. If we must put words like these in his mouth, then instead let it be something like “whether or not I agree with you, I won’t do it, and you can’t make me.”
If this seems harsh, ask yourself – if not after Wisconsin, when?
by seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 01, 2012 7:10 pm
Morning State News Briefs: Another person granted immunity on Walker probe
Wisconsin News
-- A 13th person was granted immunity from prosecution in the two-year-old John Doe probe into Governor Scott Walker’s former Milwaukee County aides.
MILWAUKEE - A 13th person was granted immunity from prosecution in the two-year-old John Doe probe into Governor Scott Walker’s former Milwaukee County aides.
Fran McLaughlin was a spokeswoman for Walker when he was the county executive. She served from 2007 through 2010, when Walker was first elected as governor. McLaughlin stayed in county government after Walker left – and she’s now the chief spokeswoman for Sheriff David Clarke. The Milwaukee County John Doe investigation is two years old and still going. Prosecutors use them to secretly gather evidence and testimony which help them decide whether-or-not to file charges in a particular case. The names of those getting immunity are the only things required to be public records during John Does. Five people have been charged in the Walker probe – three former county aides, an appointee, and a campaign donor.
by seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 04, 2012 11:16 pm
Legal Cloud Gathers Over Walker
89
By Ruth Conniff, June 3, 2011
With the recall election only a day away, Federal prosecutors are closing in on Governor Scott Walker, according to veteran political reporter David Shuster, former Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, and former district attorney Bob Jambois.
In a conference call organized by state Democrats on Saturday evening, June 2, Shuster, Lautenschlager, and Jambois laid out evidence that Walker is a target of a federal investigation.
Wisconsin Democratic Party Communications Director Graeme Zielinski added that there is evidence of wrongdoing after Walker’s time as Milwaukee County Executive, and that the investigation includes criminal activity during his time as governor.
Based on conversations with a lawyer who has knowledge of the investigation, “We believe that Scott Walker set up a secret computer network in the governor's office and Department of Administration offices, and that the John Doe investigation is seeking evidence of crimes he committed in Madison,” Zielinski said.
Walker denied the allegations. At a campaign event on Saturday, Walker answered “absolutely not” to reporters’ questions—raised by David Shuster’s reporting for Take Action News—about whether he had been informed, either formally or informally, that he might be a target of federal prosecution. “I’ve never heard a single thing about that, other than spin from the left,” Walker said. He described the allegations as “just more of the liberal scare tactics out there desperately trying to get the campaign off target.”
“I stand by my reporting 100 percent,” Shuster said in the conference call. “It’s clear to me that he is, in fact, a target in a Federal investigation.”
Despite copious reporting, especially in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, about the Milwaukee County district attorney’s probe of alleged violations when Walker was county executive—including a secret email network maintained by his staff for the purpose of conducting illegal campaign activity on county time, the theft of funds intended for the widows and orphans of Iraq War veterans, and possible favorable treatment of campaign donors seeking public contracts, not much has been written about the FBI probe.
“The Wisconsin press has only reported about the John Doe—the state component,” said Zielinski. “They have not reported on the Federal component of this.”
“I’ve been reporting on Federal grand juries for twenty years” —including Justice Department probes of former Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker, Monica Lewinsky, Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, and Jack Abramoff—said David Shuster, a former reporter for Fox News and anchor for MSNBC, who now works with Take Action News.
In his reporting on FBI involvement in the current probe of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Shuster said he consulted with Justice Department attorneys in the public integrity section and “I got independent confirmation that he’s a target.”
Shuster said that he had learned Scott Walker’s attorneys had been seeking to have their client publicly cleared of wrongdoing for the last five or six weeks, in the run-up to the recall election. Prosecutors could not clear him, Shuster said, because Walker is a target.
The ongoing John Doe investigation by the Milwaukee County District Attorney has led to criminal charges against three of Walker’s former aides, an appointee, and a major donor. Thirteen of Walker’s associates have been granted immunity—including Walker’s spokesman, Cullen Werwie.
Recent campaign finance filings show that Walker has transferred a total of $160,000 into a criminal defense fund—the only criminal defense fund maintained by a governor of any state in the nation.
Walker’s opponent in the recall election, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, has repeatedly called for Walker to disclose the names of donors to his criminal defense fund, and to release emails relating to the investigation of wrongdoing on his watch in the county executive’s office.
In Saturday’s conference call, former prosecutor Bob Jambois said that when he was general counsel to the state Department of Transportation, he released thousands of pages of records and called a press conference to put to rest allegations of wrongdoing. “If Scott Walker thinks this is so unfair, why doesn’t he open up these 1,400 emails,” he said.
Jambois suggested that the emails Walker has not released must relate to a private email network, since reporters have been unable to access them through an open records request.
Lautenschlager agreed that “Walker should have produced evidence to clear himself” if he was not a target of investigation, and that it would be “malpractice” for his attorneys not to seek a letter from prosecutors clearing him.
She also disputed Walker’s contention that he could not speak publicly about the investigation because prosecutors did not want him to.
“There is no happier person than a prosecutor when a target starts speaking publicly,” she said.
As state attorney general, Lautenschlager said that she worked by a “rule of thumb” when investigating wrongdoing by politicians “not to say anything within two months of an election,” unless prosecutors could clear the politician in question, to avoid the appearance of a politically motivated prosecution.
While that rules out an indictment before the election on Tuesday, she said, Scott appears to be “on that pathway toward indictment.”
by brainpanhandler » Tue Jun 05, 2012 11:47 am
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 06, 2012 9:06 am
The Wisconsin Recall Aftermath: Scott Walker Steps Right Up into the Pocket of Those Who Got Him There
By Charles P. Pierce
at 7:48AM
Illustration by DonkeyHotey for The Politics Blog (Based on Images from Bloomberg)
As hard as he may pretend to be a "reasonable" Republican, Walker knows he is a political creature of the forces that put him back in office. They are going to move further toward the extreme and he's going to move with them, because now he has a role to play.
WAUKESHA, Wisconsin — Make no mistake. A star was born last night. You will now see Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to run their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, everywhere in the energetic precincts of the revived American right. He will be on the covers of their startlingly advertising-free little magazines. He will be the darling of every wingnut blogger in the extended monkeyhouse; poo will be flung high and far in celebration of him. He will have a high-profile speaking role in Tampa this August, and it is very likely that there are people in Iowa who already are booking house parties for the late autumn of 2015 in his honor. He will be a bigger presence on Fox News than are Brit Hume's jowls or Shep Smith's gradually swelling public rage. I will tell you what: Willard Romney better be damned glad that he's already clinched the nomination, and that Walker didn't win this recall a year ago. And, because they are a timid flock of ruminants, the rest of the elite political press corps will wander, sheeplike, in his general direction, grazing amid the unmitigated manure of his victory speech here last night. Oh, Lord, are we going to be hearing about what a "turning point" in Walker's career that speech was.
He's going national. We know that now because last night, in his triumph, we got the humble act. He thanked God for "His abundant grace." We heard about "moms and dads and grandmas and grandads." He told us about how moved he was to visit Independence Hall and see "the desks and the chairs" that the Founders used, and how the Founders were men of courage who put their lives on the line because they made "the tough decisions." Breaking away from the British Empire. Gutting the benefits of elementary school teachers. You'd have to be blind not to see the parallels.
And we even, mirabile dictu, got a quasi-acknowledgement that he could have handled the evisceration of collective bargaining — in the state where it pretty much was born — a little better than he did. "I learned a few lessons this year," he told a steaming crowd of supporters at the county expo center. "I learned that sometimes, it's a problem when you try to fix things without talking about them. I believed that so many politicians talked about what they were going to do and then didn't do them, that it would be better just to try and fix things before I talked about them. Looking ahead, we know now that it's important to do both."
Nobody understood what was going on here. Almost everyone watched the crowds in Madison in the snow last year and missed the great force of resentment and anger that was building on the other side. Almost everyone listened to the exit polls early last evening and missed the great frustration of people who might not like what Walker had done, but they hated the idea of a recall even more.
(One MSNBC exit poll had 60 percent of the people who voted believing that recalls should only be employed in cases of actual criminality. Two points: 1) the last recall of a governor was Gray Davis in California, and he was dumped primarily because Enron rigged the electricity market and because a lot of important people — coughChrisMatthewscough — wanted a political career for meat-puppet Arnold Schwarzeneggar; and 2) if the John Doe investigation now lapping around Walker's heels begins to heat up, those 60 percent of the people may get what they want after all.)
(And, while we're on the subject of exit polls and "calling" races, shame on NBC and MSNBC for waiting an entire 49 minutes to show the rest of the country how very, very smart they are. A full hour after NBC made their call, there were still people waiting in line at the Zeidler Building in downtown Milwaukee, waiting to vote. Thought experiment: Imagine if NBC had "called" a race for a Democratic candidate while there were still voters waiting in line in heavily Republican districts. The howling from the wingnut peanut gallery would drown out the Indy 500. Milwaukee had trouble all day with precincts having sufficient ballots and registration forms. Remarkably, this was not the case in the suburbs, where turnout was equally heavy. Remarkable.)
(Oh, and the Zeidler Building is named for Frank P. Zeidler, the last Socialist mayor of a major American city, and someone whom I knew, and who would not take any of this nonsense lying down.)
But those were the forces that combined with an overwhelming flood of out-of-state money to make liars out of practically everybody. This was a winning electorate that found itself besieged by the images it saw on its television, and it felt its concerns being drowned out by drum circles and chants. When Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch got up and began her speech with the line "this is what democracy looks like," she was doing more than simply engaging in some stunningly high-level gloating; she was telling her audience exactly what they wanted to hear. Their democracy was hijacked by other people. The out-of-state special interests that most bothered them were not the Koch Brothers; it was Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz. Upwards to $50 million poured into Wisconsin from various plutocrats and their front groups to tell the people in this hall that people from outside Wisconsin were taking them all for a ride. The money was a balm. The money was an amplifier. The money gave them absolution because the money told them what they already believed. It was not all the money, although the first pundit that downplays the fact that the same people have now bought Scott Walker an election twice in favor of Walker's new "conciliatory tone" is going to have to carry the weight for my going Keith Moon on my Hyatt TV all the way down to the sidewalk along Kilbourn Avenue. It was the fertile ground on which all that money fell.
The people of the winning electorate last night have a Wisconsin in their minds and hearts that is radically different from the Wisconsin that exists in history, that great catch-basin for all the dissidents and political bounders who fled Germany and Scandinavia and the revolutions of the mid-19th century, only to come to Wisconsin and organize the mills and the factories, or become prairie populists who raised hell with the railroad bosses and the timber barons, the people who thought Fightin' Bob LaFollette should have been president of the United States, until, of course, he resisted the entry of the United States into World War I. Then a lot of them drew cartoons of LaFollette wearing an Iron Cross, or suggested, quite seriously, that he be hanged. The political emotions in Wisconsin have always ranged freely and very close to the surface; this state elected two LaFollettes, and the second one, Fightin' Bob's kid, lost a primary to Joe McCarthy. The political emotions of Wisconsin are not easily controlled, but they can be channelled, and that's what happened here. The anger on the capitol lawn, which now seems a relic of a distant age, was overwhelmed by the emotions of people who felt as though the very ground had been stolen from beneath their feet. That I believe they're wrong is of no matter. The inescapable conclusion from last night's election results was that, with a big assist from the new dynamics of campaign finance, their view of Wisconsin won out. They got back again the Wisconsin they see in their minds.
As the room grew steadily more rowdy, I fell into conversation with Ed Hannan, a lawyer from Greendale, who was glad-handing anyone who walked by, which showed considerable pluck, since one of his arms was in a sling. "I am surprised by the margin," he said. "I expected large amounts of voter fraud, both in Milwaukee and in Dane County. That has had me concerned. Given the level of participation today, I can tell you, I voted at 7:30 this morning, I was number 78 at 7:15 in the morning. That has never been seen before.
"It means the restoration of integrity in government," he continued. "It means an understanding of the role of government, the limitations of the role of government, and the return of power to the taxpayers, as opposed to union organizers. That is how important this is. Going forward, what we will then see is more legislation that is going to limit the role of government and, more than that, a repeal of laws. For instance, the Minimum Mark-Up Law, a limitation on the environmental laws. We need to have sunset laws on environmental restrictions and the employment-related laws. This election was never about collective bargaining. It was about legislation that removed the state as the collection agency for union dues."
There was no point in arguing with the man. There didn't seem even to be any sport in pointing out that the "restoration of integrity in government" that he saw in the results was on behalf of a guy who took to the podium last night three steps ahead of a sitting grand jury. The distance between what I saw and what Ed Hannan saw was too great. I might as well have been talking to him in Finnish.
As hard as Scott Walker may want to pretend to be a conciliator, as hard as he wants to fool the national press in their hopeless quest for a "reasonable" Republican that they can hitch to their centrist Cinderella's carriage, he knows good and goddamn well that it's not in the cards. The forces that put him in office, and the forces that kept him there last night, are too strong for any of that, even if he were sincere, which he most assuredly was not. He is a political creature of the Wisconsin that the people in the Exposition Center last night see in their minds. He cannot exist as a political creature outside of the Wisconsin his supporters believe themselves to have re-captured for good. They are not going to be reasonable. They are going to move further toward the extreme and he's going to move with them, because he is a star now, and he has a role to play.
The next step for them will be the upcoming primary for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate. In that, former Governor Tommy Thompson is being sorely pressed by a former congressman named Mark Neumann, who lost to Scott Walker in the 2010 gubernatorial primary. Neumann is of the new Republican party — a gay-baiting firebrand who, yesterday, in an interview, placed himself squarely in Walker's sunlight. Thompson already has been beset by commercials questioning his conservative bona fides, most of them the product of the Club For Growth, which has endorsed Neumann. Thompson is leading in the polls, and he showed up last night to shake hands and bask in the warmth of the evening. Long ago, he was practically the only Wisconsin Republican who kept the torch burning for Ronald Reagan, as Wisconsin Republicans still felt themselves heirs to the LaFollettes and considered Reagan unacceptably extreme. Now, because he worked with Democrats while he was governor, and because he and Michael Dukakis once put together a plan for a high-speed rail service that would cover almost the entire Midwest, and (I suspect) because he's 71-years old, he's fighting off a challenge from his right because the world in which his party lives now is strange terrain for him. He did a great job pretending that half the people in the hall didn't want to bury his career a few months down the line.
"The fact of the matter is that Walker has shown that, if you stand your ground and win, you're going to be able to be rewarded by the voters," Thompson said. "I did the same thing with welfare. When I started with welfare, people said, 'Don't do it, Tommy. You can't win.' But I did it and people stood with me. I think it shows that people are thirsty for leadership.
"I know they're coming for me. When I first ran for governor, people said I was too conservative to be governor. I still am. I still have the principles, but I happen to talk to people and some people don't like that."
Scott Walker finished his speech and spent a long time working the crowd. Outside, the TV lights on the lawn grew dim. Horns honked in the distance. Tommy Thompson shuffled off into the night. He reminded me of all the people I'd talked to over the past few days who looked back so fondly to those heady times in Madison. He had something in common with them. He was of another time. He was of another place. One world had beaten another, decisively. One Wisconsin of the mind was triumphant, and many of us are simply of another time and another place, and it was not here.
by NeonLX » Wed Jun 06, 2012 11:45 am
by barracuda » Wed Jun 06, 2012 11:59 am
A wake-up call for Dems, labor, and the left
By Greg Sargent
Scott Walker’s victory in tonight’s recall battle is a major wake-up call for the left, Democrats, and unions about the true nature of the new, post-Citizens United political landscape, and it should force a major reckoning among liberals and Democrats about what this means for the future.
There’s no sugarcoating what this loss means for organized labor. Unions invested heavily in this battle in order to make an example of Walker. The goal was to show that Republican governors who attempt to roll back organizing rights will pay the ultimate political price. That effort failed, and the failure will have major repercussions for labor groups as they gear up for future fights over bargaining rights in states.
But Walker’s win also has major implications for Democratic elected officials across the country. It shows with crystal clarity that Republicans may very well be able to successfully use the new, post-Citizens United landscape to weaken the opposition in a structural way, and to eliminate major sources of support for that opposition.
“This has enormous implications for Democratic elected officials everywhere,” Andy Stern, the former president of SEIU and now a senior fellow at Columbia University, tells me. “Under the guise of acting to restore balance, [the right] is dramatically decreasing the amount of resources public unions have to participate in the political process.”
Indeed, one way of thinking about tonight’s results is that they say at least as much about Citizens United, and the ways it has empowered opponents of organized labor, as they do about the very real decline of union power. An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity found that Walker outraised his vanquished opponent Tom Barrett by nearly eight to one, and that outside groups supporting Walker vastly outspent unions, thanks to Citizens United.
Unions and Dems had hoped that grassroots organizing would be enough to offset that spending advantage, and they did in fact mount a huge effort along those lines. The labor-backed We Are Wisconsin signed up 50,000 volunteers in the last 96 hours, a volunteer army that knocked on 1.5 million doors throughout the state. It wasn’t nearly enough.
“It’s pretty clear that the voices of ordinary citizens are at permanent risk of being drowned out by uninhibited corporate spending,” said Michelle Ringuette, an official with the American Federation of Teachers.
Conservatives will respond to this by insisting that this battle proves that they’re winning the war of ideas, and indeed, national Republicans were quick to claim that tonight’s results bode well for November. Recalls are quirky; exit polls showed a big Obama lead; and polls have not shown national support for Walker’s agenda. So it seems unlikely that tonight’s outcome says anything too predictive about this fall.
But the outcome does say something important about the developing post-Citizens United landscape, and should prompt a major reckoning over how Dems, the labor and the left should deal with this new reality going forward.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 06, 2012 12:00 pm
NeonLX wrote:Sh!t.
by brainpanhandler » Wed Jun 06, 2012 12:54 pm
by norton ash » Wed Jun 06, 2012 1:04 pm
by Simulist » Wed Jun 06, 2012 1:58 pm
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