SEEDS of Discontent

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
June 14, 2009

By Bill Kraus

There were small stories in the Journal Sentinel and Milwaukee Magazine recently about an easily overlooked obituary.

The deceased is an idea called SEED (School for Educational Evolution and Development).

I was a witness to its Wisconsin birth a couple of years ago.

SEED was invented in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore a few years ago.

It is a boarding school which takes students at random from poverty-stricken and otherwise non-functioning areas in the city and gives them a boarding school opportunity.

The students come to school at 8 a.m. on Mondays and go back home at 8 p.m. on Fridays if there is a home to go to. If not, they stay at the school full time.

As you can imagine, this is not cheap. It costs something like $30,000 per student (more than three times the per-student costs in public schools) and a facility has to be built to house them as well.

The reasons the Milwaukee leaders who listened to a presentation about SEED greeted the idea more warmly than one would imagine is the results it was producing in the east. Almost 100 percent of the students finish high school. More than 80 percent go on to college, where they also succeed. And, best of all, many if not most of them return to the places they came from when they entered the SEED program where they become role models and leaders for the larger community.

All of a sudden $30,000 per student--which compares favorably with the cost of incarceration in Wisconsin--didn’t seem so expensive after all.

The Milwaukee audience whose members have been desperately seeking solutions to the cultural, educational, social problems of that city finally felt that they were seeing an idea that might work.

It was expensive. It would take a very long time to get to speed. It attracted the best and brightest and most eager teachers. It offered hope.

The gestation period did not go smoothly. The first entrepreneur to step forward stepped aside to pursue another opportunity and then went away. His successor picked up the pieces, but before he could put them back together all of the people and organizations who would have to come up with the money were much less affluent than they had been. Worse yet, the state, which was looking for this kind of a solution for its largest and troubled city, had fiscal troubles of its own.

There were also rumors that the teachers’ unions were not enthusiastic and perhaps there were dissidents from the policy, from the idea itself, but the immediate cause of death was money-starvation. Governor Jim Doyle called SEED a “wonderful thing” but unaffordable right now.

One of its enthusiasts says “the governor killed it.”

No matter. The governor, the economy, the expense, the city, whoever or whatever, the sad fact is that SEED is dead. The cancer for which it might have offered a cure is not. Mourn its passing.

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Starving the beast

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
June 7, 2009

By Bill Kraus

There are some early signs that the new rules of the new "needs" economy, which is quickly and traumatically replacing the "wants" economy that we had all come to overindulge in, may extend to political donating and donations.

Advocacy organizations all seem to be hurting. This is hardly surprising because their contributors are no less immune to market shocks, housing realities, the precipitous drop in automobile industry driven jobs, and lots of trouble in discretionary market sectors generally.

Lobbyists and lobbying organizations are being asked to get along on less. Their clients may even decide that while their expertise and influence are needed, their role as bagmen is going to have to be curtailed.

This could spread.

A candidate is going to find it hard to convince a hard-pressed and less affluent constituency that he or she can't run a successful campaign without a multi-million dollar war chest which will be used to pay for an endless stream of evocative (as opposed to informative) television commercials and other annoyances like automated telephone appeals for money and/or votes.

Even the zealots with their emotional causes will find their appeals are not as effective when addressed to millionaires whose fortunes are impaired and to the rest of us who have hunkered down until and unless we get a bead on a suddenly unfathomable future. People are deciding that eating well or sending their kids to college is more important than whether gays get married, buying automatic weapons we can't afford, gaining icon status from icon-sized contributions, or any of the multitude of ideas large and small that we were willing to throw money at when money was a lot easier and more plentiful.

It may be wishful thinking, but the market may do what good reform ideas and worthy informers haven't been able to do.

The market seems to be saying no to the Hummer and McMansions.

Could lavishly endowed campaigns on issues and for and against candidates suffer the same fate?

The market as the ultimate reformer?

What an idea.


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Incongruities and incongruities

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
May 31, 2009

By Bill Kraus


It is not surprising to hear the Republicans complain about the unfairness of the “liberal” press and their unfriendly-to-unfavorable coverage. It is a little surprising that the complainers don’t take a lesson from or seek the advice of the members of the party who get a fair shake.

It ain’t rocket science, guys.

Putting that aside, what is really incongruous is that the Republicans, the ancestral home of the political fat cats, think they are getting the short end when it comes to money, too.

Surprisingly, there may be some truth to this.

The GOP has always felt that the money that flows to Democrats from the negative check-off process available to unions of all stripes but particularly WEAC, the teachers’ politically powerful union, is an easier route to money and maybe even a richer lode than their one-check-at-a-time soliciting.

All attempts to outlaw this have fallen on deaf ears or worse. The contributions are penny ante and the members whose dues are clipped can opt out if they wish. So all the GOP can do is point with alarm and complain.

The GOP operatives have come late to the Internet’s charms as well. Howard Dean explored this avenue and Barack Obama turned it into a 4-lane highway for money. If any Republican finance committee is hitting this jackpot I’m not aware of it.

It is worth noting that the Dems have also rounded up more millionaires than the fat cats have. Nobody on the GOP side in Wisconsin comes close to Herb Kohl, for example, and nationally George Soros and his ilk are red meat for the Dems and the Dem causes.

Let’s concede that it may be incongruous, but it does not seem to be a fanciful lament.

The real incongruity though is that, despite this, the organized and elected Republicans can be counted on to oppose all those reform measures proposed by all the do gooders, not to mention some proposals from their own cohorts as well, which are designed to level the economic playing field.

Spending limits would kill the overkill of negative checking off and Internet prowess.

Contribution limits would cut Herb Kohl and his peers down to size, fiscally anyway.

Best of all, the thirt-party party crashers would be (a) exposed and (b) subject to spending matches which would, in effect, make them indirect contributors to their intended Republican victims.

Goodbye, George Soros. Farewell, Bill Christofferson and the Greater Wisconsin Committee. Hello, parity.

And the Republican response? No thanks.

Now that’s incongruous.


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