Prosser's process

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
December 9, 2009

By Bill Kraus

When Justice David Prosser signed the letter from a then-unanimous Supreme Court endorsing full public funding of Supreme Court campaigns, he must have assumed that the funding would be somewhat north of the $400,000 that made it into the recently enacted law.

Prosser now says this is not enough money to run a full-blown, TV ad-driven campaign in the mold of the three most recent contests for the Supreme Court, and that it does nothing to protect a candidate from interventions of “phony issue ads.”

He is right on both counts.

The issue-ad issue was intentionally postponed for another day for fear that an impending U.S. Supreme Court decision could kill the whole bill if it was included.

The money complaint, however, is somewhat disingenuous. It is a minor miracle that the Legislature came up with even that kind of money in these desperate fiscal times.

This is a work in progress, this idea of fully funding campaigns with public money, and as, if, and when the state’s revenue streams get better more money may be available.

For the nonce, however, these are the cards that have been dealt and Justice Prosser, who is up for re-election in 2011, is, as he says, the guinea pig for the whole concept of bringing campaign spending down to earth.

This “guinea pig” campaign can develop in one of several ways.

Prosser may run unopposed, which is not unusual for a sitting Supreme Court Justice, recent campaigns to the contrary notwithstanding. A free ride is less likely now that impartial justice is in effect, because the money barrier for challengers is less daunting.

If a challenger appears and opts to take the public grant and Prosser does as well, both will have to run low media, high shoe leather campaigns consisting of face-to-face campaigning across the state to generate word of mouth support from thought leaders, lawyers, judges, and the like; visiting all the lives-at-five TV shows and other news outlets, up, or down, to and including the state’s weekly newspapers.

As an incumbent who has been on a statewide ballot and has had 10 years to make the kinds of appearances and contacts that are the essence of shoe leather politics, Prosser would have a major advantage, if indeed he has used his incumbency energetically.

If a challenger appears and opts out of the public grant which Prosser takes, the grant to Prosser will be increased to offset the challenger’s spending and the campaign will probably escalate to the media model created by Herb Kohl and emulated in whole or in part by everyone since he penetrated and blew away the dollar ceiling that tacitly but effectively restrained fund raising and spending in Wisconsin campaigns for anything and everything.

If Prosser and the challenger do take the public grant an independent campaign could be mounted by a third-party organization. WEAC comes to mind. Whichever candidate is the victim of the third-party’s attacks would get a compensating grant to offset WEAC’s spending.

If Prosser and the challenger do take the public grant they could come under attack in “phony” issue ads run by a third party of any description. WMC comes to mind. There is no provision in the impartial justice act to offset this kind of “free speech” spending by anyone.

The best and only recourse to this kind of activity is an enemies strategy which asks, “Who are these people, and why are they saying these awful things about me?”

It is possible that the Legislature will pass either SB43 or AB63, which would reveal the names of the people who put up the money for these issue ads in hopes that this will deter this kind of spending, but will surely expose the source of the money for it. This, in turn, will answer at least the first part of the enemies strategy question.

I know, I know, there is a sixth option. Prosser can take a pass on this first tiny, timid, tentative route that the Legislature has offered and opt for the status quo ante with its fundraising from unseemly sources, media-driven-deceptive advertising which has diminished the stature of the judiciary and its practitioners and made recusal a household world.

Impartial justice is what is offered. If we get more civil political campaigns and more restrained spending then so much the better. Justice Prosser will determine whether what the Legislature has wrought is worthy of the name. One can only hope.


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Anarchy in the GOP

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

By Bill Kraus

Before the behavioral huns overran the party, the biggest thorn in the side of the big-tent moderates who used to run the Republican Party were the “true” conservatives.

Or to put it another way, even if the people who run what remains of the party and the more powerful and numerous hired guns who are running the entrepreneurial conservatives’ campaigns are struck by lightning and realize that abortion, gay rights, and gun rights are not partisan issues, the activists have to cope with the anti-tax/regulation/government anarchists.

They don’t call themselves that, of course, since the name brings to mind the Fabians, Karl Marx, and other anti-government European radicals. They call themselves libertarians or, if that’s too political, simply Adam Smith free marketers even though Adam Smith would probably excommunicate them.

They are to some extent the heirs of the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party group run amok. They are consistently anti-tax. Their other basic premise is that no government body can run anything, or run anything well. The other side of this coin is that the free market private sector can run everything and run everything efficiently. An idea they hold to for dear life unaware that that it has been somewhat tarnished by missteps in several areas and places recently.

They are playing a leading role in the current health care debate as they did in the same debate in the late 1940s. They won then by stopping Harry Truman’s “socialization” proposal modeled on what Clement Attlee’s Laborites enacted in Great Britain.

My own experience with their single-mindedness dates to 1966. The Republican anarchists whose center seemed to be the Milwaukee area’s North Shore Republican Club wanted the Party Convention to condemn the party’s activist governor Warren Knowles because he raised taxes to keep the state operating after his 13,000-vote victory in 1964.

The party activists who then and now want a government that doesn’t dominate but does work rejected this idea, and the anarchists who really wanted the government to go away.

The Democrats, I am told, have their own internecine ideological battles on issues that someone from that party will have to explain to me. I think it is between their moderates and the all-government-all-the-time gang.

Political fortunes rise and fall for a lot of reasons, but one adage persisits: Partisans want issues that inflame. Most of the rest of the people want a government that works.

This is something for those who seek electoral success to keep in mind.


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Get a job

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

By Bill Kraus

There is an open seat in the race for governor of Wisconsin. The Democrats have arm wrestled the mayor of Milwaukee into running for a job he really doesn’t want over the dead bodies of most of the people in Milwaukee who want him to continue in the job he has. The principal reason for wanting him to stay, incidentally, is because there is no one in the wings in Milwaukee who they consider a worthy replacement.

The Republicans are offering up a County Executive of a dysfunctional county and a former member of Congress who lost a long ago (in political terms) race for the U.S. Senate. The other candidates who have expressed an interest in running are unknowns who are being discouraged from doing so by the Republican powers who are also quietly trying to get Mark Neumann to drop his candidacy.

The Journal Sentinel has already decided it’s a two-candidate race, discounting rumblings about Tommy Thompson from D.C. and Elroy.

The stated reason that there is this remarkable paucity of candidates is that it will cost at least $12 million to win this election. This is certainly not an inconsequential barrier even if it’s only half true.

The less obvious reason for the empty pipelines is that the unintended consequences of the Watergate reforms neutered the political parties.

Before 1975 the political parties not only recruited, groomed, promoted, and slated full-fledged candidates for the top offices, they filled the slates down to county coroner to back up these selections.

When a friend of mine who was a Republican county chairman told the state chairman that he didn’t think he would be able to find a candidate to run for the Assembly, a race anyone of that persuasion would surely lose in that county, he was told, “Either find a candidate or be the candidate.” He found a candidate; so did county chairs of both parties all over the state.

This kind of activity filled the wannabe pipelines with seasoned, accomplished political leaders who would have been elbowing each other aside to run for governor in an open-seat year.

The most important problem is neither of the above, although both of the above have contributed to it.

It is careerism.

I encountered an early form of this phenomenon in the late 1970s when I discovered that many of the state legislators from Milwaukee ran for those jobs not because they were ambitious for higher office, but because they were stepping stones to what they hoped would be successful campaigns for seats on the Milwaukee City Council or the Milwaukee County Board. They were looking for lifetime careers.

At that time most legislators from other places were still hoping to rise to higher office, and indeed that Legislature produced candidates galore and several members of Congress, a U.S. Senator, a covey of governors and lieutenant governors, and even a couple of Supreme Court Justices.

No longer.

The incumbents in the state Legislature are, for the most part, in it for the job. They are settling in and careering out in what they hope will be safe seats; seats which they will not put at risk by proposing changes or ideas which endanger their chances for a long string of re-election victories.

Every once in awhile a Mike Ellis makes noises about running for governor, and a Jon Erpenbach tosses a hat towards a ring or two, but these spasms quickly pass.

The result is what used to be kind of a potentials pipeline is clogged by people who are not regarded as being upwardly mobile by either the voters or by themselves.

Is the U.S. Congress any better or any different? The lines of challengers for the redistricting-protected incumbents don’t seem to be very long. Anybody up for a run against Russ or Herb?

To paraphrase a Peter, Paul and Mary hit: Where did all the wannabes go?


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