A letter to Wisconsin snow birds and expatriates

By Bill Kraus


Everyone knows about the recalls. What everyone doesn’t know, and what people who haven't been around lately might not know, is that they really aren’t recalls. They are what golfers call “mulligans” and what non-golfers know as “do overs.” In Wisconsin, if enough people are dissatisfied with any incumbent who has been in office for at least a year, they can circulate petitions seeking a new election, and if they get the requisite number of signatures, an election will be called.

No justification is necessary. This is not an impeachment. This is not a recall. This is a petition for a new election for any and all candidates who want to run including the person who thought he or she was elected for a fixed term.

The recall petition for the governor and lieutenant governor are the most prominent. The reason so many people signed it (more than 900,000) had to do with fixing the structural deficit the Democrats left behind and crafting a balanced budget for the next biennium.

Desperately seeking solutions

By Bill Kraus


Facing the prospect of telling a class of college students about the state of electoral politics focuses the mind.

Everyone has a long list of the things that have gone wrong.

Everyone also has fingers to point in multiple directions at a long list of culprits who are responsible for the current state of dysfunction.

The students themselves know that the three 'P's--Polarization, Partisanship, even Populism--are wreaking havoc with the representative government we all think the founding fathers envisioned. That the system is broken.

What they expect to hear is how to fix it. I have a simple answer for them: I don’t know how.

Myths, phobias and fantasies

By Bill Kraus

Life in the public sector is complicated and made more so by a long series of myths that too many believe, phobias that too many suffer from, and fantasies that too many chase.

Among the most prominent are:

Government can and should be run like a business. There are a lot of reasons it can’t and won’t be. The most important are that business is a totalitarian organization and government is not. The second most important is that the business of government is conducted in public. Public companies in the private sector think they are. They are not. They will be as, if and when the press sits in on their board meetings.

There is a market solution for everything which is better than a regulatory solution for anything. Really? Regulation is unwelcome everywhere. Events of the recent past are all the evidence needed to convince most that an unrestrained free market with all its virtues can do a lot of damage. An officious regulatory bureaucracy can as well. Regulation of anything--including voting--is and should be both fluid and subject to change in search of the elusive middle ground between too much and too little.