THE OLD PRESIDENT SHOWS HIS METTLE

President Biden delivering the State of the Union, forcing even Kevin McCarthy to applaud
while VP Kamala Harris smiles in amusement.

By Dominique Paul Noth

Joe Biden can lead a nation, but he sure can’t do anything about his age. Watching him rule that congressional mob February 7, however, made my Pacemaker sing.

He ran rings around Republicans 40 years younger during the State of Union address, making a usually formal event look much like a rugby scrum inside the British Parliament, where free-for-all antics are normal.  But if this was give and take, he was clearly taking them. He led the Republicans to applaud for seniors and at least by behavior put Social Security and Medicare outside the zone of their debt ceiling threats (they may take that all back over time, but now know they will look foolish whatever they do).

The one thing Joe can’t change, and it will loom large even among Democratic supporters in his 2024 plans (looks like he’s running), is his age.  He’s grandpa Joe, physically in great shape next to all us other 80 year olds, and he proved in that State of Union that he has more vigor and better ideas for the nation than that dying party.  Ron DeSantis will have an easier target in the blubber of Donald Trump than he does in Joe Biden.

But the grandpa label is still there, intractable in a party that remains young in spirit, forward moving and basically progressive. Nancy Pelosi may look every minute better as Speaker of the House than that new GOP guy (who can do little more than purse his lips futilely at his misbehaving GOP underlings) but she is 82 and even Democrats chafed about that. Given how all sides of our culture treat age, including oldsters themselves,  it is an issue.  

I know. I still write on both politics and culture, I can still croak to my guitar and cook gourmet dinners. But I now have grandchildren as well as children who unconsciously --  and sometimes not so unconsciously --  are taking notice of  my age. They accidentally can make me feel feeble even in those areas where I’m still pretty lively.  I know I can’t keep up with them in energy and I have learned they don’t want me suggesting things that I know from experience that they still have to learn. Insisting on telling them is the definition of old fart. I know that.

At their youthful age, they are much like I was. They can’t help lecturing me about medical issues (though at my age I have investigated more ailments than they yet know about) or particularly the dangers of our new technological age -- though in the 1990s I left The Journal Company because the CEO thought I knew enough about the Internet to be put in technical charge of its online division.  Even then I knew enough to know I didn’t know enough and was happy to leave a newspaper that knew so little about the Internet that they contemplated putting me in charge.

28 years later, there has been so much change I know I was right back then.  My children, ranging in age from the thirties to the fifties, are so accustomed to this technology that they can Google their way into fixing most everything.  Yet they pale next to their own kids, my grandchildren,  who can do things on a laptop or a Smart Phone (except talk on it) that put most of  their parents to shame. 

Nothing can change their attitudes –  we are all the oldies that have to be tolerated. So-called reverence for the elderly doesn’t stretch that far! So I can’t blame college age Democrats who admire old Joe but still hope for someone younger.   I suppose I do, too – and I expect he does as well at times. It seems strange to skip two generations to find the party leader. But who else is there ready to go?

Not to say there aren’t a number of younger Democrats coming up fast on the outside.  Some we can name – like Adam Schiff or Pete Buttigieg or Maryland’s new governor, Wes Moore – but if we’re looking ahead to 2028 (that seems most likely) the leading Democratic name may still be unknown.  There’s also vice president Kamala Harris, but I am not sure she has lit a fire in the voters right now, and lighting a comfortable fire may be the best thing Biden has going for him.

 2024 may be a case of grudging agreement among Democrats rather than the sort of electric charge  enthusiasm that Obama rode into office.  It may also be that down home Joe --  talking up the family kitchen table  needs, quoting his father in speeches at risk of boring audiences with the familiar, handling world affairs without swagger and with  intelligence and thoughtfulness;  not a progressive firebrand but obviously leaning into progressive ideals and common-sense advancement – could be just  what we need right now. 

Personally I might like more teeth in how he tackles police reform, outlaws big guns and big magazines, pushes child care, fights for  legal immigration – all things he mentioned but did not detail. But  he is setting a pace that gets things done, as even the wilder progressives in his own party concede. I even wonder if his steady stubborn hand may actually bring about more changes in a society clearly too locked into political conflict.

It has become laughable that Republicans try to scare voters about Biden – Really? Good old Joe? Some sort of left-wing nightmare?  Even traditional Republicans voters find that vision amusing. They know they’ve lucked out in getting a president who moves left from a comfortable middle, pushing concepts in a way that doesn’t inflame right-wing opponents, or shouldn’t if they had any common sense.

His new ascendance comes at an important time for Democrats, entering an election season where personal inter-party conflicts could generate hurtful moments. Just look at Arizona, which is confounding many party leaders. Sen. Krysten Sinema (who sat among Republicans during Biden’s State of the Union)  has switched from Democrat to Independent but still votes with the Dems, which puts them in a strange position about offending her. Yet a noted progressive Democrat from the House, Ruben Gallego, is taking her on.  What will the rest of the party do?

The House brings some problems of its own since three well liked House Democrats are talking about the California senate seat in 2024 though the much honored occupant, Diane Feinstein,  has not at this writing announced her plans. Talk about pushing because of age! She is 89 now and would be 91 if she ran again, so both Adam Schiff and Kate Porter have announced they are running and Barbara Lee, a young 76, is thinking about it.

Wisconsin is a rare case of an important April election – NOW --  that could change the face of the entire state. It is the supreme court contest where four are contending Feb. 21 and then the  final two for the April 4 finale.

Campaign photo for Janet Protasiewicz

My vote is for Janet Protasiewicz (have you caught her funny TV commercial about people trying to say her last name), a judge I wrote about in 2014 when GOP big money avoided her circuit court race.  Would that would be true this year, when many expect an enormous amount of campaign spending by outsiders.  

But that 2023 judicial election is also a one and done.  It could flip the court majority to a four to three sensibility rather than the what-the-hell-did-that-mean conservative bloc  that seems to blindly vote for anything the GOP dominated legislature wants to do.  

It could be that a fair-minded liberal elected to the state’s high court in 2023 will have an inspirational impact on 2024 races where all the Assembly and half the state Senate are up for grabs, not to mention Tammy Baldwin’s US Senate seat. It even could lessen the GOP gerrymandering impact, since there are cases pending.

Historically Democrats do well in statewide contests but when you get down to districts for the state assembly and senate,  the gerrymandering in favor of Republicans means that Democrats have to fight above their normal weight class in most districts.  A more balanced high court could adjust that. Protosawiecz is also a judge who openly stands for progressive values. 

At least, the GOP  could no longer have  a state top court to lean on. This April election could  be the break in the dam that  Wisconsin residents seriously need.

Nationally the Democrats stand a better than  even  chance of winning back the House and that looks like the Republicans’ own doing. Anyone who thought splitting the Congress between the two parties would be good news has learned differently in just a month of GOP control of the House.

The GOP barely won a House majority and is  already squabbling about how to continue, launching investigations into the FBI, Hunter Biden and the origins of COVID (bats, pangolins, Chinese labs?)  that most of the country find laughable.  Republicans  have inspired a genuine fear that Biden’s first two years will be the end of the road for him doing any good until he wins again in 2024.  That potentially lost two years is  the voters’ own fault given how a few but still  too many treat  Republicans as some sort of balancing party.  Sorry, folks, that’s not today’s GOP.

But the Democrats will have to fight like hell to keep or grow seats in the Senate, where they have 51 voting with them out of 100.   The election map is against the Dems.

And the House could well face more churns since there will be open Senate seats for Democrats in several states (not Virginia, apparently, since Tim Kaine now says he’s running).

Note the irony.  Most of the Senate, even the progressive icons among them, are at the age to contemplate retiring.  The Democrats do have a strong bench in some states that think about such things. But given the weight of the issues, the need for experience and the immediacy of how well he’s doing, the Democrats have good reason to stand by Joe.  

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with still active archives at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his Doms Domain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

 

CHOP FLORIDA OFF THE MAP TO SEE REAL NOV. 8 ELECTION

 

By Dominique Paul Noth

On election night, as Florida dominated the news and led to false ecstasy from Republicans, a relative sent me a famous old Merrie Melodies gif of Bugs Bunny sawing Florida off from the rest of the United States – an apt memory for me.  I was sawing Florida off in my email from any future gathering of relatives, which we had done in that state several times. But not  again as long as Ron DeSantis was governor and Marco Rubio was a senator.

Florida election results not only saddened me, but they misled many in the nation because  they came early in the Nov. 8 count.  Viewers didn’t at first realize it was an outlier, that Biden had scored a victory by going gently into changing things, by staving off disaster and keeping not only the Senate in control (probably) but the House less in opposition hands than many of the presidents who preceded him in mid-terms.  They had disasters, he had a glitch. He also had voters who understood his pace and ignored (in several areas though not my state) the hysteria crime ads of the Republicans.

I was saddest for Val Demings (Senate) and disturbed that smirking DeSantis was now acting even more godlike as he contemplated running for president.  That gif reminded me and should remind him that Florida is unlike most of the country and can be mentally sawed off.   Whether he has appeal in the other 49 remains to be seen, though the battle with Trump could be as laughable as his Nancy Sinatra boots (a now famous meme).

It is ironic, of course, that the state most in need of active action on climate change, health care, broad cultural diversity and immigration reform would vote statewide against its own best interests. But that is Florida today, like Kansas in eras gone by.

Unlike 2000 and the Al Gore/George Bush race when NBC’s Tim Russert famously proclaimed “Florida, Florida” (the then  swing state that could save democracy) -- well, Florida ain’t swinging these days.  It is hard red – no longer a state for the US to put any hopes in.

It was not all great news for the Democrats, though better than 

many expected.  There were some bridges too far and I was steeled to expect Rubio surviving in Florida (though he almost ran away with the race), and that Chuck Grassley was likely to die in harness in Iowa.  But Johnson? 18 years of that oaf? I am ashamed of my home state, somewhat eased by the Democrats who survived (almost all of them), the Democrats who changed the map (Futtermen in PA) and the ones who came close.

Let’s be honest about the last batch.  Ohio is a strange and strangely conservative state in politics, and while Tim Ryan was clearly the better choice (saying Sen. J.D. Vance makes me feel like swallowing my tongue), he also looked too cautiously at the conservative nature of the state and decided to run as a maverick and his own man, refusing help from Biden and even Obama.  He came close but events prove him wrong. I mean, the other senator from that state is blunt progressive Sherrod Brown!  This was an election year where some Democrats like Ryan wanted the president to stay away.  They didn’t understand that Biden’s low poll numbers were more about age than accomplishments.  

I also think the Democratic powers-that-be missed a developing opportunity in North Carolina, which despite the prognostication has been a good chance for months.  Maybe the money was stretched too thin already, but celebrity presence could have made a difference. I keep thinking a visit from Obama in the last week would have worked wonders for Cheri Beasley, who came close but doesn’t have another good national opportunity for years.

But what was also remarkable about Nov. 8 was that the voters took seriously the threat to democracy, and to reproductive rights, the two together probably more important than inflation.  The vote reflected their distaste for Jan. 6 and even for Trump, up and down the ballot of governors and other local races.

 

It also signals that the nation is comfortable giving Biden some freedom to operate.  The polls that indicate most voters think he is too old to run again in 2024 were belied by the results. His policy (doing things people want and just letting the results unfold in their own time) seems to be working at home and abroad.

If the Republicans can actually do anything with a narrow margin in the House, Biden is probably the Democrat who can work with them.  He may not be able, lacking the House, to codify Roe v Wade into law – except the Republicans were looking at the same election and saw how reproductive rights were essential to voters, a concept winning in states like Kentucky where the Democrats didn’t do well.  It’s not a partisan idea, and Biden has a better chance of picking off enough Republicans in the House to go with what looks like a stronger majority in the Senate.

Wisconsin was not a typical election state because it has been so gerrymandered. But even here the Republican legislature failed to gain a supermajority, which means Tony Evers’ return to the governor’s mansion keeps an important block on Republican shenanigans.  Josh Kaul also returns as attorney general.  In many ways this is a salve to Barnes’ loss in the Senate, because keeping Evers in place was the most important goal.

There are some pundits, mainly Republican ones, who think if Barnes had been more of a centrist he would have won.  I wondered if those remarks were a subtle suggestion that Wisconsin was not ready for a black senator or a progressive one.  I think it should shame Wisconsin that the racist ads and focus on crime worked, but frankly I think Mandela handled himself well and shouldn’t back way from his progressive roots – in fact, I think he should have been more aggressive in that regard.  But the marketplace was against him, particularly the split between urban and rural. America seems to have entered a space where every casual remark can be turned into a savage sound bite in a commercial.

One thing Nov. 8 does set up is a surer chance for Wisconsin to return to the real world.  In April it only needs one election and one candidate to correct a state supreme court that has given the GOP free rein on Foxconn, voting rights, big business corruption, and poor environmental regulations. This is a court that has been carrying Republican water in a 4 to 3 majority for way too long.

Now there is a firmer justice on the horizon, not beholden to one particular political party and committed to intelligent judicial balance – Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee judge I covered years ago. 

She is running for the high court in 2023.  Her election in April would quietly but instantly correct a big problem in the state and pave the way for more intelligent and progressive elections in 2024 and 2026.

I expect more attention will be paid to this state race,  including vicious GOP attacks and big money,  because the US high court’s decisions taking away rights people thought they had has made everyone more conscious of the importance of judicial appointments – on all levels.  In Wisconsin we elect them.

Even a casual look at the state high court decisions on voting rights, big business behavior, John Doe probes of corruption – and on and on – emphasize how this is the next most important election in Wisconsin.

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his Doms Domain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

BRANDS OF FEAR PREOCCUPY NOV. 8 VOTERS

By Dominique Paul Noth

I wonder how many other voters are caught in a seesaw about Nov. 8. Sometimes, absorbing interviews and speeches from President Biden and other leading Democrats, I agree that optimism is in order, that America has toyed with running on fear before and generally corrected itself when the voters see an administration getting things done – or look around the corner at things that one side will do more than the other side. 

That makes me want to preach Nov. 8 as salvation, a nation correcting and protecting itself.

And then come the strident dark clouds of teetering poll numbers and GOP voices saying the big fear should be migrants and crime. Part of me doesn’t want to believe Wisconsin voters would tolerate another six years of Ron Johnson. But those ads are everywhere!

(Illustration text:  Newspapers are having fun contrasting the filtered image of Barnes in Johnson home mailers to the actual lighter skin photo at right.)

In states like Wisconsin, the GOP also has gerrymandering on its side. Even publications like the New York Times have noticed, quoting Democratic Party organizer Tammy Wood in Wisconsin: “It is daunting to convince fellow Democrats their votes matter. That is the purpose of the gerrymander — to make us fall into that feeling of defeat.” 

In Wisconsin crime is being linked bigtime to Mandela Barnes (as mis-portrayed in endless dark money GOP TV ads that colorize Mandela in shadows. make his movements herky-jerky and blame him for all the children abducted into a van). The crime issues raised may be state ones not federal, dating back to a bill he supported in the Assembly as did many Republicans, prosecutors and judges wanting a better cash bail law for Wisconsin.

More mildly, maybe because Tony Evers isn’t black and as governor has tried to increase funding for police departments but was blocked by GOP legislators, the leaking faucet of drip-drip Michels commercials plays similar themes.  Fair is fair, I guess, since the anti-Michels home mailers make him look almost as grainy and villainous as Barnes does in the TV ads.

These crime ads are cited as the main cause of Barnes shrinking in the polls from a lead to a few points behind. On the other hand, the polls show fluidity, and his counterattack seems to be having success.  We keep seesawing back and forth, don’t we?

In Pennsylvania, where Democrat John Fettermen once had a clear lead over TV doctor Oz, crime ads are also blamed for the polls tightening. Ditto Colorado of all states, ditto Nevada, ditto Ohio, ditto North Carolina where Democrat Cheri Beasley once actually had the lead in polls that are now tied.

The GOP-supporting dark money involved is close to obscene – and the anger of Democrats is growing that their own party doesn’t have or won’t spend their own dark money (don’t we have that?). Or maybe the complaint is that the Democrats’ legitimate funding outlets aren’t spending more money to support these candidates plus some long shots as Charles Booker in Kentucky, Mike Franken in Iowa and even Trudy Busch Valentine in Missouri (who is having success as well as laughs  reminding Missouri voters that the US Senate needs a nurse, which she is).

Look beyond the games of who has money and how it is spent. The ability of voters to blame Democrats for crime statistics, which are actually sinking in some places, is ridiculous. Especially, as cooler heads point out, statistics show Republicans are not better than Democrats in this regard -- in fact, right now crime is statistically worse in states considered red not blue. So much for GOP leadership!

The other Republican selling point is equally ridiculous according to facts – inflation.  My main reaction might be amusement at the voters who think like that, followed by anger at their naval gazing. But the immediate issues at the supermarket seem to be trumping common sense about the future.

Sure, we are in inflation, but what did you expect? Think what we just went through.  In the first year of COVID, we are more and more learning, Trump responded poorly. Biden did much better. If there was ever a time for the federal government to give money over to people suffering from the pandemic, both parties agreed and the Democrats’ aid strategy once Trump lost has worked much better.

Other consequences that led to inflation) were disruption in the supply system, which had a lot to do with how many goods were manufactured in foreign hands – such as computer chips, which Biden is addressing with big money for US manufacturing.  Time will cure the problems, but which party’s hands do you want in charge?

Does the American voter also want to suspend aid to Ukraine to make the supermarket prices lower? That was another costly commitment that the Biden administration has taken on, which the Republicans are making negative noises about despite the applause of most American shoppers. 

You can more rightly blame the cost of fossil fuels on Russia and the Saudis.  Biden is the one who has cut the national budget deficit in half, freed oil from national reserves, worked to keep pushing on climate change while dealing with the interim need for increased oil production (an interim I expect to last for decades). Trump’s big selling point was his tax cuts for the richest, snarling at our NATO allies and saying climate change was no big deal.

But the polls keep suggesting a close election and that voters don’t take seriously enough the threat to democracy and basic voting rights the Democrats keep talking about.

Wisconsin particularly suffers because in statewide elections we lean toward Democrats, but through gerrymandering we have a Republican dominated legislature that resists sensible changes in voting policy, gun policy, medical policy and so forth.

Ohio and Georgia worry me, because I feel that both are states once thought red in balance but o are now on the bubble, and you can almost feel those local pockets of GOP voters getting angry about that.  It’s also hard to apply any logic to how hard it has been for Warnock to shake off Walker in Georgia despite the Republican’s constant idiocy– or for that matter in Ohio for Tim Ryan to shake off the personality loops and dodges of J.D. Vance.

And then Georgia and Florida worry me because their state leadership continues to push the voter suppression buttons in heavily organized campaigns and state laws that aim to keep the poor and disenfranchised at home.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, food and gasoline costs are going down and are precisely the transitory wounds of our society that neither party can solve. Crime flows up and down in a society that still hasn’t sensibly addressed its gun problem and the issues of equity. Right now, though, the GOP is telling us to fear, fear, fear.

Except for FOX talking heads, the media has been sounding the alarm about an imminent loss of US Democracy, a rise in antisemitism, a rise in foreigner hatred (if you regard the immigrant community that has been our nation’s backbone as foreigners) and attempts to turn the power of voting over to Republican legislatures. But are the voters listening? And to whom are they listening?

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his Doms Domain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

 

A TINGE OF RACISM PLAYS WELL IN JOHNSON’S TV ADS AGAINST BARNES

 By Dominique Paul Noth

As national surveys keep showing, citizens absorbed by commercial television’s endless crime shows tend to have a more negative view of their own personal safety, particularly in urban communities.  The images they believe in are rife with dark alley gangs often portrayed as black thugs threatening those nice white citizens who are the clean-cut center of our democracy – at least in this corner of TV land.

I think the stereotypes are even worse in Wisconsin – at least judging by the millions of dollars in TV ads on cable and on the Internet funded by Ron Johnson and Tim Michels, Republican candidates who have a lot more personal wealth and PACs to throw around than their opponents.

Judging by recent polls – Johnson has climbed eight points to nip ahead of Mandela Barnes where a month ago he was seven points behind – the slimy crime ads succeed in something more than reminding us, as polls often do, how fickle are the public’s opinions.  These ugly ads appeal to the darkest regions of the human brain by emphasizing shadows and subtly dimmer lighting. They may obviously be as they have been identified for years as “political advertisements that blatantly stoke racial fears and stereotypes,” but they work.

They did for the first President Bush in that still notorious “Willie Horton” ad that tied Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis to a convicted black rapist.  They worked most prominently in Wisconsin in 2008 when buffoon Michael Gableman beat the only black elected to the state’s highest court by juxtaposing Louis Butler’s image with a black rapist that Justice Louis Butler had nothing to do with the release of.

(Gableman was a laughingstock for 10 years on the high court, but he returned and even doubled down on his buffoonery – so extreme about Biden’s election win that his fellow Republicans have been busy trying to disown him and justify the million dollars taxpayers spent on his “investigation.”)

There was always a subliminal visual appeal to these ads that stay just slightly to one side of legal consequences.  Gableman was actually brought up on legal charges of exploitation, but since he was one of the votes in the high court monitoring role, he escaped judgment by a 3-3 tie among the other members.

In Johnson’s ads against Barnes – unavoidable even on MSNBC and YouTube, so heavy is the ad expenditure – they feature every ugly image of Barnes’ longer beard as opposed to the well-trimmed one he has today.

They blur the lighting and the facial images as if they have discovered someone lurking in doorways surrounded by graffiti, whose head moves in a jerky motion as misshapen headlines and phrases are painted behind him. They pull every misleading quote by Barnes about defunding the police or how he supports (as well he should) the progressive side of the Democratic Party -- despite every clear Barnes in-context explanation of what he said.

Now, progressive though I may be, I did worry last year of how many Democrats were caught up in the understandable George Floyd protests and hung out with the “defund the police” crowd.  There was an understandable repulsion at how many black citizens has been shot by police.

That anger caught up many moderates including Republicans – until cooler heads better defined the movement as ”refund the police” to better recognize mental illness and social needs, which I really can’t find anyone opposing.  But those damned images and isolated old quotes still flourish on TV as if black skin is still affiliated with dark streets, as if muggings and nightclub shootings by every race take place in the daylight.

Tim Michels, running against Gov. Tony Evers, has tried similar crime ads but Evers has such a mild-mannered image and sensible policies that these ads backfire.  He tries to blame Evers for taking money away from police forces while Evers actually proposed an increase that was shot down by a GOP legislature!

But Wisconsin voters are still so weird on this issue that Michels poll numbers have also gone up slightly, basically meaning that the Democrats cannot relax the pressure in the last months, and we really won’t know what will happen until Nov. 8.

Meanwhile we have to recognize that in terms of political ads TV is still segregated, thanks to how local ads are inserted into what we think are national programs or national Internet services.

Folks in other states do not see the repellent GOP ads we get in Wisconsin just as we don’t see the senate and gubernatorial ads from other states where the Democrats are now gaining in terms of the Senate particularly and the House in general. 

You could argue that this is because the big GOP money is more scattered or hasn’t yet landed full bore in Ohio and Pennsylvania (where Democratic senate candidates Tim Ryan and John Fettermen are ahead).  But it could also be that Wisconsin’s more extremely split citizenry are more vulnerable to the TV commercials and the generalities about crime, punishment and blackness than their national counterparts.

Personal Note: Maybe the visitors are mainly law students fascinated as I am by what Wisconsin lost in 2008 – and may be restored again in 2023 if Janet Protasiewicz, is elected to the high court – but I am still getting visitors to a 2015 article I wrote (rare for an old political piece to still get traffic) about Louis Butler.

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his Doms Domain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

NOVEMBER VOTERS ARE REAL TARGET OF THAT TRUMP SPECIAL MASTER RULING

 By Dominique Paul Noth

John Roberts (hardly having a liberal bone in his body) has lost any semblance of control of the conservative court he is chief justice of. He’s been pushed aside not just by Trump’s ability in four years to make three appointments. Old buddies like Sam Alito are shoving him into the toilet.

For three years in speeches and reports, Roberts has been urging his colleagues to move more slowly through past decisions and insisting the federal court system is nonpartisan.  There are not Obama judges or Trump judges, he has proclaimed, but judges doing the best they can to protect democracy and the Constitution.

Guess what, John?  For any who doubted there are Trump judges willing to put politics above the law, it’s not just Alito. Welcome to the special master decision by a Trump appointed novice district judge in Florida.

She has invented a special deference for former presidents (or just one of them) when facing criminal investigation, forcing a special master to be appointed before the Department of Justice can use the documents seized in August at Mar-a-Lago.  That seems to mean that even forensic evidence about who handled what has to be deferred until a special master decides what is in bounds and what it not.

Legal experts respond with
rage and sadness to
Aileen Cannon

Constitutional lawyers on all sides are frankly aghast.  Aileen M. Cannon based in Florida -- and only appointed by the disappearing GOP Senate majority in the days after Trump lost the election – has basically invented standards beyond the attorney-client privilege a special master is supposed to protect.  She has imagined a standard for ex-presidents (those named Trump not Obama) and ordered the DOJ not to use any of the material seized in August for criminal prosecution, though the DOJ knows full well (while we don’t) what it found.

The DOJ, the national archives and the FBI found a lot more at Mar-a-Lago before August, none of which is hampered by the Cannon fodder.  (Though the August haul is more clearly stuff Trump was hiding.)  Plus, there are arrays of grand juries and legislative hearings probing Trump that will not slow down.  It does mean that several of these impending charges are about money and influence, though some want to find him guilty of Jan. 6.

Trump may wind up an Al Capone echo, forced into prison by tax stuff though we knew his mob behavior killed people.

TV’s usual array of talking heads – right, left and supposedly middle – seem equally muddled. Some see a victory for Trump, others expect it is activating his opposition and speeding his doom (sort of like Russia buying missiles from North Korea, which can be seen as a sign of Putin’s deterioration).

All acknowledge its main gain is a delaying tactic forcing the DOJ into a difficult decision as it lays grounds for what it will accept or oppose by Sept. 9 in the choice of special master. In a rare display of judicial balance, Trump’s former attorney general, Bill Barr, likened the special master ruling to a baseball game “rain delay of a couple of innings.”

Traditionalists, recognizing how this novice judge has created new rules just for Trump, want the DOJ to go the formal appeal route to a higher court, the 11th Circuit where 5 of the 11 judges were appointed by Trump.  But all are probably more restrained by their judicial temperament than she was.  The appeal route could force intermittent delays, briefs, a trial-level presentation, even an appeals panel that can be appealed to a full court, causing even more months.

Meanwhile simply choosing a special master – who is supposed to have judicial experience – may also be a delay but far quicker.  Hovering over all is the public and legal anger that the Cannon novice has written new rules of the road, and these must be forced away by judicial sensibility.

But honestly, how do these delay tactics benefit Trump? The public is clearly impatient to see him penalized or absolved. His tactics do suggest he still holds some power.  Yet the tactics give the various branches of the law more time and clout in pursuing him. Meanwhile the public is getting sick of the game and disinterested, which may work to Trump’s advantage. People are asking themselves if the full force of the government can’t lock him up, maybe the public should just let him be.

And that’s the only way the delays will work – IF in November the Republicans gain power at the polls. IF the Republicans take enough seats in the House to stop the Jan. 6 hearings. IF the GOP gains enough leverage in the Senate to block the range of good things the 50-50 split (with VP Kamala Harris as tiebreaker) have put in place. IF enough states gain enough GOP voters to revive abortion laws passed in the 19th century when women didn’t have a vote.  IF such antiquity and GOP gerrymandering (under the inane false equivalency that “we’d better do it to the Democrats before they do it to us”) gain even an inch of ground.

That Trump judge in Florida has actually clarified how real are the worries about our democracy being in danger.  The extremes of the SCOTUS abortion ruling gave voters, even those who didn’t like Roe v Wade, more reason than ever before to roll away from the extreme right wing. 

 Biden’s successful infrastructure and inflation reduction bills are also making inroads, as are his speech efforts to separate responsible Republicans from MAGA ones.

For the public that refused to worry about the future of our democracy, the special master decision should have a very specific meaning.  The danger warnings no longer feel like the left side of right-wing conspiracy paranoia. More of the public is now activated by concern for one person, one vote, for the basic standards of democracy. 

These voters realize the danger is real – if a judge in Florida can violate all expectations to rule somewhat in his favor, if he can still draw several hundreds to his rallies almost two years after leaving office, if states continue to try to elevate false electors,  if  state GOP legislators try to override the votes against them in an election. 

If these attacks and more succeed, it will only be because voters didn’t pay attention and organize to shoot them down.

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

CAMPAIGN TACTICS HAVE GOP PEDDLING HATE AND DEMOCRATS CAUGHT IN THE SWITCHES

 By Dominique Paul Noth

If you’re on the Internet or watching TV looking ahead to the November election, you know the GOP is offering you resentment and the Democrats, judging by their emails, are still in the throes of desperation.

The Republicans are all about hating those who are benefitting from Biden’s moderate but progressive approach, which actually is getting astounding things done on the climate change front, combatting inflation and deepening the benefits of Obamacare, to name the top of my list. 

Now added in is student loan debt relief for the lower incomes in particular.   But the GOP ads dominate in encouraging people who paid their student debt to resent any giveaway to students carrying the debt, even though the government aid back then (state and federal) was vastly superior and even high-priced private universities didn’t cost that much (I went to Marquette University in the 1960s and remember $500 a semester,).

Mandela Barnes made to look
lousy in GOP TV ads.

The sense of hatred expands into the techniques of advertising, though I am sure some Democrats are also guilty of similar devices.  But they sure dominate in GOP ads in Wisconsin. 

The  commercials reduced to slow-motion shadowy images every bad moment Mandela Barnes has ever had in campaigning  -- trying to make him look like a cartoon or puppet, while  also  trying to tie him into what they regard as the extreme vision of the  Squad (their term for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her allies) – who in the case the GOP cite also have allies in most Democrats and even some Republicans in trying to get rid of cash bail as  the prime way to control  lawbreakers. The dominance of cash bail has long harmed lower income workers rather than the criminals who exist in all rungs of society. The GOP is reverting to the 1950s and trying to make opposition to extreme cash bail a sign of law-and-order weakness.

 The GOP approach -- demonizing all those seeking better roads to social justice as weaklings at law and order -- comes even as the party supports the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2020, most of whom were white Trump supporters.

Speaking of the Johnson race against Barnes, his ads are particularly weak-kneed for any who know his actual history.  There are those ads in which a trucker (or actor) and a young mother (or actress) praise Rojo for defending the working family. The trucker ad even has him doing great things like supporting domestic gas production and the Keystone Pipeline (which is only a conduit through the US for Canadian tar gas heading to Gulf ports, proving again that the GOP treats Wisconsin voters as know-nothings about Rojo’s tax policies and actual behavior.

The resentment politics – hate these liberals! –  are most evident locally in Tim Michels race for governor.  Most people realize that Gov. Tony Evers is hardly a professional long-term politician, more the milquetoast-looking detail man who spent most of his career in education.  But Michels, who owns homes in many states and whose construction company has benefitted mightily from Evers’ spending on roads ignored by the previous GOP administration, has been filling the airwaves and campaign rallies urging people to hate those in government who want to spend more money on schools and higher education.

What I’ve personally enjoyed is looking back in time at which presidents’ tax and social policies most helped my family (I can start with LBJ, then skip to Clinton slightly, then Obama a lot and then Biden, literally unable to think of anything Reagan, the Bushes and Trump did to help my struggles to raise nine children; Nixon, my amazed memory records, actually did some things). 

I find the most mature Americans are not resentful of Biden’s help to those with student debt but wish it had happened in their time, are glad they spent the money to improve family income despite the tight belts it caused and doubly glad that it looks like their children will suffer less if prices of education can come down. They remember how different government attitudes toward schools and higher education were then.

I think the GOP approach is going to backfire – and already has, as the Biden team takes some delight in fighting back.

Some Democrats I like who are running in more moderate states are trying to achieve a balance in the wrong way (such Michael Bennet seeking re-election in Colorado and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, plus Senate wannabe Tim Ryan the Ohio Democratic candidate who is heads and shoulders above his opposition).  They are going to regret their hands-off Biden approach because he may have mediocre poll numbers now, but those numbers are likely to climb as people weigh his accomplishments. 

My emails from Democrats amuse me in their strident demands for money because they are clearly based on poll numbers in early summer that have swung to the Democrat side in August, giving them much better odds in the Senate and even better chances in the House. 

I don’t blindly trust the vagaries of the polls (and the public that responds to polling) but the rise in Democrat fortunes reflects my anecdotal take (in a community of mixed partisan beliefs). These are highly paid campaign workers putting out the email blitzes, and they may be based on the time-tested belief that negative ads bring in more money.

But from where they started the blasts a few months ago the conversation has shifted under their email fists. Incumbent Mark Kelly’s email team tells me they’re packing their bags and leaving Arizona, so upset are they by the GOP dark money pouring in against him.  Val Demmings team in Florida cries “game over” and Maggie Hassan’s emails from New Hampshire chronicle how much mysterious GOP money is lining up against her.  When they composed those emails, the polls didn’t show Kelly leading little-known venture capitalist Blake Masters, nor Demmings in a tie or ahead or Marc Rubio, not Hassan pulling ahead.

Similar “end of the road” emails stem from throughout the Democratic nation, even down to House races.   Bennet in Colorado is trying to establish a more positive image, but his campaign hires are still engaging in the doomsday approach. From Nevada (or the Internet portals being used), Catherine Cortez Masto’s emails are equally bleak, reflecting what was a difficult fund-raising period for them and the tons of dark money the GOP has poured into these contests.

John Fettermen winning in Pennsylvania

Perhaps because the poll numbers have been building in John Fetterman’s favor for months in Pennsylvania and for Barnes in Wisconsin, their campaigns have mixed the pleas for money with a more optimistic view of America’s future.

The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC) has also expanded its aims.  Aside from the traditional defense of threatened incumbents (Kelly, Hassan, Bennet, Cortez Mastro with less attention to Patty Murray in Oregon and Tammy Duckworth in Illinois who seem in better shape) the DSCC has expanded its money-raising activity to encompass some new polling favorites – Fettermen, Ryan, Cheri Beasley in North Carolina and Demmings in Florida.

Sen. Gary Peters

I almost feel sorry for the nice guy, new DSCC chairman Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, a low-key and quite successful public servant who fought off a big money attack to win re-election. He at first refused calls to head the DSCCC (main job is setting goals and raising money for the Senate) and finally gave in to pleas from fellow Democrats who admired his quiet way of working. 

Now he is being pestered to add more attention (meaning money) to Democratic newcomers who are making unexpected inroads in come from behind campaigns – particularly Charlie Booker in Kentucky and even Trudy Busch Valentine who lags further behind in a tradition red state like Missouri yet is gaining ground because of her roots as an Anheuser Busch heir and her own personal record as a nurse and social activist.

My emails are clogged by the new ability of American voters to give money over the Internet to any state they wish (even if they can’t vote there) while the nature of cable and cut-in network ads tend to only tell Wisconsin voters about their own state contests.

The GOP can find nothing more to do than to push the resentment, basically reminding voters their currently constricted party hasn’t done much of anything for Americans except to gripe about inflation and immigration. The Democrats are doing better though they still seem to be looking for problems in the headlines to worry about. We certainly are not framing the future as a positive place, are we?

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee. 

NATIONALLY AND LOCALLY, POLLS SHOW DEMOCRATS’ POWER SURGING

By Dominique Paul Noth

I have my problems with the Marquette University law school poll though it is one of the most scrupulously done in Wisconsin.  I fear a little bit that poll expert Charles Franklin sometimes overreaches trying to balance the rural and urban vagaries of this curious   state and thus the poll, like the university, tends to reflect more conservative concerns than a good Jesuit institution should. But that may be mainly about me and my experiences as a long-ago MU student and teacher who liked to push the institution’s buttons.

Still I noticed with interest the week of August 16 how the Senate poll put Mandela Barnes seven points ahead of incumbent ass Ron Johnson (now you know my political leanings) while suggesting that the governor’s race between Tony Evers and  unknown (before his endless TV ads) GOP billionaire Tim Michels (whose construction business has been rewarded with projects from  Evers’ tireless effort to fix Wisconsin roads, led into disrepair by GOP policies) is a contest several points closer, though Evers is still two points ahead.

Mandela Barnes (left) gained his
statewide moxie as lieutenant 
governor to Tony Evers in 2018.

That pleases me in one sense because Barnes’ reputation throughout the state as Evers’ lieutenant governor is clearly dominating any concern about his skin color (in a state not recently famous for avoiding racist concerns) and to this point Rojo hasn’t played the race card as I suspect he eventually will.

But here’s why it also worries me. The Evers race is more important and it’s tighter.

I consider the state in total to lean toward progressive policies, but it is also the classic example in the nation of how a GOP dominated legislature, even with a Democratic governor, is unhealthily self-naval focused on winning elections and keeping ordinary folks from voting. 

Forget the stupidity people feel looking at Wyoming whose voters plug away in blind support of Trump even in the face of one-time conservative darling Liz Cheney.  Sometimes Wisconsin voters behave no better. 

How else can you explain the tolerance for gerrymandering and the tendency of GOP legislators to do so little for their constituents and so much for their biggest donors? -- and keep getting elected by the folks they openly call their sheep? As election expert David Pepper recently told New Yorker magazine in a thoughtful article: “No one knows anything about statehouses. They can’t even name their state representatives. And it’s getting worse every year, since the local media’s dying and the statehouse bureaus are being hollowed out.”

To be blunt, the only thing standing between the GOP’s worst tendency and Wisconsin’s chance of improving things for its citizens is Tony Evers, the governor whose presence thwarts the GOP – and next April Democrats could thwart them even deeper when the election of Janet Protasawiecz to the state’s highest court will literally flip the balance on the high court and block the GOP from expecting favorable rulings.

Dare I say it out loud. As much as I like Barnes and dislike Rojo, re-electing Evers as governor is the most important task facing the voters in November. If along the way they can weaken the GOP hold on the legislature – even though the Democrats didn’t universally field candidates in rural GOP strongholds, misreading how much the fever for change was operating – that would be great as well.

Nationwide, in fact, history may be standing on its head thanks to constant right-wing overreach.  Only the GOP rumbles about inflation are keeping the party in the election game and it may well be the most powerful, if misapplied, issue the GOP has. 

Recent polls suggest that Biden’s calm manner as well as his sneaky progressive commitment are starting to gain traction.   Of course, young voters would rather have someone who doesn’t look like their grandpa, but so far no one in their generation has proven as politically nimble.  Politics is a different kind of marathon.

Biden is taking victory laps for the Inflation Reduction Act, which has many elements.  But its common name doesn’t reflect the climate change reality -- it’s the largest climate rescue investment in human history. 

The Democrats’ standings in national ratings are beginning to reflect this, even before Labor Day when traditionally most citizens don’t look very much at politics.  I think the abortion decision and Trump’s flirtations with prison are changing that – in fact, I am most distressed that in America there are still 20% of Americans who cling to Trump and don’t believe in the realities in front of them. They stubbornly vote for people who aren’t doing them any good.  I’m not sure Trump alone is responsible.   There has been a curious willful me-ism streak in American society for centuries.

History records that, in our two-party system, the party out of White House power does well in the mid-terms, and it is hard for pundits to recognize why this year may change that.  In the past voters almost unconsciously tried to keep the nation in balance by helping both parties.   Few believe that today’s Republicans have any ideas how to solve the issues and they are starting to give the Democrats credit for intelligently trying. 

Reality is sinking in, putting the inflation issue in balance. The country has come through COVID-19 and other diseases, a crazy Putin, aggressive China, supply problem issues, a Supreme Court attack on women and more problems that would stymie the best economy and the best administration. Yet all the GOP can think to do in their TV commercials is blame Biden – and then try to say he is too old and senile to be effective.  They can’t have it both ways as he passes the most progressive legislation in decades.

It is starting to make a difference though everything is still in doubt with November a few months away.  But look at recent polls.  I am not much enamored of how Americans keep changing their minds in polls, but only a few months ago, the pollsters were doubting the Democrats could keep the Senate and pretty much stated they would lose the House. Not today.

In August, many polls are saying the Democrats have a chance to expand the Senate and that the House could flip either way.  The Inflation Reduction Act that Biden and Congress passed is only part of the difference, but this is the part that should keep growing in the voters’ minds until November.  By then, it is hoped, more of the nation will be clear on where their brightest political future resides.

In Pennsylvania, John Fetterman's 
everyman image is a winner.

Democrats still engage in desperation email campaigns, each claiming that giving money to just this one candidate (be it Mark Kelly in Arizona or Michael Bennet in Colorado or Warnock in Georgia) was essential to keep the Democratic majority,  The Democrat PR folks haven’t caught up with the national thinking that gives the Democrats a better chance – not  only  to Kelly, Warnock  and Bennet (who are now polled as leading)  but also to Catherine Cortez Masto now leading  in Nevada, Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire and even added targets – Democrat Tim Ryan in Ohio, John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Cheri Beasley in North Carolina  and amazingly Val Demmings in Florida. All are also leading or gaining in polls.

The hopes for these Democrats are even bringing tsunami dreams to some Democratic insiders.  They are chastising party leaders for not giving more money to Charlie Booker in Kentucky (running against the schizophrenic – even to Republicans – Rand Paul). Booker has rightly pointed out that what the abortion issue did in Kansas it may do again in Kentucky.

Also looking stronger are retired admiral Mike Franken who has made inroads against Chuck (“am I really going to pretend I can run again?) Grassley in Iowa at age 88, and even Budweiser heir Taylor Busch Valentine trying for the Blunt seat in  normally red Missouri (she loves to point out she would add a much-needed nurse to the Senate).    Along with those Democrats who look totally safe in their seats (Patty Murray, Richard Blumenthal and Tammy Duckworth) the odds are looking better for a broad swath of Democrats.

Recent polls suggest they may even hang on in the House. Sure, if you look at gerrymandering, we may see more of extreme Republicans like Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy, but not as once thought in majority positions. If progressive voters hit the polls. And the new political reality of our Internet times is that progressives in other states can send money and call their friends.

About the author: Noth has been a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org. In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.