Blogojevich Nation

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
February 8, 2009

By Bill Kraus

Someone once said that you can find something good to say about anyone. Blagojevich then is a good bad example.

Outlandish? Yes. Unique? Hardly.

There are a lot of reasons Blagojevich did what he did (no compelling ones about for how he did it). The most important one is the need for money to run campaigns and keep the power that money buys made him do it.

As campaigns became more expensive, more entrepreneurial, more the playgrounds for the well endowed candidates and the third-party zealots and single issue groups incumbents began to use the powers of incumbency to accumulate the large amounts of money they felt they needed to perpetuate their favored status.

It is called “pay to play.”

Money has always bought access to power. Pay to play money buys action.

The legislative leaders set up a series of toll booths. Supplicants pay a toll to get a bill introduced, another to get it to committee, then out of committee and to the floor for a favorable floor vote and shipment to the executive office where the Blagojeviches of the world have an opportunity to extract their pound of flesh.

When this costly journey was exposed in Wisconsin, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala went to jail, and Republican Speaker of the Assembly Scott Jensen started his endless journey through the legal system on the way to who knows what fate awaits him.

Two Illinois governors and one from Connecticut have been deposed or jailed as well when ambitious prosecutors followed the money trail to the executive offices in those states.

Bill Richardson’s journey to the cabinet was derailed because of suspicions that a form of Blagoization has spread to New Mexico.

Increasingly legislators and executives here and elsewhere have suffered the embarrassment of having to answer questions raised by the annoying do-gooder organizations and the dwindling but really annoying few remaining investigative journalists.

Is something being bought here? they ask.

Those who ignore or brush the question aside have to deal with the political version of a long ago story about a sports writer whose editor told him not to accept any largesse from a team he was covering.

“Do you think I can be bought for a 5th of whiskey?” he asked the editor.

“I’m not sure,” the editor replied, “but I do know that they didn’t give it to you because they thought you were thirsty.”

Blago-ism moves this Q-and-A to front and center in politics and raises the question whether those in power will realize--even if they dodge investigation and prosecution--that play-to-pay puts their good names and the good name of the trade they practice at serious risk.

It is easy to blame the system. It is hard to dodge the fact that the people who are victimized by or blaming the system have the power to change it and the behavior it evokes.

Yours and ours

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
February 1, 2009

By Bill Kraus

This is addressed to the incoming class of executives of quasi-public companies: banks, insurance companies, investment banks, automobile manufacturers, and whoever else has a brand new, large stockholder who is located in Washington, D.C. Welcome to the fishbowl.

Up to now your acquaintance with the press, unless you have had the misfortune of being caught with your corporate pants down, has consisted of issuing press releases and saying “no comment” in those rare instances when someone asked a nosy, penetrating question.

No longer.

You are now a beat.

The good news is that the press, which now feels it has a right to know everything about what you do and how you do whatever it is you do, is woefully understaffed.

The bad news is that reporters' instincts for the capillary is still alive and well. And now they feel they should have complete access to behavioral conduct as well as fiscal results.

Up to now you have been very forthcoming about your results. Actually, corporations’ reports are a lot more complete and confessional than those of public institutions. Quarterly and annual reports (called 10Qs and 10Ks) go to great lengths to tell their readers what has gone and could go wrong, and about all the risks that your enterprise faces. Government reports (called State of the State and State of the Nation addresses) are less about how bad things are going than how well they will go in the future.

The potentially embarrassing stuff was pretty much out of view.

Reporters are no longer confined to reading and reporting on the results. They really think they should be invited to your board meetings, like they are in the public sector. It hasn’t come to that. Yet.

In the meantime they are reporting and commenting on things that were pretty much out of bounds before, like politicians sex lives used to be. All this changed when you took OUR money.

How the heads of the auto companies got to Washington was their business. No longer. Now everyone knows they came on their corporate jets, and that they shouldn’t have.

Citicorp has cancelled an order for a new jet and is being asked whether putting its name on the New York Mets' new stadium is an appropriate use of OUR money.

And it doesn’t stop with the few remaining straight reporters. It has spread to the comic sector. Jay Leno said the other night that the Obama inauguration was the most expensive celebration since the last corporate retreat the executives of the AIG company attended on OUR money.

And it isn’t going to let up.

Those of us who have spent time in both sectors have long known that the big difference between the private and public sectors is that the public sector is public in every sense of the word, and that that fact influences behavior.

Welcome to the fishbowl boys and girls.

The state of the paper

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
January 25, 2009

By Bill Kraus

In January of 2009, Madison’s Capital Newspapers ran a small item announcing that another 12 jobs had been eliminated, mostly in the newsroom.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy.

The New York Times borrowed a lot of money from someone they once characterized as a Mexican drug lord and sold most of their headquarters building—so they could lease it back and have a place for their office and the money they spent to build it.

None of the papers whose troubles had been announced in 2008 did not say they were doing better. As a matter of fact, if you have a couple of bucks and want to own a newspaper you might talk to Sam Zell in Chicago or whoever answers the phone in Miami.

It goes without saying that what you would be buying is the right to lose money.

All of this is both deplorable and frightening. It is also predictable and uncorrectable.

The first sign that I saw that everything was not as it should be in the newspaper business was over 30 years ago when I was told that the then powerful Milwaukee Journal would not deliver their papers to me in Stevens Point anymore.

I asked why not. The answer was couched in more businesslike terms but came down to telling me that their mostly Milwaukee-based advertisers weren’t interested in displaying their merchandise to people in Stevens Point.

I suggested that by becoming a regional newspaper they were giving up power for money. I heard from another source that they didn’t disagree, but they didn’t change their decision to retrench either.

A few years later I was in the governor’s office and discovered that if a story appeared in either of the Milwaukee papers, but especially the morning Milwaukee Sentinel, that story would be on the governor’s agenda that day.

These papers still had 10 reporters covering state government, and the fact that no one in Stevens Point knew this or cared hadn’t registered in Madison. Yet.

It has now. The Sentinel is gone. The Journal Sentinel bureau is a shadow of its former self.

The power to set the public agenda has shifted to the likes of talk radio screamers who admit to being in some business other than journalism.

The information part of our working democracy is not working.

Thomas Jefferson said if you have to choose between the right to vote and a free and omnipresent press, choose the latter. Lee Dreyfus never worried about the peoples’ intelligence, just their knowledge, their information.

Both would be appalled about what has happened in January of 2009.

Everyone with the possible exception of the sanguine techies (*) is or should be as well.

* The techies believe the Internet supplants the press, blogging is journalism, and anyone addicted to the newspapers’ format can read them online. The facts are that the Internet is a marvelous resource but is like drinking out of fire hose as a news source, blogs are built on journalists’ reporting—as this one is—and the online editions will last only as long as the reporters do.