Cures for toxicity

By Bill Kraus

A longtime supporter suggested to a legislator that his ambition for higher office could be advanced if the legislator joined forces with a Republican who shares his views on the legislator’s favorite issue and has offered to join the effort to help do great things for Wisconsin.

“Remember who your friends are," the legislator replied to his now-former supporter.

A politically active Democrat whose day job would be advanced if the Legislature acted on a significant and difficult bill was advised to lay low on political activity until the bill is passed.

The watering holes where legislators of all persuasions, administrators, and even reporters once spent their “off the record” off hours together are gone, strictly segregated along political lines, or too toxic for one side or the other to consider patronizing.

A major health institution which is putting together a plan to increase health care coverage and reduce health care costs was told that the enabling legislation for this worthy idea would have a better chance getting through what has become the Capitol war zone if the institution and its members reduced their political profile and activity.

The costs of redistricting

By Bill Kraus

Everybody knows what big money is doing to political campaigns, candidates, and politics itself. Most people don’t seem to like it. But five of the big nine on the Supreme Court do, and no one else counts.

Everyone also knows and dislikes the reconfirmation of the McLuhan premise that the medium is the message and that the campaign medium is TV commercials. Quick, simple/simplistic, pervasive. Most people don’t like this either, except, of course, the TV station owners and the producers and purveyors of commercials whose livelihood is dependent on or greatly enhanced by this phenomenon.

There is little or nothing that can be done about the flood of money masquerading as free speech or the popularity and power of TV as a medium.

There is another democracy destroying phenomenon, however, that is working below the radar of public notice that is doing as much or even more to diminish our democracy and the people we elect to run it.

Up in the air

Something immense has happened on Wisconsin's political landscape, but what it is at this point is mostly unknown.  


By Bill Kraus

The immediate reaction to the collection of over 1 million signatures on recall petitions is: WOW.

There have been no elections. But there will be one big one for governor and five for lesser offices.

The outcomes are not predictable. The challengers to the recallable incumbents aren’t even decided. But something significant is afoot.

If politics is still lists, and the role of money and TV messages it buys to the contrary notwithstanding it stll is, the Democrats have 30,000 qualified activists and the names and addresses--and to a considerable extent the ever-important e-mail addresses--of more than a million voters who are somewhere between sympathetic and enthusiastic about Democrats’ ideas, issues and representatives.

This is an enormous head start on the recall campaigns on the horizon.

Properly nurtured, these are foot soldiers in the battles for majorities for years to come in terms of recruiting candidates, raising money, mounting campaigns and governing.

There are lots of balls still in the air, but this one has landed with a resounding thud.

Among the balls that are still up in the air: