The economy's known unknowns

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
September 7, 2009

By Bill Kraus

Down

Cars: It seems we don’t need a new car after all. Styles don’t change. New models' improvements are minimal. The one we own was built to last. We’ll keep it.

Houses: The McMansion era may be history. Those who own them would move to something smaller and less bucolic in a New York minute if they could sell the one they own. But there’s a big inventory of unsold monsters that has to be whittled down first.

Anything that’s fashion driven: Sort of the antipathy of anything we need.

Art: A lot of art sales are driven by housing, which is going nowhere. Most of the rest is discretionary.

Sports: We love our Packers and Badgers so they’re safe, but other fans are less smitten. There are going to be TV blackouts where NFL games aren’t sold out. Golf tournaments are looking in vain for sponsors. Golf courses are looking in vain for players.

Advertising-driven media: We all know that newspapers are either dead or dying. If part of health care reform is a ban on advertising prescription drugs to incipient hypochondriacs, TV will follow suit. How many network shows can lite beer carry after all?

Charities, do-good, and trade organizations: All hurting. Some more than others. People with weak cash flows and their own structural deficits to worry about are understandably reluctant to borrow money to give away. Even dutiful tithers are tithing against a smaller base number.

Up

It’s hard to think of many things that are booming. Maybe mattresses. A country that was characterized by zero savings has suddenly started putting money away (in mattresses?) at a ferocious pace. This may be propelled by a fear of rainy days ahead. Since it’s already raining, the move to the mattresses is hardly misguided.

Unknown

What about politics? If the health care proposal is an indicator, the forces of the status quo are still digging deep when threatened with change.

What has yet to be determined is whether this kind of generosity will extend to candidates for major offices like governor and Congress. It is possible that, like charities and other organizations, these candidates may be asked to get by with less. Since the spending on these races in this century has been somewhere between excessive and outrageous, it is not unreasonable to expect a return to what we used to regard as normal here.

Maybe a tougher test will be the multi-million dollar races for legislative seats that will determine majorities in the statehouse.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the big and small political contributors may have started to wonder if they have done anything beyond making a few mercenaries and some TV station owners rich and whether this is a particularly good idea.

There is even a possibility that the people who are assaulted and demeaned by TV-dominated negative political campaigns might respond to a poor boy campaign if any candidate had the guts to try one. It’s even possible that many candidates will have no choice.

The recession as an unintended but welcome campaign finance reformer? What an idea!



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Rove's World

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
August 30, 2009

By Bill Kraus

The people in charge of what remains of the Republican Party insist that they realize that as long as the party’s agenda is dominated and characterized by social issues it will not win elections. The misguided wedge era is at an end. It is time to get back to the basics of frugality, competence, and regulation-lite. Or so they say.

Their entrepreneurial candidates have not all seen the light, however.

Scott Walker, who has the most money and a head start on the GOP nomination for governor, has sent out a mailing insisting that he is the MOST pro-life candidate.

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has decided that his re-election candidacy will be enhanced by not doing what he was elected to do and instead is flirting with being afflicted by the kind of homophobia that is being rejected in "radical" states like Iowa and by "left wing" Republicans like Ted Olson.

And no incumbent in Congress from our state has picked up where Tommy left off on trying to get a handle on the economy/job-killing cost of our employer-based health care system. To elaborate: At one time when he was serving as Secretary of the Health and Human Services in the Bush administration, Tommy proposed a crash program to computerize the health care records of everyone in the country in 18 months. Karl Rove, the illegitimate father of wedge politics, nixed the plan. The Republican’s willingness to fix high-cost-mediocre-results health care has gone downhill from there.

The free-market ideologues in our state Legislature do not hear the GOP state chairman when he tells them that the party is losing the campaign funding battle because too many Republicans are afraid to support the kind of modest public funding that would level the fiscal playing field. Stupid.

Until and unless the Republican Party rejects the partisanization of abortion rights, civil unions, and even gun control in urban areas, and gets back to frugal fixing of the public sector operations its main contribution to elective politics will be to enhance the candidacy of unpopular Democrats who will keep the Republican radicals at bay.

The thing that made Jim Doyle unbeatable was his veto pen not his programs or his personal charm.

So the only hope for the Republicans seems to be the Democrats’ likely hubris.

One of the truest truisms of politics is that we know how to handle defeat better than victory.

I would much prefer to see the Republicans base their campaign to regain power on a return to their traditional strengths instead of waiting for their opponents to go too far with theirs.


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The status quo and the people who love it

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
August 24, 2009

By Bill Kraus

Thirty one years ago Bill Safire of the NY Times wrote an Election Day column in which he said, “[The] wrong-headed rejection of political labels--the glorification of non-participation--is at the root of the rise of single-issue voting which bids fair to make this year’s election more of a battle between local extremist groups than a referendum on the nation’s case of hardening arteries.”

At the time, the forces of the status quo were re-directing the money, which was and still is the mother’s milk of politics, from the political parties to the proliferating and rapidly rising single-issue groups.

Without money the parties lost their power to recruit and slate candidates, and a diverse collection of entrepreneurial candidates picked up a party banner that most suited them and we entered the abominable era of wedge politics.

As we quickly learned, money that once went to the parties’ coffers began to flow disproportionately to protecting the status quo. This should have been expected inasmuch as those with money usually got it from the existing conditions and situation, which is the definition of "status quo."

Instead of representatives legislating for the benefit of the people they represent and the nation, state or districts from which they came, they became more and more beholden to the money and the issues and the interests and the causes that they believe got them there in the first place and whose money and votes they needed to stay in office.

Among the unfortunate events that beset our current president, the full flowering of the Safire prediction may be the most intractable.

It is on full display in the battle by the interests and their money to NOT change the way health care is delivered and paid for in this country.


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