Dancing around the problem

By Bill Kraus


When he was majority leader of the state Senate, Bill Bablitch referred to the long slow prelims to the state budget as “the dance,” as in, “The dance has begun.”

Before getting to the nitty gritty, some stuff has to be cleared away.

Campaign promises are the first to go. The new administration has done a lot of that.

The train is either gone or postponed. The GOP paranoia about voter fraud is being addressed. The “open for business” slogan has gone beyond talk to small, symbolic, more-or-less important actions. Cathy Stepp has taken over DNR and will test the reality of what may be an anti-business illusion there. The proponents of Health Service Accounts got the nod they wanted.

Take back the campaigns

By Bill Kraus

In the fall of 1970 the Wisconsin Republicans were having the kind of year the Wisconsin Democrats had in 2010.

Pat Lucey was beating Jack Olson for governor. Bill Proxmire was pummeling John Erickson for the U.S. Senate, and things weren’t going all that well in the statehouse for the GOP either.

It didn’t cost an arm and a leg to win a major office back then. Proxmire, as a matter of fact, raised and spent no money, which confirmed his electoral invulnerability and the virtue of campaigning almost full time to achieve that status. The Erickson campaign spent something like $150,000 to persuade something like 34 percent of the voters to vote for John. Pat Lucey and Jack Olson spent somewhat more, but money wasn’t the issue in that campaign.

The big difference in those campaigns other than the modest spending levels was who was running them and who was not and what they were about. The now famous Roger Ailes was working in the Olson campaign. He was working for the estimable John MacIver, a volunteer campaign chairman. There were professionals working in the Erickson campaign as well, but that campaign too was being run by citizen volunteers.

Fixing the fix

By Bill Kraus

All the talk about the 2010 elections is about the referendum on the Obama/Democrats response to the great recession, about the length of the coattail on the Obama popularity if any (coattail or popularity), and how these things will play out in legislative elections everywhere.

No one is talking about the fact that the legislatures elected in 2010 will be responsible for the mandated legislative redistricting that will follow the 2010 census.

Don’t kid yourself. There is a great deal of talk about this. But it is among the insiders who nest in the D.C. beltway and the Madison capitol square.

The alleged purpose of redistricting is to even out the size of the Assembly, Senate and House districts, and achieve some kind of popular homogeneity within them while getting as many competitive races as possible.