How power gets made

By Bill Kraus

Most of the coverage of the current Wisconsin legislative leaders has focused on the fact that the Speaker of the Assembly and the Majority Leader of the Senate are brothers, which is interesting. What is overlooked is the more obscure phenomenon that the jobs they hold have become more and more powerful over time.

Legislative leaders were always powerful, and usually attracted the best and the brightest from the elected members even though the main talent on view and needed was akin to herding cats in a venue where the cats had large egos and demanding constituencies.

The cats, for the most part, came to them courtesy of the recruiting, slating, funding and campaigning of the political parties.

A problem and an opportunity

By Bill Kraus

Every indication is that the flurry of recall elections coming this summer will be referendums on Governor Walker.

They will not necessarily be about what he has done or proposes to do but on him....personally.

The bumper strips “Recall Walker” say it all.

The pro- and anti- interests that have dogs in this fight will weigh in with their money and their ads which will oversimplify, stretch, and/or distort the truths about the things they like or dislike.

Disagreement will be displaced by demonization. Adversaries will become enemies. Irrespective of the winners of these elections the effect will be to deepen the partisan divide.

The losers will be compromise, civility and mutual respect for the trade and the people who ply it.

Instant recall

By Bill Kraus

Power is an uncertain, unreliable, often volatile, mistress.

Newt had it in the '90s. It began to erode when he let Jim Sensenbrenner’s judicial committee abuse the impeachment process. The fact that Clinton was slowly sinking and the Democrats were doing nothing to impede his trip to the bottom was quickly reversed by the push from the power-overplaying Republicans.

Newt finished off his run by deciding to shut down the government. He’s back, of course, but hardly at full strength, and everybody now knows he didn’t know how to handle power when he had it.

Even the late, great FDR wounded the progress of the New Deal agenda by thinking he was bigger than the Supreme Court. The odd, historically important fallout from this diversion was that the next item on the New Deal agenda, health care reform, never made it to enactment. Delayed by the power play against the Supreme Court. Bumped aside by WWII.

Power comes with a caveat. Don’t overreach. There will be a recoil. Nobody likes a bully.