Wisconsin Political Fix

TV or not TV

2012-02-21T10:14:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

As we lurch into another multiple election season--there will be at least 4, maybe 5 in Wisconsin this year--one thing is sure. We will be bombarded by TV commercials extolling the virtues and deploring the sins of the several candidates for the several offices in play.

There will be personal contacts, there will be radio commercials, there will be direct mail, there will be phone calls, some by live human beings, there will be billboards, there may even be a few newspaper ads, but TV will be the main medium of information and persuasion.

How did it come to this?

Gradually.

I have been a witness to, a victim of, even a perpetrator in the whole TV era and saga.

My first campaign experience was in 1952, the year that television became a presence everywhere in Wisconsin.

TV was a minor player in political campaigns then. Most of us who were involved in campaigns didn’t really know what to do with it. TV was for selling soap. It was not appropriate for something as important as politics. The candidates shied away from using it aggressively. Most TV ads put the candidate, the candidate’s family, the candidate’s pets on a couch in their living room. The candidate then spoke about the importance of voting. This ran on TV on the Sunday night before the Tuesday election. It was usually scheduled after the late local news.

Sometime in the next several years a man named George Henman, who was an adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, convinced political operatives everywhere that TV was not demeaning, that they should not think of their candidates as tubes of toothpaste but as Buicks.

TV became a campaign staple in the '60s. Mostly it was more an animated brochure about the candidates, very positive, a moving colorful resume if you will. Cinema verite was popular during this period until everybody figured out it was more cinema than verite.

What brought TV to the top of the media steeple was the presidential campaign of 1964 when Doyle, Dane, and Bernbach, a creative NY ad agency, made a series of ads for Lyndon Johnson to use against poor, outgunned, not-ready-for-prime-time Barry Goldwater. These ads suggested that Barry would drop the atomic bomb, wanted to cut the whole northeastern U.S. adrift into the Atlantic Ocean, and had social security on his hit list.

That campaign, those ads, that overwhelming Johnson election victory propelled TV ads to the top of the political media list for every campaign where buying this expensive message delivery system was not absurd for geographical reasons. Within a few years, newspaper ads, which had been the mainstay of political campaigns, were pushed aside. Too long, too expository, not emotional enough, and the mantra became: spend everything on TV, and if you have anything left over, spend that on TV too.

In one respect 2012 is our best hope that because of the length and number of campaigns, of wretched excess of exposure, of message overkill and of over simplification instead of amplification, a browbeaten voting public might just turn it off.

Enough, already? It could happen. Certainly there is going to come a day when TV ads don't work in elections.

2012?

Please.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Post-regulation

2012-02-12T16:33:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

The first time I realized there were activities that were beyond regulation was when the songwriters tried to stop the development of technology that would make it possible for listeners to tape songs off the radio for their own private purposes. It couldn’t be done.

More recently this same issue has come up vis a vis the also universal and uncontrollable internet. This isn’t settled yet, but it is pretty clear that technology has probably put the things that can be done on the internet beyond regulation as well.

Is the flow of money into political campaigns in the same category?

Could be.

Some 20 years ago Tim Cullen testified before a Legislative Council committee headed by Senator Dave Helbach and Representative Peter Bock that was trying to contain political fundraising and spending otherwise known as Campaign Finance Reform.

Tim used the analogy of a balloon. “There is a certain amount of money that is going to flow into political campaigns,” he said. “If you visualize it as being contained in a balloon, what regulation can attempt is to squeeze one end of the balloon down. What will happen is the money in the balloon will pop up elsewhere.”

Is money coming into politics truly beyond regulation?

I am beginning to think it is.

With the balloon analogy aided and abetted by a long series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions knocking down any and all attempts to channel and contain political contributions, the free market free-for-all has reached ever new highs every campaign season.

If the premise is correct, the fact that the incumbent officeholders who could impose whatever regulations are still possible have little or no interest in doing so is almost irrelevant.

The problem goes deeper than that.

So what’s to be done?

How about nothing?

Is it time to surrender to reality and quit trying to regulate who can give to whom how much and when?

How about a true free market where the already unregulated outsiders are joined by the candidates themselves in a world free of regulation?

The goody two shoes reformers like me will object. The legislative leaders who have inherited the power that attends the ability to raise and channel money will not be happy. The organizations who collect and bundle money from their members and donors and use it to run parallel campaigns for candidates they like or against those they don’t or who make donations that are dependent on the docility of candidates on the interests they are promoting or opposing may lose their ability to hijack campaigns.

The law of unintended consequences will come heavily into play in a free-market system, but that’s nothing new.

Who would have thought a casino mogul would single-handedly keep a presidential candidacy alive or that taking or not taking a pledge in Wisconsin would determine who could entertain a candidacy in a recall election?

All these and other untoward, unanticipated developments prove is that the present half-slave, half-free system is not working.

Would a free-market election system be so revealing of the role of special interests and money and so egregiously corrupting that the voters, who are the only people who can fix anything they don’t like, would start voting against money instead of for the bought and paid-for candidates who have the most and the best commercials?

Anything is possible.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Cures for toxicity

2012-02-06T07:28:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

A longtime supporter suggested to a legislator that his ambition for higher office could be advanced if the legislator joined forces with a Republican who shares his views on the legislator’s favorite issue and has offered to join the effort to help do great things for Wisconsin.

“Remember who your friends are," the legislator replied to his now-former supporter.

A politically active Democrat whose day job would be advanced if the Legislature acted on a significant and difficult bill was advised to lay low on political activity until the bill is passed.

The watering holes where legislators of all persuasions, administrators, and even reporters once spent their “off the record” off hours together are gone, strictly segregated along political lines, or too toxic for one side or the other to consider patronizing.

A major health institution which is putting together a plan to increase health care coverage and reduce health care costs was told that the enabling legislation for this worthy idea would have a better chance getting through what has become the Capitol war zone if the institution and its members reduced their political profile and activity.

Speaking of war zones, one legislator says he will not feel safe in the hallowed halls of the state Assembly unless armed. Surely this is an isolated view. Or not.

Is it any wonder that as the level of contentiousness rises the sane and sensible citizens who are alleged to be the object of the affections of their representatives are disgusted, which is bad, and being advised to absent themselves from the public arena, which is worse?

Representative government is increasingly a closed shop and in a shambles.

Is there no hope for assembling representatives of diverse views from different places who think they are elected to make this a better place for all of us and are willing to work together through their inevitable differences to deliver what the people want: a government that works?

Only if they get out of their trenches, fox holes and silos. Only if they give themselves a chance to get to know one another so they can discover that in many ways, despite their differences, they are more alike than different.

Not until it is possible to disagree without being disagreeable, where it is possible to dislike ideas without despising the people who have them.

There are three things going on which seem to me to have de-toxifying potential.

The first is memorial services. This is a somewhat morbid way to bring people together; also unpredictable; also unwelcome. It is evident though that when a politician passes and the survivors and successors come together to praise and mourn the dear departed that they mingle and even enjoy each other’s company. There is hope. Maybe they don’t hate each other full time after all.

Another less maudlin movement is an embryonic attempt to resuscitate something known as the Special Edition dinner where all the denizens of the public sector gathered to honor one of their own for succeeding in the arena they all occupy. Food and drink and fun were reliable ice breakers before and may be again.

A more notable, successful, and long running de-toxifier is headed by two remarkable women who run a series of seminars where the warring incumbents can come together with professionals and experts to dissect and discuss objective, quality research on the subjects on the public agenda. The objective, which is routinely met, is to get to the facts and away from the ideologies in search of the common ground from which solutions spring.

The question is can we get together before toxicity pulls us ever further apart?

Only if we start with mutual respect and civility and keep all eyes on the problem not the process or the people advancing the solutions.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

The costs of redistricting

2012-02-05T08:39:00.001-08:00

By Bill Kraus

Everybody knows what big money is doing to political campaigns, candidates, and politics itself. Most people don’t seem to like it. But five of the big nine on the Supreme Court do, and no one else counts.

Everyone also knows and dislikes the reconfirmation of the McLuhan premise that the medium is the message and that the campaign medium is TV commercials. Quick, simple/simplistic, pervasive. Most people don’t like this either, except, of course, the TV station owners and the producers and purveyors of commercials whose livelihood is dependent on or greatly enhanced by this phenomenon.

There is little or nothing that can be done about the flood of money masquerading as free speech or the popularity and power of TV as a medium.

There is another democracy destroying phenomenon, however, that is working below the radar of public notice that is doing as much or even more to diminish our democracy and the people we elect to run it.

It’s called redistricting. Redistricting determines which voters will get to vote for which candidates.

The rules are that each district will have the same number of voters, racial minorities will be given a chance at representation, the physical districts will be compact, and something called community of interest, which is vaguely defined, will be respected.

Competitiveness, if any, is not a criterion. If it happens, it will be inadvertently.

The hidden criterion is non-competitiveness. Given the high cost of campaigning and the fact that the burden of raising the necessary money needed to compete has fallen on the legislative leaders who have the blue chips in this mostly white chip game, non-competitiveness is more than a criterion. It’s an objective.

When one party controls the legislature and the executive office, that party will create as many safe seats for their candidates as the courts (who are charged with enforcing the aforementioned rules) will allow.

When power is split within the legislature, collusion raises its ugly head. Party leaders scratch each others' backs in pursuit of safe seats for both. This has been most visible at the congressional level in Wisconsin. After the 2000 census, the 1st and 2nd districts, which had been competitive, were rearranged in ways to make one safer for a Democrat and the other for a Republican. After the 2010 census, collusion led to a 3rd district which was more Democratic and the neighboring 7th district which became more friendly for the Republicans.

This is a diverse country, but we do tend to cluster. Ethnically, economically, racially, and politically. This makes reducing the number of districts which are truly competitive possible. In a few areas it is inevitable. But should it be an objective? I don’t think so.

The consequence of conceding or advancing party preferences is that we are elevating the importance of primary elections and making more general elections irrelevant. Fewer people vote in primaries, and those who do vote are usually more partisan and predictable. The less committed, less rabid voters tend to wait till November. This is too late in too many places. The November results are more and more a foregone conclusion in legislative races.

Redistricting in the hands of the incumbents has filled a lot of safe seats with too many unambitious ideologues who are interested less in governing than in staying in office.

This diminishes an honorable trade which attracts superior people into the Congress and legislatures we have come to love to hate.

The route back to putting problems not political advantage on the top of the priority lists of those elected to represent us starts with competitive general elections.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Up in the air

2012-01-24T10:20:00.000-08:00

Something immense has happened on Wisconsin's political landscape, but what it is at this point is mostly unknown.

By Bill Kraus

The immediate reaction to the collection of over 1 million signatures on recall petitions is: WOW.

There have been no elections. But there will be one big one for governor and five for lesser offices.

The outcomes are not predictable. The challengers to the recallable incumbents aren’t even decided. But something significant is afoot.

If politics is still lists, and the role of money and TV messages it buys to the contrary notwithstanding it stll is, the Democrats have 30,000 qualified activists and the names and addresses--and to a considerable extent the ever-important e-mail addresses--of more than a million voters who are somewhere between sympathetic and enthusiastic about Democrats’ ideas, issues and representatives.

This is an enormous head start on the recall campaigns on the horizon.

Properly nurtured, these are foot soldiers in the battles for majorities for years to come in terms of recruiting candidates, raising money, mounting campaigns and governing.

There are lots of balls still in the air, but this one has landed with a resounding thud.

Among the balls that are still up in the air:

1. Will the Republicans concede that there are going to be recall elections and take a pass on challenging signatures or do they figure they need the time a delay would give them to let their “good works” sink in or to figure out where and how to get there own million?

2. Will an iconic Democrat enter the race now that they have seen the jump start the 30,000 petitioners have provided for them or will the field be the able and willing announced and about to announce (Kathleen Falk and Tim Cullen) and whoever else decides this is too good a shot to pass up? This will make a primary at least inevitable and probably desirable...if...

3....the Democrats take heed of the destructive ad hominen antics of the Republican presidential candidates and the possible damage to his chances that primary is doing to the survivor if any.

4. Will the labor leaders whose dismemberment set off this unlikely, unprecedented, unwieldy chain of events take a low enough profile so the recall campaign is not a referendum on who has been the most egregious abuser of power---the public unions when they had it or the majority Republicans now that they have it?

5. Will the voters suffer total exhaustion due to election fatigue and, if so, how could this affect the several outcomes of the slew of elections on the near term horizon? At this writing Wisconsin is looking at the prospect of 6 elections in the next 9 months.

6. Will, when this is all over, the combatants come to their senses and take a pass on the use of recalls to protest misguided (subjective) votes and procedures instead of high crimes and misdemeanors as reasons for impeachments and recalls, and revert to the more traditional representative government remedy for incumbents’ bad policies and votes--the next election?

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Six degrees of ruination

2012-01-17T14:02:00.000-08:00

While almost everyone thinks our current political system is corrupt, there are still too many influential people who like it that way.

By Bill Kraus

In a recent Kathleen Dunn show on Wisconsin Public Radio, her two guests made a lively, lucid presentation on the two pretty much mutually exclusive “ideal” campaign financing proposals that are competing (unfairly, as will soon be obvious) for the hearts and minds of a somnolent public.

The primary objective of the position espoused by spokesman for the bevy of “reform” organizations at state and national levels is direct or indirect public financing so that the money needed to pay for increasingly expensive media driven campaigns will come from subsidized small donors or the government directly. Doable. The secondary goal is to expose and, to the limited extent possible, regulate and suppress the participation of non candidates and organizations in the election itself. Harder.

The market position is a no holds, no spending limits, unregulated free-for-all in which anyone and everyone, including the candidates themselves, can contribute and spend without disclosing where the money for campaigns and campaign advertising comes from.

Neither of the guests had a kind word for the current patchwork design where (1) candidates, parties, and other “official” participants must reveal money sources and where contribution limits are imposed on those money sources and (2) outside organizations and people and self-funding candidates themselves are pretty much unrestrained in how much they collect and spend and what or who they spend it on.

The proponents of the regulated idea are:

1. The voters who say they are tired of all the commercials, the nonstop campaigns, and are also beginning to wonder who their representatives are really representing.

2. Editorial page editors and writers who view the excessive spending their news editors are featuring with distaste and alarm.

3. All those reform organizations and their members and contributors.

The proponents of the market position are:

1. Donors to political campaigns, causes, candidates and businesses who are buying favor or being extorted by those whose favor they (or the lobbyists advising them) seek.

2. Unions whose ardor for free market participation has dwindled as their funding system has come under attack, but who have traditionally wanted the freedom to raise and spend campaign money without inhibitions.

3. Politicians themselves. Republicans ideologically, Democrats more advantageously, both fearful of offending their friends with money.

4. Courts whose judges protect freedom of speech, especially the Supreme Court Professionals who are paid to run these expensive campaigns.

5. TV station owners who need the money the professionals spend on media.

6. All kinds of organizations with causes and money, from social to economic to self-aggrandizing, who want to influence voters to favor candidates who favor these causes.

The streets are filling up with protesters who have little in common except the belief that they are being ignored by the people who were elected to represent them.

Meanwhile, proponents of term limits and part-time legislators hope that incumbents who can no longer make careers of public service or who have to support themselves with real jobs will be less rascally than the rascals they will replace.

Along with this rising tide of discontent are polls showing single-digit approval ratings for the Congress and for politics itself.

All of this leads one to hope that people are beginning to wonder whether the system is broken, whether representative government itself is at risk.

The question is whether anyone who is running for office has the same kind of misgivings.

The road to change will go through the candidates who will be elected this year. So far none of them are even talking about any of the ideas the participants in the Kathleen Dunn show talked about.

Isn’t it time to put the concerns about the future of representative government and the way we elect our representatives on the short agenda?

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

True believers ascendant

2012-01-08T09:01:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

I have a lot of trouble with true believers...I have always had a lot of trouble with true believers. The main reason is that they think they can simplify the truly complicated and contentious into a slogan.

This tendency would be correctable if they listened, but they don’t.

The true believers on the right are fundamentally anarchists who think the market and its free enterprise operatives have the solution to all things large and small. Those on the left believe the public sector in general the government in particular is father-knows-best and can solve all things large and small.

Both are wrong.

The recently marginalized occupants of what we call “the middle” are less sure of anything than the true believers are of everything, which may or may not be a virtue, and know that there are no simple solutions to most of the things that confront us as individuals and collectively.

The anarchists pause when it is pointed out that half of most cities’ budgets go for fire and police protection. A full laundry list of vital public functions might weaken their commitment to “the marketplace.” The “we know what’s best for you” socially sensitives twitch when confronted with the long series of failed wars on poverty and other flights of fancy in search of easy solutions to intractable problems.

It seems to me that the free market has to be restrained. It will always go too far.

The guilt-ridden socially conscious will sacrifice initiative and creativity, even personal liberties to create their edenic version of what life on this planet could be if all were indeed created equal.

The maligned moderates in the middle want the benefits offered by a free society. They also realize the less able and less fortunate will always be with us and cannot simply be thrown off the bus.

My kind of Republicans think that the public sector has a legitimate role to play in society but it should not be the lead role. My kind of Democrats know that the government is good at welfare, infrastructure and public education, but will flounder in the high risk, high failure rate markets where society does its business.

They will probably never come fully to terms about what is the best way or even that there is a best way.

There are differences between them that moderates of both persuasions understand are probably irreconcilable. The Republicans I respect are confounded by people who pass up opportunities and unsympathetic to those whose lives are unfulfilled because they did pass them up. The Democrats I respect think it’s their fault that people pass up opportunities, that some people need more help, easier routes to a good--okay, acceptable--life.

A longtime friend of mine who served honorably in the highest reaches of our federal government gave a graduation speech years ago where he did not offer solutions to the problems in the world they were entering. Instead he told his audience that life is coping and groping. He was right. He still is right.

It is unlikely that any true believer on the right or the left agrees.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Three wishes (and some other stuff)

2012-01-02T07:15:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

Resolutions are unlimited, nice, personal, breakable. Wishes are bigger, better, limited (like a political agenda; no more than three) and are so hard to achieve that breakability is superfluous.

When I asked for nominations, I excluded personalities. Recall Walker or Re-elect Obama and the like were edited out.

The three that survived are headed by, no surprise here, a wish that someone, anyone running for public office would talk about the fact that our representative government is at risk, endangered. Everyone I talk to loves the reform agenda: less gerrymandering, shorter election cycles, an even playing field, less spending. Unfortunately, nobody loves the agenda passionately. A “Save Representative Government” rally would not draw flies.

It does, nonetheless, need saving. It has plenty of enemies. The U.S. Supreme Court among them. The money drive election process is wretchedly unbalanced. Candidates must follow strict rules on how much money they can collect and from whom and must report in great detail the sources of that money. Candidates are routinely outspent by outside organizations that do not have to reveal the sources of their money and are spared the candidates’ burden of declaring who they are or that they approve the message being delivered.

Under the rules of the free speech free market Supreme Court, the most that can be done to level the playing field is to make those outside organizations reveal where they get their money and do a candidate-style declaration as well.

Nobody is talking about that.

The other threat to representative government is self-serving districting of legislative seats to make as many of them safe for one party or the other. This is done to save money, of course, and to perpetuate incumbents as well. The deleterious outcome diminishes general elections and makes primary elections the main battlefield for individual candidates. Party outcomes are predetermined.

Nobody is talking about that either.

Wish number two is widespread adoption of the Ed Koch (former mayor of New York City) rule that “If you agree with me on 9 of 12 subjects, you should vote for me. If you agree with me on all 12, you should see a psychiatrist.” Too many voters are reduced to one issue: taxes, debt, guns, gays, privacy, crime, even jobs. Candidates believe that voters’ political consciousness is severely limited. So campaigns tend to simplify to this narrow view of the world where decisions are more black and white, good and evil. As the endangered political system drives choices down to the primary election level where the true believers are disproportionately powerful, candidates are increasingly judged on litmus tests on what I consider marginal issues. Competence to deal with difficult situations and interests where the decisions are more like 51-49 one way or the other is not even graded.

I would like to clutter this blog post with wishes about our crippled public communication system, about the way the fear factor is squeezing individual freedoms, about combatant civility, about the rise of politics as hockey, about the empty talent pipelines for all offices, about a lot of quibbles, but the rule is no more than three wishes.

My third, then, is to stop treating education and educators and the education system as a cookie jar and start living up to the rhetoric that the future of the country is connected to the success of the education system and the educators' ability to deliver preparation commensurate to an increasingly complicated, definitely more cerebral world of work and life.

The industrial revolution made workers into machines. The educators responded to this revolution. The technological revolution is making machines into workers. A very high priority should be preparing people for that world. Putting resources against that monumental task is going to require money, ideas, a redesigned workplace, an inspired education system staffed by inspired educators, even a redesigned society.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

What 'government-by-recall' begets

2011-12-26T10:10:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

The recall frenzy is either a grassroots reaction to an abuse of power by a radical group or it is an unjustified expansion of what the recall provision of the Constitution intended to be a response to personal perfidy into policy disagreement.

If the latter, it is a dangerous departure from the design of our system into something approaching those parliamentary democracies where governments are overturned on bad or unpopular decisions not bad behavior.

Our response to bad decisions has been to throw the rascals out at the next election. The expanded recall definition/option throws them out immediately.

Justified or not, this clearly changes the way we do business in this country. Elections here are for stated terms. In the parliamentary system, elections are mostly indeterminate in length. Usually, new elections are called when those in power wear out their welcome or don’t produce the expected results. They could also be a response to abuses of power or other mis- or malfeasance.

So the decision to recall has much less to do with Governor Walker and the lemmings who came to office on the tsunami of 2010 than with whether we want our elected representatives to be more immediately responsive to a kind of non-stop popularity rating and reacting.

We are getting lots of indications from the tea partiers and the occupiers that there is something amiss in the current system. Even the less noisy among us must wonder from time to time just who our representatives are representing since they surely do not seem to be representing us.

Do we want them on a shorter leash?

Are we sure who will be on the other end of that leash?

The way elections are decided these days it is a pretty sure thing that interest groups with causes and lots of money are not going to be disenfranchised in a recall world.

Other moves in other places to make politics more populous-driven where initiative and referendum laws permit direct intervention in the legislative process do not seem to have been as people-centered as predicted. As a former governor of Wisconsin once said, “The golden rule of politics is that them with the gold make the rules.”

I am less convinced than others that money is the whole thing, but it is certainly a very big part of what our politics has become.

Putting that aside for the nonce, an even stronger argument against government-by-recall is that it will surely dull daring and creativity which are always in short supply.

We have learned that elections have consequences. Recall elections do too. Including having long tails. Do we really want them as a routine part of the governing system?

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

The incredible shrinking reform agenda

2011-12-18T07:06:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

Not too long ago there were high hopes that an inventive combination of spending limits on candidates accompanied by a dose of public money into campaigns and an offset feature that would have provided matching funds to protect candidates from campaign spending by hostile, outside forces would become law in Wisconsin.

This didn’t happen. The Republicans never liked the public money idea, the Supreme Court didn’t like what they regarded as suppression of free speech, the Obama campaign passed on public financing, and free marketers everywhere, including our own Democratic Governor Doyle, didn’t support this attempt to starve the campaign beast.

The reform movement shifted to what the Republicans had said and the Supreme Court did say was the best option: disclosure. The candidates wouldn’t get any money or any protection against hijacked campaigns, but at least they would know who their enemies were. The Republicans backed off when organizations like Right to Life, which had supported them with collateral campaigns, told them their money would dry up if their donors were revealed.

The Democrats did their own number on the idea. A disclosure bill passed the state Senate over the dead body of Democratic Majority Leader Russ Decker only to be trashed for reasons that were never disclosed by the Democratic Speaker of the Assembly Mike Sheridan.

This was followed by a cavalier and casual disposal of the attempt to insulate the Supreme Court from the two 'P's of partisanship and polarization by the incoming GOP irresistible horde.

The reform agenda was suddenly two items long: redistricting and recalls.

Redistricting, because it is done by the incumbent legislators, has been turned into an effort to create as many safe seats for the party in power as possible with trade offs as needed to the minority. Because people with similar likes and tastes in politics do tend to cluster, drawing legislative district lines so every voter has a choice between a viable candidate from both parties is not feasible. What turning the line drawing over to disinterested professionals would do is take the active attempt to make districts uncompetitive out of the criteria. A worthy idea with little or no incumbent support, which makes it typical of the way reform ideas are regarded historically.

Could this happen if it wasn’t immediate, if it went into effect after the 2010 census? Only if the people want it enough to make it a campaign issue--okay, topic---and the current majority realizes the other guys may be in power in 10 years so what the hell.

Recall mania if it maintains its current feverish pitch will lay the key feature of the parliamentary system on our representative system. The parliamentary system reacts to policy decisions by calling elections unpredictably and more or less frequently on the basis of what is perceived as bad or misguided policy. The representative system takes care of this in regularly scheduled elections. There is a recall option in our Constitution, but it has traditionally been reserved for misconduct by individual officeholders.

The argument is made that the current flurry does deal with misconduct not policy, and to some extent the rush to legislate in the wake of the 2010 election was at least unseemly and trod pretty roughly over niceties like hearings and secrecy. At it roots, however, the amazing reaction to the legislation rushed through by the Fitzwalker combine in early 2011 was mostly about policy.

What may or may not make the diminished reform agenda is the question of whether parliamentarizing a representative system is workable and desirable.

I don’t think so. It’s on my reform agenda.

And yours?

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

The moderate's dilemma

2011-12-12T08:03:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

Judging from the ideas being forwarded and the appeals being made by candidates today it is easy to conclude that the moderates are being marginalized at best, ignored at worst.

Candidates who had the problem of being attractive enough to win the primaries, where immoderates and immoderation are disproportionately represented, without poisoning the general election well don’t appear to be worried about that as much anymore.

Those who vote in primaries are no longer regarded as a stepping stone to the general election. They have become the main event.

This is not surprising at the legislative level, where partisan redistricting has made most general elections irrelevant. Statewide and even presidential candidates are behaving as if that is true in their elections as well.

Candidates who were trying to win nominations in primaries where “the base” and the once taken-for-granted yellow dogs (a yellow dog for the uninitiated is a Republican who would vote for a yellow dog before he would vote for a Democrat, and vice versa) had to be careful not to go so far off to the right or left that they couldn’t get back to the middle to win those crucial votes in the general election. They don’t seem to worry about that anymore.

The Republican moderates of an earlier time believed that the public sector had a legitimate role to play in society, but not the lead role. They liked frugality and competence and were mildly libertarian. They were regulation averse but not anarchistic. They were leery of flights of fancy like wars on poverty and they were wary not cavalier about using the military as instruments of policy.

As the battle for power shifted to the primaries, subtleties like these have given way to behavioral issues, polarization, partisanship, my way or no way, and the whole gestalt of the true believers who are more sure of everything than moderates tend to be of anything.

I happen to believe that the moderates are still there and in numbers significant enough to determine election results statewide, and in the few remaining congressional and state legislative districts that are not hard-wired for candidates of one party or the other.

These moderates are, in short, still worth catering to and worrying about. They are not wedded to conservative ideologies. They do not think that any one thing is the whole thing. They adhere to the Ed Koch rule: ”If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, you should vote for me. If you agree with me on all 12, you should see a psychiatrist.” They do not use litmus tests. They do not suffer fools or foolish ideas.

I still think that the biggest political risk is not offending the single-issue zealots or the rabid “base” voter. The biggest risk is chasing away the mild, moderate, more reasoned and reasonable voters in the middle who want nothing more complicated than a government that works and candidates who will use the powers of their offices to achieve that worthy end.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Representative democracy

2011-12-05T09:29:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

I know, I know. It isn’t perfect. It never was. There were always representatives who represented something other than the people who elected them. Like money. Or even something purely self serving.

With “advantage” redistricting doing maximum damage, there are more and more “representatives” who represent a segment or two of the electorate and markedly fewer representatives who believe that while they were undeniably elected by a percentage of the voters they represent everyone in the district they were elected to represent.

These untoward trends and developments are naturally exacerbated when the representatives of one party win majorities in both houses and control the executive office as well.

The question then is whether the two main ideas being used to offset these inherent flaws in this imperfect system are really improvements.

The first and most longstanding idea is something called “Initiative and Referendum.” It is on display in various incarnations in various places. It is running amok in California. The ballots are big city phone book size in that state to accommodate all the referendi that are seeking enactment outside of the representative system. “The people,” we are told, are active participants in the process.

If this is true, the people need a short course in consistency. In California, to cite only one of several aberrations, “the people” put a cap on spending on education while mandating smaller class sizes which inevitably require an increase of the education budget.

On closer examination it becomes obvious that this is not “the people” speaking after all. It is the anti-tax anarchists with their money and the education organizations with theirs. Both seem to have won. Unfortunately, California has lost. The best ads and the biggest spending prevail. And the winners are...TV stations and professional campaign organizations.

I concede that as I have pushed the Sisyphean rock of campaign reform up the legislative mountain over the non-dead bodies of recalcitrant Republicans and duplicitous Democrats I have wished for a route around them. I have concluded the initiative and referendum price is too high.

The other, more recent, movement comes out of the Wisconsin winter of our discontent protests of 2011. Its proponents say that government by recall is a way for “the people” to participate more fully in their democracy and also a way around the invincible, insular representatives who are representing their own interests (and the people who fund their campaigns) instead of the voters who elected them and the people they are elected to represent.

Recall number one failed in its objectives to a.) reclaim a majority in the state Senate for the Democrats and b.) punish those Democrats for decamping to Illinois to fully disrupt the process of representative government.

Recall number two is an expensive, time-consuming, distracting effort to remove the governor for his excesses in his use of the extraordinary powers that devolved on him and his office in the 2010 election.

There is a recall number three possibility afoot as well, which would target legislative miscreants of both parties for as yet unnamed sins of commission or omission.

The assertion is that all of this activity will improve representative government. I doubt it. What it will improve, of course, is the economic well being of the same TV stations and professional campaigners who are routinely enriched in California.

To misquote Winston Churchill, “Representative government is the worst possible system except for all those other systems.”

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Interesting Political Times

2011-12-04T08:51:00.000-08:00

By Cal Potter

One can surely say that we live in very interesting political times. Conservatives are already hard at work pinning all the political and economic problems and decisions of the last ten years on President Obama. Massive corporate dollars and many irresponsible talk show hosts and politicians are fueling a political atmosphere that defies fact and intellect, and has too many civic illiterate citizens buying this trash talking propaganda as the truth.

The basic facts being perverted are that if our nation still had the tax rates of the Clinton administration; had not been fighting, mostly through deficit spending, two multi-trillion dollar wars; and did not have the great recession brought to us by irresponsible Wall Street and major banking actions, this nation today would have no national debt at all - None. The political and financial community decision makers over the past ten years have given us a real economic mess, and a political climate wherein cooperation and compromise, needed if a divided and pluralistic society such as ours is to function in behalf of the citizenry, is impossible.

The voters are indeed fed-up as is reflected in the 9% positive rating given to Congress in recent national polling. One would think that Congress, faced with this unbelievable negative report card, would be falling all over themselves trying to regain some semblance of public support. Herein lies another facet of our interesting political times, the reliance for re-election on one issue voters, who when added together, can still give politicians victories in spite of over-all dismal performance ratings.

Conservatives can put aside addressing our pressing economic issues and focus on their hopeful defeat and false political character assassination of President Obama, because many voters vote guns, gays, abortion, no taxes, religion, or other such single issues. Politicians know that all they need to do is keep throwing various individual constituencies attention to their pet issue, and in the end add up the votes to be 51% victories or greater at the polls. Yes, this is a form of democracy, but not the good governmental operation needed and geared to solving the nation’s pressing economic, educational, health care, environmental, and infrastructure challenges.

Yes, we have 50 million people without health care coverage; 52 million people living in poverty; tens of millions unemployed or living on greatly reduced pay due to the loss of good paying manufacturing jobs, many relocated to the biggest Communist dictatorship the world has ever seen in China. American investment in Communist China has certainly helped fuel their growing economic prosperity, but has been reflected in the loss of millions of good paying American manufacturing jobs, along with the loss of worker health care benefits and retirement pensions. Is it any wonder why there are demonstrations on Wall Street and in other major cities over this nation’s problems, and the lack of action to rectify them.

As we approach another presidential election year, we need to recognize that this nation is split in its opinions, and commit to the idea that we should have a system that truly does address the needs of our citizens, know that compromise is needed, and that this will be the only way to truly have a functional government. We need a greater degree of actual understanding and knowledge of the problems we face, based on real facts, and not the venom spewed by some of the ratings seeking unqualified talk show hosts and many of the less than stellar candidates hoping to defeat the President next November.

Simply maligning Obamacare as something that needs to be repealed, without recognition or even caring that 50 million Americans without health insurance is a national disgrace and unfairly continues to cost all of us in the final analysis. Calling for the demise or drastic cuts in basic life lines such as Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid is totally irresponsible in what purports to be the richest nation in the world. The economic plight of millions of today’s Americans depends, now more than ever, on the need for the creation of financial soundness for these programs, not ridiculous attacks on their basic need or very existence.

If many in this nation continue to pursue simplistic answers to complex problems, do not recognize and work within the diverse nature of our national culture, and do not put aside political partisan selfishness and meanness, placing political interest not national first, we will be guaranteed more of the same dysfunctional operation we rightfully detest in today’s politics. And for a nation as great as ours, this would be a continued national tragedy. There is an old saying that in a democracy we ultimately get the government we deserve.

Calvin Potter is a member of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board and a former State Representative (1975-1991) and State Senator (1991-1998) from Sheboygan Falls.

What do you know?

2011-11-27T09:33:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

The Know Nothing movement of the mid-nineteenth century was a semi-secret political organization (an oxymoron?) which was dedicated to protecting the country from a takeover by German and Irish Catholic immigrants. The name resulted from their members’ keeping their association secret. When asked about the movement they, not unlike TV’s Sergeant Schultz, replied “I know nothing.”

The 21st century version of know nothingness is not a movement but a condition. It describes the citizens who have outsourced, abandoned, and ignored politics and politicians.

The result of this behavior has two deleterious effects. The first is the obvious one of letting the righteous righties who want governments to do nothing and the loony lefties who want them to do everything rise in influence. These are the “bases” to which the candidates must play to get nominated and elected. They used to be marginalized by the dominant moderate middle of both persuasions. No longer.

An even more insidious side effect is true know nothingness. People who don’t participate, even slightly, in electing our representatives who don’t know of or about the public sector lose more than influence.

They also lose perspective and a mild kind of wisdom. If they vote, they pretty much vote in the dark and support and reject ideas and people off a no-knowledge base.

The first time I realized something was awry here was when I got a call from a politically alert friend who was offended by his representative’s non-stop attacks on higher education in general and on the University of Wisconsin in particular. “What can I do about this?” he asked. “You can run an opposing candidate in the primary,” I replied. “I don’t know how to do that,” he said.

He was alert but unequipped. Not good.

Somewhat later I chatted with other very worldly, very well informed (I thought) citizens in other parts of the state. One of them had no idea who represented him in the state Senate or the state Assembly. Don’t laugh. Ask this question of some of your acquaintances sometime.

The other didn’t know he had been redistricted and was no longer represented in the Congress by someone who he had voted for for years.

If they don’t know this, what do they know?

Do they know what their government can and can’t, should and shouldn’t do?

What are they looking for or at when they make a voting decision, if, indeed, they bother to vote at all?

Does this kind of know nothingness make them foils for the professionals who do know something and who categorize them by wedges and appeal to them on one or two hot button issues--guns, marriage rights, fear of crime--to get their vote for a candidate who may or may not be a worthy representative on the full range of public sector responsibilities?

I have on my wall a picture that was taken behind the high school in Stevens Point on a cold, fall Saturday in late October in the 1960s. The 40 or 50 people pictured had gathered to pick up campaign literature which they would deliver throughout the city urging their neighbors to consider the Republican candidates described in the literature. If you are looking for a daunting political task, this venture in futility will fill the bill.

The members of this group included the chairman of a large insurance company, the president of a bank, the manager of a paper mill, a county judge, a physician, a dentist, retailers, housewives, teenagers, clerks, executives, union members, teachers. Everybody.

This may have been the only political act in which many of them participated. But they read the literature. They knew why they were there. They knew the candidates. They knew what the candidates were for and against. The knew something. They were not know nothings. Nor were they single-issue zealots.

Until and unless they come back, our representative form of government will be polarized, partisanized, endangered. Sending money, delegating and outsourcing to others is not enough. Scorning politics and politicians is not helpful. Nor is whining.

We all need to have a hand in and on the public sector. The system depends on us.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Change in a time of beholdenism

2011-11-22T11:48:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

As the occupiers, recallers, and other malcontents are about to learn, the mostly invincible incumbents who occupy our legislatures are largely deaf, dumb, and blind to their supplications.

As a veteran of multiple failed attempts to alter the electoral status quo, I feel equipped to offer several warnings and a little helpful advice.

The first warning is that enormous power has devolved on legislative leaders. The political parties, since they lost the power to recruit, slate, fund and manage campaigns, are noisy paper tigers. The tea party types and possibly the occupiers (if they get serious about acquiring power) could do some of this, but for the most part the legislative leaders are filling the pipeline. Are they filling it with rambunctious, aggressive, creative talents? They are not. They want lemmings. Empty suits. Followers. To a very large extent they seem to have gotten what they want in our state.

This means that anyone who wants something the legislative leaders do not want has his or her work cut out for him or her.

The legislative leaders think they know where they got their power and are not going to do anything to annoy those to whom they are beholden for their power and prestige. The legislative leaders reject changes that remove some of the threats to their well-being more or less routinely. They know how they got where they are and will rebuff any ideas that threaten their routes to power.

They are beholden to the status quo generally. More specifically they are beholden to anyone or any organization that is or are organized to deliver money to their campaigns and campaign organizations or that threaten their incumbencies in other ways.

Examples of the latter are organizations like the NRA (the National Rifle Association) and AARP (the American Association of Retired Persons). For reasons that befuddle me, these organizations, which do not contribute money or associate with either political party, almost always get their way. I concede that the golden oldies are not as formidable as they were once, but the NRA rules everywhere but in Illinois of all places.

Money suppliers are revered, respected and protected, which is understandable in a money-driven political system. This seems to be inevitable. It is not always reprehensible.

Where money goes astray is when it is connected to ideology. The most egregious are the single-issue organizations that want their contributions to be unfettered and anonymous.

One of the electoral reform ideas that everyone once respected and even urged, and that an otherwise deaf, dumb, and blind U.S. Supreme Court has approved and even recommended, is the disclosure of the names of contributors to organizations that participate alongside candidates’ campaigns in supporting or opposing candidacies.

It is no secret that the Wisconsin Right to Life organization has told its supporters on both sides of the aisle that disclosure of contributors would dry up the organization’s funding. Is that why a Democratic Assembly Speaker trashed a disclosure bill and why a Republican Assembly Speaker has said he will refuse to consider one? I’ll listen to a better reason if anyone has one.

Since secret contributors fund organizations on the anarchistic right and the socialistic left which interfere with and hijack campaigns without compunction, one would think that the candidates in those campaigns would want to know who their real enemies (the contributors) are so they could mount specific counterattacks. One would be wrong.

Money is golden. Secret money is whatever is more precious than gold.

The malcontents are about to learn that unless they or their goals come to the battle armed with large amounts of money, or their followers are disciplined, predictable lock step voters who can be relied on to turn out on election day, they are going to get what those of us who have been trying to clean up and reform campaign spending for years have received.

It’s called the brush-off.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Representative democracy and its mutation

2011-11-14T13:47:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

The idea was that the people would elect people to represent them and their interests. Those they elected would become more expert at the job of governing and would lead where leadership was needed never losing sight of their followers.

If they tried to lead where their followers didn’t want to go or if they were defective in other ways, their constituents would lead them. To the door. At the next election.

For many reasons this simple idea has been complicated and corrupted.

The forces, events, whatever, that have warped what the founding fathers wrought and envisioned, in no particular order of importance or sequence, include:

Mass media. Person-to-person, face-to-face campaigning was replaced by third-party communications and contacts as the country got bigger and the peoples’ connection to their representatives frayed.

Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message. At one point in time not so long ago, the people were the medium. I have on my wall a picture of a fully representative gathering of the citizens of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, who had assembled to pick up campaign literature which they in turn would take to their fellow citizens on a cold October Saturday. The message they were delivering was in the literature, but the fact that they were doing the delivering was an important part of the message.

Mass media was in play in the form of advertising, of course, but advertising did not become dominant until television became an important part of our lives and money a more important part of campaigns and campaigning.

Outsourcing. As campaigns professionalized and the medium depersonalized, campaigning evolved into a kind of arm’s-length, third-person, segmented-appeals operation.

The people didn’t gather anymore. They sent their money. Endorsements were still important as long as the endorsers were important, but the heart of campaign activity was professional marketers and the money to advance candidacies through the media.

As the people backed off the money to fund these longer, more expensive campaigns flowed in, and as candidates became convinced that money was crucial to success a new and ugly kind of beholdenism appeared.

The idea that candidates were being bought, or at least rented, became widespread. The people began to suspect that their representatives were representing them less and the people with the money that was fueling campaigns more.

The visible reaction to this suspicion is that iconic political leaders with big followings of enthusiasts are dwindling, and most politicians have favorable ratings below 50 percent.

The active reaction has been a turn to several anti-representative government ideas. Initiative and referendum, with all its flaws, is rising in popularity. Recalls of candidates or of specific pieces of legislation are gaining traction as well. The politics of the street--protesting--is no longer an occasional and small part of the game.

Even the free speech worshipping Supreme Court has taken judicial notice of this phenomenon by urging legislators to reveal the specific sources of the money that the people think is buying their representatives’ votes.

Wisconsin legislators are displaying the indifference, which is the occupational disease of fanaticism, by ignoring this supplication. A prior Speaker of our Assembly trashed a disclosure bill which the state Senate had narrowly and reluctantly passed. His successor has told his caucus that there will be no disclosure legislation coming out of his Legislature.

Their unstated but obvious reason for this legislative deafness is a fear that disclosure of donors would shut down the money flow needed to keep the incumbents in power.

Will the people who now suspect that they are not really the object of their representatives’ affection react by voting for disclosure and against tainted money and move more aggressively in other not always admirable ways to get their representative democracy back?

It’s there for the taking.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Supreme disappointment

2011-11-06T17:44:00.000-08:00

By Bill Kraus

What the responses to my last blog post about de-partisanizing redistricting reminded me of is how far below the radar this whole subject is.

This is not what you would call a high-profile item. A good half of the people who contacted me or who didn’t respond to my contact urging them to join a movement to turn the every decade legislative district map-making over to people who don’t have a dog in the fight seemed wary of my motives.

What had been made clear is that the present system puts competitiveness into the criteria mix. Negatively. As long as the map-making is in the hands of the legislators who occupy these districts, they will favor making fewer districts and the elections for those districts less competitive. So far so good.

The next assumption among the doubters was that the Iowa system, which I admire, tries to make more districts and elections more competitive. This may or may not be the result of disinterested redistricting, but it is not the objective of it. The genius of the Iowa system is that it simply takes competitiveness out of the list of criteria.

The criteria that remain and which I like are:

1. Where counties or major municipalities have the population to be about one Assembly seat or two or three or more, districts should be drawn within those bounds to yield that number.

2. No counties or municipalities should be divided among districts unless that is necessary to assure approximately one person one vote. And then the districts should be defensible, have natural boundaries like rivers or city thoroughfares or media markets, other political boundaries like school districts, or ethnic conclaves.

3. No wards should be cut.

4. Districts should be as compact as possible. No long fingers or squiggles. Square is a good shape.

5. Population equality is a goal not an absolute. Over the course of the 10 years these districts are in effect a lot of population shifts are going to happen. So getting close to population is good, getting too perfect is probably impossible and not necessary.

6. If within these rules, incumbents can be placed in one district and putting two incumbents into one district can be avoided, that’s okay. Contorting districts to make sure there are no incumbent vs. incumbent contests isn’t justifiable.

No red and blue criteria are recommended.

The idea is to make defensible, almost-population-equal districts and let the voting chips fall where they may.

It seems to me that maps drawn by a dispassionate public agency which has a few geography majors on staff can do this without setting off an epidemic of paranoia: the incumbents’ occupational disease.

And, if what they come up with is at or near what has happened in Iowa, for example, the incumbents will vote for it overwhelmingly, there will be fewer gerrymanders, and more voters votes will count right through the November elections.

How scary is that?

The opportunity to put this idea on everybody’s short agenda at this moment in time and space arrives because there are going to be eight or nine elections in a wholly unanticipated summer season this year. It is my hope that everyone who runs in these elections will be asked to support this un-radical, unthreatening, voter-power enhancing idea.

I would think that none of them would say no thanks, that they prefer gerrymandering.

This is the last chance to make this good thing happen until 2021.

Let’s do it.

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Reasons to run

2011-10-30T18:04:00.000-07:00

By Bill Kraus

Where have all the candidates gone?

Actually, maybe the question should be, “Where have all the traditional candidates--or the candidates from traditional places--gone?"

There used to be a lot of lawyers in the state Legislature. Running for office was a way to meet people, get known, and for those who didn’t have a warm enough fire in the belly to want to seek higher and higher office, it was a way to start a law practice.

No more. The new graduates need to make money fast to pay off the debts those degrees burdened them with.

Another steady source of legislative candidates was county boards and city councils. Except for Milwaukee where candidates did just the opposite. They ran for the Legislature as a stepping stone to the city council or the county board where the pay was better, the hours shorter, and the travel nonexistent.

Legacy candidates weren’t endemic, but there were sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, wives and widows in the mix too.

Farmers always were well represented as well. Most legislative work was done in the winter. Farming was not. Good fit.

The power seekers, the politically ambitious, saw the state Legislature as a stepping stone and a training ground for every political office up to and including the presidency. It also offered a kind of side door entry into the judiciary at every level.

Every incarnation of every state legislature had what the late, great Lowell Jackson called the sleaze caucus. The small minority who were in it for the money, to become members of the knife and fork club for free food and drink, or to advance a special cause or enterprise. I remember a state representative from the 1960s who went to the trouble to get elected so he could get the Madison campus to accept English course credits earned by students elsewhere in the state system.

Today’s version of this group is less material, more ideological, but like those who preceded them, their interest in the business of governing is not high. Their causes are more toxic than credit transfers, and their contribution to the general welfare is no place on their priority lists.

They gave the place a bad name, but, until recently, had no real influence on the business at hand.

Without rendering any qualitative judgments it is noticeable that the pipelines for the upwardly mobile are a lot emptier than they used to be, and there are more careerists in the capitol than there used to be as well. An empty governor’s seat attracted no candidates from the state Legislature in 2010, which is odd, and an increasing number of state legislators seem to have settled in for the long run. It’s a job.

Another factor that affects both the numbers and characters of state legislative candidates is the wrenching changes in the electoral process.

The parties that were the main recruiters, slaters, funders, and campaign managers are none of the above.

The special interests are certainly a factor in the financing of campaigns which, in turn, brings a kind of beholdenism into the process especially in those few races where candidates from both parties have any kind of a chance of winning.

And in the more prevalent safe districts the fine Italian hands of the legislative leaders and their handmaidens are clearly in play. What legislative leaders want is followers. There seem to be a lot more followers than there were. The rebellious maverick population is way down these days.

The money needs are higher in the unsafe districts, and the public abuse by the know nothings and the anarchists has not abated, which has always been a barrier to widespread entry into what I always considered an honorable trade.

All of these changes are pretty obvious. Whether they are more good than bad or vice versa depends on how each of us rates the talent level of those we are putting in power. Is this honorable, crucially important trade attracting superior people? This is the most important question to ask in an age of endemic outsourcing.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Health history

2011-10-23T18:07:00.000-07:00

By Bill Kraus

When Frances Perkins came to Washington as Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, she brought along a “to do” list. All of the programs that became the New Deal were on the list. Almost all of them were enacted. Most survived the displeasure of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Health care reform was on the list. The more urgent, Depression-driven items had a higher priority. By the time health care got to the top, it was pushed aside by the demands of World War II as were most social issues and a lot of other stuff as well.

When the war ended the new labor government in England put health care at the top of the priority list and passed what was called socialized medicine for that country.

Meanwhile, back in Washington President Truman (with the help and at the urging of still-Labor Secretary Perkins) presented his version of a national health care system to what he called “The 80th Worst Congress.”

Its chances of passing, which were dim to begin with--can anyone imagine anything called “socialist” passing the 80th Congress?--were killed off by the deadly duo of the American Medical Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The people in charge of the effort to kill the Truman proposal were smart enough to make sure that they weren’t trying to beat something with nothing. The AMA exploited the power of the Chamber of Commerce to expand the fledgling health insurance industry by convincing its insurance company members to go into that business despite the dim prospects that any of these companies would make a profit in this new, low-price/high-cost business in which they had no experience.

Over time the insurance industry solved the profit problem and private health insurance became a member of the status quo which is committed to protecting the status quo against change.

The next major push for what has come to be labeled “health care reform” came from President Richard Nixon. Good sponsor. Bad timing. The Nixon idea fell out of favor along with President Nixon himself whose activist administration’s ideas were pushed aside by the Watergate scandals.

President Clinton’s pass at reform fell victim to incompetence, intellectual arrogance, and lack of transparency, otherwise known as the “We know what’s good for you; just shut up and take your medicine” syndrome.

Then along came President Obama and health care was at the top of an agenda again at last. He got a lot of what he wanted, but paid a terrible price for the half-victory. The Obama administration made two small mistakes which loom large in retrospect. Instead of characterizing the effort as a cost-control program which would make U.S. industry competitive in a flat world, they let it become a welfare program for the uninsured 40 million, which included a significant collection of deadbeats. Unpopular beneficiaries and unfortunate labeling. They also failed to find a respected, competent, high-profile Republican to do for Obamacare what former Republican Governor Winant did for Social Security for President Roosevelt as it was getting its sea legs in the '30s. Winant got it running and his presence at the top shielded it from all but the manic critics who lacked credentials and respect.

These oversights brought the shortsighted Chamber of Commerce into the battle against “socialized medicine” again despite the woes many their members were experiencing as they tried to price the products they were trying to sell abroad competitively despite the heavy price of providing health insurance for their employees that had to be built into their products’ costs.

The Obamacare outcome is undecided but at risk. Court challenges, cries for outright repeal, and even new limbs and transplants to the wounded corpus by more friendly therapists loom.

The hope of something worthy coming out of the current chapter in this 80-plus year old journey (to what? nowhere?) now rests on the hope that a polarized, paralyzed government can and will focus on the problem instead of the process, on ideas not ideology.

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Protests and recalls

2011-10-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

By Bill Kraus

Protests are a fixture in banana republics everywhere, the mideast more or less continuously, and parts of Europe and Africa more recently.

Wisconsin had a notable one this year, and now Wall Street and bankers everywhere have taken center stage as targets of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Protests are usually rooted in frustration and anger. They are spawned by organizations or collections of people who are not getting attention, action, or are simply being brushed off by those with power, because those with power have different agendas and priorities or are simply indifferent to the causes or needs of those without power.

Protests worked in a big way on Vietnam and civil rights. The draft was ended (which was probably necessary at the time and may or may not have been a good idea) as a response to the Vietnam War protests, and the giant step forward of civil rights in the 60s is unimaginable without the widespread protests of that era.

The 2011 Wisconsin protest was about radical legislation and action by a new governor and legislature. It was about more than union busting or claimed to be, but the attempt to perpetuate it seems to be more and more about the deprivation of the bargaining rights of public employees.

The more recent Wall Street protest seems to be more about getting revenge on the moneybags who seem to have gotten away with screwing up the economy without hurting their own fiscal well being. Lots of issues being aired, like the income gap, and the arrogance of the money shufflers who think they are, not servants of, the economy.

Maybe this will amount to something, but it seems a lot less focused than its successful national predecessors. More a grievance session than a call for specific action.

Recalls taken to their logical conclusion could result in effectively reducing the terms of those elected to office to one year irrespective of the terms of the office they were elected to.

An already too timid, less daring collection of legislators whose main interest is often being re-elected will spend a lot of time looking over their shoulders to see if they have offended their donors, any third party zealots, any organizations to whom they are beholden for votes and/or money, and even the voters themselves.

The threat of being taken to the recall woodshed for any real or imagined failures to conform to the expectations of any or all of the above can not help but escalate their already serious case of hardening of the legislative arteries to a state of paralysis.

Another undesirable side effect of recallitis is voter fatigue. The voters who already don’t vote in admirable numbers in general elections, and are notable for their indifference to and absence from the increasingly important primary elections, are already saying “not again” to the prospect of a series of recalls after the November “fire when ready” date passes.

The answer to my question, then, is no, this is not a good way to run a country.

The better response to misbehavior in office short of the the commission of high crimes and misdemeanors which could legitimately call for a recall or an impeachment is to find a candidate to run against the miscreants who deserve to be ousted.

This challenge would be mounted at the regularly scheduled next election.

And, of course, in the wake of several decades of careful gerrymandering, most of the candidates recruited for these challenges will have to be members of the same party as those who are targeted for replacement if they are to have any chance of success.

If the replacements are as good as hoped, they may even do something about un-gerrymandering so the general election voters can get into the game at the time they are most likely to bestir themselves enough to get proper identification together and actually go to the polls.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Only so angry

2011-10-09T09:44:00.000-07:00

By Bill Kraus

What are the "angry" voters going to do about Congress? Not much.

One thing is clear. The polls are unanimous. The Congress is below unpopular on the way to being disdained, which is a step away from being despised. The conversations on the street confirm the polls.

The protests spreading across the country, however, are about banks and other brigands. The Congress is mentioned obliquely for not punishing the bad guys who ruined the country and are being protested against.

The protests are not going to overthrow the Congress.

It’s up to the voters. Will the voters do what the voters are supposed to do when the people they elect don’t perform up to the voters’ expectations?

This is possible but unlikely. It is also difficult.

The reason it is difficult is because several decades of subtle and not-so-subtle bipartisan bartering has created--to cite a local example--eight demographically biased one-party congressional districts in Wisconsin. Ours is not an isolated case.

So if the voters would really rebel and decide to throw the “rascals” out they would have to do so by finding some new rascals with the same party affiliations as those they want gone.

Statistically all eight congressional districts in Wisconsin are what political pundits regard as “safe.”

Statistics do not always hold up. A tidal wave comparable to those of 2008 and 2010 could make a Democrat vulnerable in the 3rd District or Republicans vulnerable in the 7th and 8th districts, but only incumbents pulling a Weiner-like faux pas or neglecting to campaign (surprisingly this happens, as the beloved Robert LaFollette, Jr. and even more beloved Gaylord Nelson learned to their sorrow) would go at risk in any election.

In the normal course of events no Republican, no matter how worthy, is going to unseat Gwen Moore in the 4th District or whichever Democrat replaces Tammy Baldwin in the 2nd District. Nor is any Democrat going to beat Paul Ryan in the 1st District, Tom Petri in the 6th District, or Jim Sensenbrenner in the 5th District.

The redistricting gods have so decreed.

Putting aside voters' fundamental inconsistency--we hate the Congress, love our congressional representatives--if the voters do decide to remove incumbents to punish the Congress itself they will have to do so in primary elections.

Another problem.

Very few voters turn out for primary elections. Those who do are overwhelmingly one-issue ideologues in the mold of the Wausau voter who told a reporter “I’m all about concealed carry” or yellow dog Democrats or Republicans, commonly referred to as “the base.” They will not turn against the incumbents they put in on their criteria because some pollster says they will. One thing is for sure, they will vote, and, thanks to bipartisan gerrymandering, their votes will determine most winners of the November elections. September is the new battleground.

It is possible to increase the September turnout enough to upset the gerrymanders’ apple cart and to outvote the primary voting base, but the chances are right up there with the Cubs winning the World Series.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Lessons in cartography

2011-09-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

By Bill Kraus

I am now, finally, in possession of the maps of the legislative districts that the new law created and that Wisconsin will adhere to for the next 10 years. I think.

Everyone knows by now that the tradeoff of counties in the north and west has presumably made the 3rd congressional district safe for Ron Kind and any Democrat who runs there forevermore and the 7th congressional district safe for Sean Duffy and any Republican ditto.

My own view is these carefully sculpted results are not as permanent as the sculptors imagine. These districts have a long history of choosing people they like without regard to political labels. I attribute this to their Progressive Party roots, probably unjustifiably.

But if the intended results are achieved, this rearrangement means that there are no competitive congressional districts, none, in Wisconsin. If the voters dislike an incumbent, they will have to dislodge him or her in a primary election. The general elections are wired.

The state legislative maps are pretty incumbent-friendly too, but not to this extent.

The Assembly comes closest. If this redistricting holds up through the several court challenges it faces, only 10 of the 99 Assembly seats will be truly competitive. Ten of the 33 state Senate seats were competitive before this redistricting. There are now 11 that are.

It is hard to explain how the artful cartographers who succeeded in making the Assembly unassailably Republican for the next 10 years failed to do the same for the Senate. Maybe they know something I don’t. Always a possibility.

Fifty Assembly representatives will come from districts with a history of voting Republican by 20 points or more and another 10 will come from districts where Republicans were elected by margins of 10 to 20 points in 2010.

The best the Republican cartographers could do is make 12 state Senate seats safely theirs with another two in the 10-20 point margin category. The Democrats get seven safe seats and one more in the 10-20 point margin category.

Fully one-third of the state Senate races can be expected to be truly competitive. Only 14 Assembly districts have that expectation: 14 percent.

Unless the mapmakers have made egregious errors in not conforming to the relatively equal population and community of interest criteria, the courts, who have no serious interest in going into the mapmaking business themselves, are not likely to overturn the maps as drawn.

There is no way to predict what the redistricting would have produced if put in the hands of a disinterested group of cartographers who had no interest in or reason to achieve predetermined partisan goals.

We know that getting competitive elections everywhere or even in most places is geographically and ideologically impossible. Taking partisan criteria out of the mix isn’t going to turn the Fox River Valley blue or Milwaukee and Madison red.

But a state with no congressional districts worth contesting or with a locked-in majority for one party or the other in the state Assembly seems to me to be showing the worst side of partisanized redistricting. The congressional districts are safe for the incumbents due to mutual backscratching. The 1st and 2nd district were the beneficiaries in 2001. The 3rd and 7th in 2011.

The Assembly results cannot have been unanticipated. Eureka! Look what happened! Not likely.

A bill to de-partisanize the next redistricting in 2021 by taking the mapmaking out of the hands of the Legislature is being drafted.

Many voters are perfectly content with their representatives and don’t want them to be challenged. They should not overlook the prospect of a wild swing in the other direction in 2021. By keeping the redistricting in the hands of the Legislature, this result is entirely possible.

Rather than rolling the dice yet again it may be time to take the foxes out of the henhouse as many states have done and many more are thinking of doing.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Two State Senators Should Be Inducted Into Civility and Compromise Hall of Fame

2011-09-13T09:07:00.000-07:00

By Roger Utnehmer

If Wisconsin had a Civility and Compromise Hall of Fame for politicians, State Senators Tim Cullen and Dale Schultz would be the first to be inducted.

It is a cliché to decry the lack of civility and compromise in state politics. Partisanship has polarized all branches of government. That’s why what Senators Tim Cullen, a Democrat from Janesville, and Dale Schultz, a Republican from Richland Center are doing to restore civility has profound potential.

Cullen and Schultz have visited each others’ districts. Each listened to the concerns of the others’ constituents. They are working together finding common ground on issues that matter to people regardless of political affiliation. Their reciprocal visits have already resulted in both recognizing the importance of rail service to rural Wisconsin as a tool for economic development.

More positive results will follow.

Both have been around state government long enough to remember the days of bi-partisan cooperation when legislators built bonds of friendship across the aisle. Congratulations to Senators Cullen and Schultz for attempting to restore that rich Wisconsin tradition. May their efforts be an example for their colleagues to follow.

Their bi-partisan cooperation is proof we have hope for better discourse in a state government troubled by discord and incivility. Thanks to two veteran legislators for restoring optimism and hope that things will be better.

That’s my opinion. I’d like to hear yours. I’m Roger Utnehmer

Roger Utnehmer is President and CEO of DoorCountyDailyNews.com, and a member of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board.

Destiny for appointment

2011-09-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

By Bill Kraus

Two years ago a panel of jurists and lawyers and political types, with the exception of the State Journal’s prescient Scott Milfred, told former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who had come to town to advocate appointing instead of electing judges, the following:

1. Wisconsin’s DNA strongly favors elections, of everyone. We invented open primaries. We elect coroners. We elect state officials to jobs that really don’t exist. It’s beyond an obsession; it’s an addiction.

2. We have a full funding law for Supreme Court candidates that spares them the indignity of dialing for dollars and the risk of having to recuse themselves from cases in which donors to their campaigns are involved.

3. We have a tradition of bi-partisanizing candidates, by putting prominent Democrats and Republicans in tandem on the top of judicial campaign organizations.

The Justice was not convinced, but she was impressed.

If she were to come back today, she might hear a different story.

The protests and recalls and legislative turmoil got all the headlines in our tumultuous 2011, but the most significant turn may have been in the way we look at the way we select our judiciary.

The elect-everyone gene is still intact, although more and more counties are deciding to take the office of coroner off the ballot.

The full-funding law achieved a couple of objectives, but the spending for and against the two candidates by outside organizations with an obvious agenda and secret sources of money overwhelmed, obliterated really, the spending by the lightly funded candidates themselves. This was all the justification the new administration needed to call it a failure and to repeal this law and any and all other laws that put public money into political campaigns.

Concomitantly the partisanization of judicial campaigns infected the judicial process itself. Instead of fact-based deliberations and discussions on cases with political consequences by disinterested legal scholars, we got a replication of the two-aisle, caucus-driven polarization that has diminished our legislative process. As one astute observer asked, “When was the last time you couldn’t predict the outcome of a controversial case before our Supreme Court?”

Suddenly two respected state senators (a Democrat and a Republican) have put the idea of an appointed judiciary on the table.

The reigning chief justice, who was the strongest voice in favor of an elected judiciary two years ago, admitted to having second thoughts.

The governing boards of reform organizations like Common Cause are being asked to put this presumably unpassable, untouchable prospect on their short agenda, and are viewing the prospect favorably.

The case for appointment over elections (and, yes, there is a case against it) is buttressed by the fact that over the century or so that judges have been elected in Wisconsin two thirds of those who ascended to the Supreme Court came via appointment. This is interesting but not necessarily alarming.

More alarming is that several of the well-funded groups of ideologues have done the math and found that it is cheaper if you think you have a chance of buying favor to participate in four court campaigns than in 50 and 17 legislative ones. Issue money is pouring into judicial elections.

Most alarming of all is the unseemly behavior of those who have been elected to rise above partisanship and rule on the difficult things that come their in a sedate and scholarly way. A court that behaves like a legislature is not what we bargained for.

All of which adds up to a question that more and more are asking: Is there a better way to the judicial rectitude everyone, okay almost everyone, wants?

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board

Stuffing the beast

2011-09-05T09:54:00.000-07:00

By Bill Kraus

We have known for a long time that campaigns are too long and too expensive.

We have also known that the remedy for both maladies is easy: Starve the beast by shutting down the flow of money.

This is not happening. This is not going to happen. The flow of money into politics has become a flood as the U.S. Supreme Court took the open door off its hinges. It is getting bigger every day in every way.

The incumbents have been deluded into thinking that this is to their benefit. They won’t even enact the mild suppressant which the otherwise complicit Supremes have recommended: making third-party organizations which are running parallel campaigns disclose the names of the people who are funding those campaigns.

This combination of forces has led to invincible incumbents whose main ambition is keeping their jobs, and it bursts the bubble of ideas like part-time legislators.

All of this makes the deals cut every 10 years to make more seats ideologically safer almost redundant, but not redundant enough for the incumbents.

What has evolved is a situation where challengers are more and more limited to winning primary elections. The founding fathers who designed our electoral system could hardly have anticipated this since they didn’t know there were going to be political parties.

They didn’t anticipate wedging--which works best in low turnout elections like primaries--either.

What wedging does is turn elections into issue quizzes.

The people who vote in primaries are largely concerned about narrow, special issues. They are political junkies, and their drugs are things like guns, abortion rights, lower taxes, looser regulations, gay rights, gas prices, ethanol, and the like. They are ideologues.

What ideologues want are candidates who will vote their way on whatever it is that turns them on. The guy who told a reporter when asked how he felt about a gubernatorial candidate “I am all about concealed carry” typifies the breed.

The professionals who advise candidates tell their clients that the winning formula is to build a majority an issue at a time. They pitch the campaigns to the pro or anti guns, gays, social issue ideologues to get to 51 percent.

Whether the candidate has any ideas or the capability to deal with the problems and opportunities that are going to arise and that nobody is anticipating is increasingly irrelevant.

Instead of voting for candidates we are voting for automatons who will pull the levers we want pulled.

I no longer have to ask if the system is at risk. I know it is.

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Bill Kraus is the Co-Chair of Common Cause in Wisconsin's State Governing Board