Wisconsin Political Fix

By Bill Kraus

How do you ruin a perfectly good Bar Association convention? Invite Bob Williams and me to talk about the sad state of judicial politics and what can and can’t be done about fixing them.

We told them that nobody likes what Supreme Court campaigns have become.

We also told them that since nobody who dislikes what they have become likes any proposal to fix them–except perhaps their own–better than the current mess, the current mess is going to survive.

We told them that the forces of the status quo, which are always a three-touchdown favorite, are powerful and set in concrete and are major reasons no change is in the offing.

The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, would have to turn 180 degrees from its recent past to even take a look at the collateral damage that its decisions have caused.

The incumbents, even though they are wearing out their index fingers dialing for dollars, are afraid to change for fear they might become less invincible than they are.

The interest groups that are now the major players in the money race and who are getting what they seem to want—a biased instead of a disinterested judiciary—are not interested in giving up what they have spent a lot of good money to get.

The hired guns who are making the tasteless, misleading attack television ads and the television stations that are selling the time to run them are getting rich. They are going to give this up? Get real.

The only hint of good regulatory news we were able to dig up was the prospect of getting some transparency into the funding sources of the groups who are hijacking the campaigns. We know who is coughing up the dough for the manufacturers and the teachers generally if not specifically. But all we know about the Club for Growth, the Greater Wisconsin Committee, One Wisconsin, and the Coalition for Families is that their names are as unrevealing as are the names of the people who are sending them the money they are able to scarf up to denigrate the candidates they dislike.

The special session, we told them, is still alive. The disclosure bill which the senate passed unanimously ended up in a trash can in the Speaker’s office on its way to the floor of the Assembly despite the fact that this has always been the Republican preference over regulation and spending limits and the fact that the speaker is on the record in favor of the idea.

Bad.

But the special session is still alive and transparency is part of the big reform bill that is gasping for breath and which could be passed [ha!] or modified down to a skeletal disclosure version..if someone, like all of the lawyers in the audience would call their Assembly Reps and raised something approaching hell.

Easy but perhaps a forlorn hope. We’ll see.

What we really asked them to do is a lot harder. We told them to get back into politics as candidates, as campaigners, as contributors, as citizens. They could start, we suggested, with their mouths, because judicial campaigns are still places where word of mouth counts.

Bob Williams closed this plea with two questions for all the 15,000 members of the Wisconsin bar who live in Wisconsin by asking:

If not now, when?

If not you, who?

Just what they wanted to hear. Or not.

By Bill Kraus

The incumbent sheriff of Dane County was asked to record automated telephone messages for the county board candidates he had endorsed for election or re-election. In the cases where it was appropriate he was also asked to note that the county’s deputy sheriffs’ association had also endorsed the candidate.

The recordings were made late in the campaign and late at night in a period that all of us who have been involved in political campaigns know is chaotic at best.

A mistake was made in one case. The sheriff had endorsed a candidate, but the recording said the deputies had as well. They hadn’t. They had endorsed his opponent.

The aggrieved candidate protested as soon as he heard about the inaccurate calls.

His opponent apologized, contacted the local paper with a story about the mistake and with his retraction and apologized. He had the faulty tape pulled and had the sheriff made a new, corrected tape. The sheriff apologized as well and so did the county board chairman was in charge of producing the original recording.

At a hearing of the Dane County Election Commission after the whole episode was described and discussed and after another round of apologies, all those concerned made promises to tighten up the process so this would not happen again.

It was a civil conclusion to what all felt was an honest, non-fatal mistake.

In the same election sequence the campaign of Judge Michael Gableman for the state Supreme Court issued a letter signed by former Lieutenant Governor Margaret Farrow that said Gableman’s opponent had cast the deciding vote in a case that resulted in a convicted sex offender being released from custody and put back on the streets.

The charge was a mangled version of what the court decided and what the case was about, and, worse yet, ignored the fact that the offender had not been released but was still tucked safely away in the Sand Ridge Secure Treatment Facility.

The Judicial Campaign Integrity Committee (on which I served), which played the role the Dane County Election Commission played in the previous case, called attention to the errors in the letter and asked the people running the Gableman campaign to “retract the statement and correct the record.”

There was no retraction, no correction, no apology.

An uncivil conclusion which reflected badly on the campaign, on politics, on the judiciary.

The only similarity between these two campaigns is that they were decided on the same day. The biggest difference in them was that the one that handled its problem more admirably and with more grace was the one that was the work of citizen politicians, amateurs if you will. The other campaign was the handiwork of what former president Gerald Ford described as “professional hired guns.”

Don’t kill all the lawyers, but do give some serious thought to eradicating the mercenaries who have shanghaied our political campaigns.
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April 25, 2008
The Democrats’ death wish
By Bill Kraus

By Bill Kraus

A couple of cyber-spaceheads reacted to me and my recent blog post lamenting the decline of the print press generally and the loss of hundreds of reporters specifically.

My contention was that reporters are the root source of information in this society and on this planet. Without reporters, I thought but didn’t say, the promulgators of blogs (such as this one), the producers of television news, and radio programmers everywhere would dry up and blow away for lack of raw material.

Spacehead number one jumped to the defense of two of major league bloggers (Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington) and relegated me and all like me to the trash bin of ancient history. To wit:

“Drudge and HuffPo are big enough that people send them information or they discover it through their networks. Both..have broken news stories that newspapers later picked up. To say that [they] are just regurgitating what is in the newspapers is silly. I even break stories on this site from time to time. Anyone who has a network can do it and at the end of the day, the only difference between newspapers and bloggers is that newspapers have paid staff, but that will change.”

I guess this is responsive even though it doesn’t seem to me to address the question of the huge numbers of reporters and the discipline that they bring (or should bring or do bring before some editor screws it up) to their profession. His concluding paragraph goes from disagreeing to insulting.

“The main reason why newspapers will never die,” he says, “is that many people in this generation are attached to them. When the new generation which is not accustomed to reading newspapers takes over, newspapers will no longer be necessary.”

So the organized collection and dispensing of information hangs by a thin thread: us geezers.

Spacehead number two, who I know and who in response to my direct question “Where do you get your information?” told me “by osmosis,” seems to me to head off into non sequitur land with this:

“It will be a positive change to have television without news networks to drown us in all the negativity of the world. They thrive on things like murder, rape, and natural disasters for ratings. Sure there are a few noble journalists out there, those who are driven by an internal passion to share information with the world. Maybe this change will cut out the fat and eliminate all those journalists who are only motivated by money and numbers. Those journalists who are deeply motivated will find a way to do their job whether there is a guaranteed paycheck or not.”

Really?

Until and unless someone shows me how the Internet, with its amazing plethora of information, is something more than a resource, I will continue to think of it as an infinite tower of Babel instead of as a replacement for the tradition and traditional role of journalism.

It’s paradoxical but possible that this age of massive overcommunication may be courting knownothingness. Unless my two critics are right, of course. Or, Heaven forbid, that my old fogie peer group and I are behind the curve and over the hill.

By Bill Kraus

Let’s see now. Radio was supposed to replace newspapers. It didn’t. Television was supposed to replace radio and movies. It didn’t. What television may have contributed to was the demise of afternoon papers at least in major cities.

The latest prediction is that the internet will replace newspapers.

The NY Times has run a long article in its business section saying that more and more citizens are getting their political information from the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post.

The article doesn’t go into where Drudge and Huffington are getting their political information unless it’s from all of us. Everyman as source?

At the same time Eric Alterman’s article in the New Yorker indicates that one of the reasons the numbers of newspaper readers is declining is because of a decline in the readers’ trust in the reliability of the news being delivered by those newspapers. That it isn’t all technology or the rise of the internet as an information source. All of this is taking a toll on newspapers’ revenue which, in turn, takes a toll on the newspapers’ ability to collect the news the readers presumably want. A vicious, downward spiral which affects a lot more than the well being of the newspaper business.

The trouble is that the much-maligned newspaper reporters whose numbers are shrinking along with the numbers of newspapers’ readers are providing the basic information that fills the papers’ pages and the radio and television newscasts. This raw material also gives Drudge’s and Huffington’s “posters” something on which to build, comment and opine. Just as I do and am doing right now, as well. Like bloggers everywhere I am a kind of news parasite. I produce no original information unless my view of what others produce is counted, which it shouldn’t be.

It has always been an article of news-gathering faith that, say, if Madison’s two newspapers shut down the local radio and television stations with their relatively much smaller news-gathering staffs would soon disappear as news dispensers. It is worth noting, incidentally, that the major TV networks, followed by many of their local stations, are also saving money by cutting reporters.

Let’s say that the predictions of the demise of print media are finally right this time. Radio and TV changed newspapers without killing them, but the internet with its websites and bloggers is going to kill them off.

The first place this would show up is in sports reporting. A very large percentage of the newspapers’ reporting staffs are covering games. Not just the games that TV and radio reporters are describing, but all games. Games our kids are playing. Games that are not being reported on national or our own local broadcast outlets.

Politics and government would be next to suffer (if, indeed, the politicians we elect and the government workers we pay think that they would suffer from not having reporters watching them do what we used to think of as the peoples’ work).

How about crime and other vital statistics. These lists would be available, but with no one to organize and promulgate something as routine as, say, obituaries, accidents, fires, floods, and other natural and personal disasters this information would rank with the tree that falls in the empty forest.

Maybe someone with a cellphone camera will be everywhere something happens and will post what they capture on some site that someone else maintains as a substitute for the local paper. Maybe not. Probably not.

In short, a world without newspapers may be imaginable. But a world without reporters whether the 1,200 at the NY Times, the 800-900 in the news rooms at the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal or the lesser numbers in our own cities is not.

The inefficiency of writing all these stories on paper, sending that paper to a printing press, assembling them into a manageable package, delivering that package to thousands of readers at their homes or widely available newsstands is obvious. Perhaps Madison’s own reconfigured Capital Times will show how this can be done more expeditiously in a deadline free cyberspace world where the computer not the front porch is where we find the information we need and want. We’ll see about that.

What we cannot count on or risk is that this disorderly democracy can function without what Thomas Jefferson, who said, “If I have to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter,” believed was indispensable.

By Bill Kraus

The late, great UW Political Science Professor Leon Epstein chided me for my non-stop criticism of Political Action Committees. I regarded these creatures as complicit in the destruction of political parties, and as representative of the tribalization of American politics.

He, not unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, felt that PACs were legitimate beneficiaries of the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment to the Constitution. He also pointed out that “you know who they are.”

Good points.

We never got that far, but I would guess that he and I as well probably thought that the PACs’ campaign rhetoric would be restrained because it reflects on their members and contributors. That hope is currently being shattered by the “contributions” to the campaign dialogue being proffered by the state’s manufacturers and teachers. Their members do not appear to be distancing themselves from their organizations or inhibiting them.

The most obvious disadvantage of the presence of these two organizations in campaigns was that, because they came with a lot of money, they had the ability to push the candidates’ and their issues and agendas aside…to hijack the campaigns.

This was offset by the fact that because they were identifiable, a counter-attack could be mounted. If the candidate under assault from a named PAC or organization couldn’t find a member of the organization who would publicly defect from the position being taken, then the question of whether one should vote for someone who is likely to be a puppet for an organization, no matter how worthy, could be raised.

What we didn’t anticipate was the major role that the anonymous organizations would play in political campaigns. We know who these organizations like or dislike. What we don’t know is who they are or where they get their money.

A line from Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid is appropriate: Who are these guys?

We know they are not Bill Christofferson whose name is associated with The Greater Wisconsin Committee or R.J. Johnson of The Club For Growth, to take two prominent examples.

Next to a flawed opponent, a campaign manager’s greatest wish is to have an enemy who can be built into a straw man.

The candidates themselves reveal the names of their supporters and contributors. This kind of endorsement is considered a plus. To a lesser extent, and somewhat less enthusiastically and more implicitly, so do the manufacturers and the teachers and the realtors and the trial lawyers.

They are, in a way, fair game.

The new 800-pound gorillas have apple pie and motherhood names and lots of money but are otherwise invisible.

This seems to me to go beyond being undesirable to being unfair as well.

There are a lot of reasons I wish that Leon Epstein was still with us. The opportunity to ask him if this extension of the PAC phenomenon troubles him as much as it troubles me is one of them.

I think it would.