Mine Tragedy Should Prompt Call for Public Financing of Campaigns

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
April 15, 2010

By Roger Utnehmer

The West Virginia mine tragedy that recently claimed 25 lives is prompting calls for new safety rules and a review of our country’s dependence on coal. What the explosion absolutely should prompt is a call for campaign finance reform.

The CEO of Massey Energy, owner of the mine in which the fatalities occurred, has bribed and bought his way around West Virginia politics for years. Don Blankenship donated $3 million to a candidate for the state supreme court who then provided the one-vote margin to over-rule a $50 million judgment against Massey Energy. The contribution was so offensive the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that it created an appearance of bias.

In 2006 Blankenship spent millions of dollars of his own money attempting to defeat legislators who supported worker safety and environmental regulations he opposed. Last year a subsidiary of Massey Energy spend $5.8 million trying to influence regulation of the coal industry.

Campaign contributions on the scale typical of Ron Blankenship are nothing but sanitized corruption. When a single candidate for a seat on the court takes $3 million from one individual and then votes to save him $50 million in damages public confidence is severely sacrificed.

Don Blankenship has engaged in a pattern of legalized bribery. Unfortunately, that same corruption is common in judicial and legislative races throughout America. The only solution is to crowd out the special interest money and replace the bribery and corruption with public financing of campaigns.

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.

Order in the court

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
April 14, 2010

By Bill Kraus

After an interlude of unseemliness, high-level judicial elections in Wisconsin seem to have come home to our longstanding tradition of civility and non-partisanship. To at least some extent this is a reaction to the revulsion at the slide into the partisan election mode which features mass media attacks, big money campaigns, and advertising that is designed to deceive more than to inform.

Although the coat holders in the press decry it, judicial elections are largely beauty contests where the voters get to choose the most qualified and fairest candidates. They are not and should not be slugfests on issues and wildly exaggerated promises.

Candidates usually come to the contest with some partisan baggage. So the first thing they do is put names at the top of their campaign letterheads of prominent partisans from both parties. The ideal is to be regarded as “non-partisan.” The reality is in most cases to achieve the reputation of being or aspiring to being “bi-partisan.”

The campaigns seek endorsements from prominent members of the community like judges, lawyers, and law enforcement officials who are chosen to represent as many partisan sectors as possible and establish bi-partisanship as well. This is probably impossible, but worth trying.

The stump speeches and campaign ads talk about credentials and readiness to perform the job without making any pre-judging promises of any kind on any subject or issue or person that may appear before them if elected. Partisan elections seek people with common interests. Judicial elections seek people who will make disinterested rulings on the facts and the law, who will come to the job with an open mind.

A popular objection to judicial elections is when they are held and the numbers of voters they attract. They are held in the spring (which means campaigning in the winter) and they don’t attract flies. The commonly recommended remedy is to move them to the fall when the turnout is higher. This would mix two disparate kinds of elections, and it overlooks the desirable side effects of low-turnout elections.

Low-turnout elections can be shoe leather and word-of-mouth based, where media is used for name identification and resume presentation not for scorched-earth attacks on opponents and implied promises to be strong on crime (does anybody ever claim to be weak on crime?) and to construe the law “strictly,” whatever that means. This kind of person-to-person campaigning tends to be polite and appeals to the intellect instead of the emotions.

Another heartwarming development is that the recent winners have not been tempted to follow Judge Barbara Crabb’s wrongheaded suggestion that it is acceptable to become overtly partisan. This is good. Overt partisans are offering the kind of bias that attracts partisans and that is unwanted and unwarranted from the judiciary.

Overt partisan candidates also do a dumb electoral thing. The non-partisan elections do not appeal to the yellow dogs of either persuasion perhaps, but to ignore the partisan tendencies of the more independent voters who make up this limited turnout is to limit your appeal. Half the voters lean one way or the other. So any candidate who makes an appeal to a Democrat or Republican constituency turns off at least half of the potential voters.

I, for one, accept the fact that an elected judiciary is in the genes of Wisconsin voters, like an elected judiciary for other reasons as well, and applaud the fact that those who have sought judicial office recently have done so in the judicial equivalent of going door to door, one-vote-at-a-time personal campaigning.


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Where have all the candidates gone?

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
April 4, 2010

By Bill Kraus

In 2010 there is an open seat in the governor’s office.

In the state Legislature there are 132 incumbent office holders, none of whom are candidates for governor.

The Legislature a generation ago was a virtual spawning ground, a stepping stone, for politicians ambitious for higher office.

If there was a complaint about the make up of those long-ago bodies, it was that the members were climbing over each other in search of shots at the few higher offices that were available for which they could run.

A fast count reveals that this generation-ago group of state legislators produced eight members of the U.S. Congress, one U.S. Senator, three governors, two Supreme Court justices, one ambassador, and uncounted mayors and county executives.

The current crop, if 2010 is an indication, will produce none of the above.

For lack of ambition if nothing else.

What happened?

For one thing, the recruiting, slating, and electing of the talent pool that produced large numbers of the restlessly ambitious was taken over from the diminished-role-parties by the enhanced-role legislative leaders. The party leaders wanted the best and the brightest with the most promising prospects for higher office.

What the legislative leaders wanted were people who could win legislative elections and, once that was accomplished, would obey orders.

The jobs themselves changed as well. A generation ago most of the members of the Legislature had other lives, other jobs. The legislative pay scale was set on the assumption that the members would be part-timers. Most were. For most, it was not a career destination. It was a temporary trip into public service for some, a first or second step up the ladder of political power for the rest.

Many state legislators came from service on county boards, city councils, and school boards where they got their first appetizer-sized taste of political power and developed an appetite for a larger entree-sized serving. One interesting exception to this progression was the several members of the Milwaukee caucus whose ambition was to use the Legislature as a stepping stone to more lucrative and long-term careers on that area’s county board or city council.

When it became economically possible to live well as a full-time legislator and when self-serving redistricting made perpetual re-election almost a certainty, more and more members of this latter-day crop of legislators decided to career out in Madison.

Those are the real reasons the 132 are staying put except for the few who are opting out altogether for reasons of their own.

The popular explanation that the candidate shortage from this traditional source is that the next governor is going to face an impossible challenge is an excuse not a reason.


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