Sunday, November 12, 2017

ETHICS IN A TOXIC ELECTION ERA – INCLUDING WISCONSIN

By Dominique Paul Noth

Roy Moore (left) vs. Doug Jones, a hot time in Alabama.
There is a surprising 38th parallel in politics that routine candidate ads are not supposed to cross even if third parties do.  The line is using legally unproven crimes and scandals from the past against an opponent in last minute ads -- despite their availability in news stories. 

It is amazing – and sometimes quite pleasing -- how cautious even today are political ads by candidates about using such material in the final weeks of a campaign.  Except if your name is Donald Trump.

Part of it is self-preservation, part fear of backlash accusations of gutter politics but some reasons are moral scruples.

Nowhere has this been truer than in the state you’d expect it to be less true right now – Alabama.  Defrocked justice and wannabe senator Roy Moore may use every radio outlet he can find to blame opposing candidate Doug Jones, the Democrats, Amazon.com, even George Soros for smear tactics and gutter politics four weeks before the senate electoral vote, though the well researched Washington Post story about child sexual molestation in 1979, when she was 14 and he was 32, was clearly dragged out of people in multiple interviews and hardly initiated by political opponents.

In fact, the Jones campaign has been scrupulous to not use the ugliness  even in its email solicitations, which fill my email box and many others.

(Editor's note: On a Monday filled with fresh revelations, the Jones campaign went a tad further, praising the courage of the women who came forward to accuse Moore.)

It is Moore’s fellow Republicans who immediately expressed their doubts about his innocence, partly because they already thought his views unhinged but most prominently because they agree with Mitt Romney’s tweet:  “Innocent until proven guilty is for criminal convictions, not elections.” Every time he tries to address going out with teenagers as a man in his thirties, he reinforces the allegations.

Despite the rantings from the Moore’s side, and perhaps because  of the timing of the report (like the true but late DUI report about  George Bush),  the most the Jones campaign at this writing has said in email solicitations is that their candidate is gaining momentum, a common fund-raising come-on.

Over the weekend they still avoided the story:  “So now Moore is hiding from reporters, refusing to debate Doug, and running a MAJOR ad campaign to defeat us!”  And sure enough, after leaving the airwaves largely to Jones’ common sense persuasions that even a Democrat could work better with both sides of the aisle than Moore could, the Moore third party camp is launching a last minute ad blitz. They are not sure if the religious faithful will stand by Moore even harder as many think or drift away in the privacy of the voting booth.

Wisconsin, fortunately, has nothing as horrible.  But in fact the pettiness in crossing that line is notable in some preliminary social media posts by campaigns, and to me that is disturbing this early in the election season. 

So far these are minor blips and slips on the Wisconsin  campaign trail and I sometime fear I am behaving like a Puritan policeman beating the early brush for intrusions, whispers, sly wording or unneeded interpolation signaling ethics slipperage.

I don’t want to be too pure of heart here, but I am hearing snideness already among supporters of the 17 announced or almost announced Democratic candidates for governor (there’s a list at the end of this story). Several of the snide will have ad responsibility for their choices. I think the Democrats’ success in Virginia stemmed in large part from knowing when to put away the intramural knives, and I already sense how little hiccups now can slide across the ethical line. 

In that spirit, let me fret about something four months ahead of the non-partisan primary and spring election, mitigated I suspect by a boiling understandable anger within the electorate of wanting to know how the judges they elect will rule on their issues, so biased to the conservative side is the state’s highest court right now.

Tim Burns, the most openly left candidate running for Wisconsin Supreme Court, has used social media to point readers to the news stories about an opponent in the race, strongly supported by Republicans, ticketed for trespassing and obstruction in 1989 during an abortion protest. Now Michael Screnock’s opposition to abortion, given his right-wing ruttings, is hardly a surprise and there were plea deals that apparently allowed him to become a judge.   

That was not pointed out in the Burns campaign message.  Screnock’s behavior was a disqualifying factor for me when I read the news, but I didn’t like a candidate using it outside the more balanced media. And then telling people how to think by posting mug shots with the tagline: “Does this seem like Michael Screnock would respect women's rights?”

I’m sure I’m about to offend someone, but why does a belief in abortion automatically brand someone as disrespectful to women and not worth the trouble of trying to recruit to progressive viewpoints?

There is another one – a Burns email solicitation I regard as too sly for its own good, talking about an event in which a reporter asked each candidate to name a justice they admired.  Milwaukee Judge Rebecca Dallet, pursuing the same liberal voters that Burns is, mentioned Sara Dey O’Connor – not for her decisions, she emphasized to the reporter, but her acknowledged diligence and listening in approaching issues.  

Look how that came out in the Burns email solicitation.

The differences in this election could not be more clear . . . 
Last week, a reporter asked which U.S. Supreme Court Justice each of the candidates admired most.
What did my opponents say? Republican Justices Scalia and O'Connor.
My answer? Thurgood Marshall.”

Now I also admire the late Marshall, though the civil rights activism that marked his career are hardly the cases that will come before the state supreme court where we need balance.

And I was bothered at the conflation of his opponents – who cited whom and why? --  especially since Dallet went out of her way to explain her choice of O’Connor as a justice she didn’t always agree with but who didn’t wear politics on her sleeve, which she thinks hurts high courts today.

While some think the voters just want to know which side justices are on – given how right-wing the state court has been – Dallet told me in an interview she believes a blatant political tilt can be toxic, that people are afraid to bring cases to the court if they already sense how a judge is leaning.
Randy Bryce running against Paul Ryan . . . 

I sure felt similar twinges about Dan Bice’s JS story pointing out how candidate Randy Bryce had a three months delay in child support payments, since rectified.  There was no support issue between him and his former wife; she knows iron work is seasonal and that Randy is a devoted father who’s always there for his 11-year old son. And I understand Bice scours public records for news.
. . . has dominated the headlines Cathy Myers
thinks ignore her campaign.

I didn’t understand why Cathy Myers, Bryce’s fellow progressive in seeking to displace Paul Ryan from the First District House – a goal I sincerely agree with – would jump on this delay as some sort of character issue.  Frankly, Bryce’s struggle to maintain child support is something a lot of voters will admire, and it emphasizes how he is not entering this contest with the big bucks that Ryan has behind him.

Still, Myers is a most respectable and welcome candidate, with strong support in Janesville for her school board races and certainly articulate on many of the issues in the race. She is clearly miffed at all the publicity Bryce has engendered from his earliest videos and the force of his image and personality as a striking contrast to Paul Ryan. 

It was that enthusiasm that last October 5 produced this tweet from her: “Like too many women, I know what it's like to prepare, work hard & be successful only to be ignored in favor of a less qualified man.”

Well, some may sympathize with that blunt assessment.  But it is also true that a traditional progressive opponent, which is what Myers is, hasn’t generated the headlines and interest that Bryce has in this race.  It’s because of the IronStache campaign that Ryan for the first time in years is running a bit scared. Add to that his abysmal record as speaker of the house clinging to Trump in D.C. while pretending to voters back home he is maintaining a distance.

Some of this is the normal bitterness and contrast that candidates, even when they actually have  similar views and aims, engage in to convince voters – but the issue is always how well they come together to fight for their side when the time for storms and disparagement passes.  And if the voters in this bitter national era are now willing to understand and forgive such games.

Final note: Current list of Democratic candidates for governor


Some detail is required in  referring to the large field of Democrats looking to run against Scott Walker for governor, though the field will be weeded down June 1 depending on nomination papers and then again that same June weekend by the Democratic state convention.

But right now, the known names statewide are quite interesting:

Newcomer Bob Harlow was early out of the gate and should be included along with former Reps. Kelda Helen Roys and Brett Hulsey, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, current Rep. Dana Wachs, state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, state school superintendent Tony Evers, Blue Jean movement’s Mike McCabe, businessman Andy Gronik, lawyer and active former candidate Matt Flynn and firefighter leader Mahlon Mitchell, who ran for lieutenant governor with Tom Barrett.

But aside from these better known statewide candidates there are interesting others in the race: Madison business leader Michele Doolan, former state candidate David Heaster from Fort Atkinson, Sheboygan businessman Kurt Jason Kober, former candidate Jared William Landry from LaFarge, Madison minister Andrew Lust,  Jeffrey Rumbaugh, an advocate for the disabled,  and photographer Ramona Rose Whiteaker from Stoughton.   


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 also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as 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 and Internet and consumer news. 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 culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  His award-winning theater reviews appear at urbanmilwaukee.com.


Friday, November 10, 2017

WILL MONEY DECIDE SENATE ELECTIONS – AGAIN?

By Dominique Paul Noth

Don’t know about you but my email has been flooded with fund-raising pitches from political candidates around the nation.  For news purposes I dip into Republican come-ons as well as Democrats but the Democrats are clearly more agitated.

Almost every email refers to the enormous dark money being raised by Republican opponents. A little research determined it is true.


Is Claire McCaskill top GOP target?
The GOP money machine aided by Citizens United, while also defending GOP seats, is trying to buffer the Senate by attacking sitting Democrats in vulnerable states. Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin are among those  facing  dark money media buys and can only turn to the mom and pop $25 givers to fight back. That’s why their email pleas are becoming more desperate this early for the November 2018 races.

Respected journalists concede that McCaskill is the top target of dark money.  Her newest pitch accurately quotes them: “The Washington Post has reported that our seat is the most likely to flip in 2018, and Roll Call called me the most vulnerable Senate Democrat in 2018,” which is why her Blue Missouri campaign has gone nationwide.

Brown in Ohio might argue it is him, if this were a battle of which Democrat was the most hated by dark money.  Brown, a popular progressive and hard worker you would think would be above attack, nevertheless comes from a state where Trump had a strong showing, so the GOP is going after him hard.

Baldwin is also fighting off dark money.
But I would put in a plug for Baldwin. The campaign against her doesn’t even have a final opponent and yet the leading primary contenders, Kevin Nicholson and Leah Vukmir, are attracting gobs of secret money in a battle for bucks more important to them than any ideological position they take. It’s a campaign of attack not light.

Each is seeking the most potent secret financing support not just within the state but outside it.  Richard Uihlein (who spent $23 million on conservative candidates in 2016) and billionaire Diane Hendricks (who has signed on to Vukmir’s campaign) provide just two of the wealthy names revealed to be using front groups pledged to generic attack ads.  They’ll get more specific depending on who wins the primary. 

Part of the sense of desperation is that every email says money is needed this week or by end of the week.  But that’s because campaigns are trying to reach reporting deadlines so they can look successful compared to the other side. My recommendation will not be liked by the campaigns – give when you can what you can and forget the deadline pleas.

We’ve barely tapped the GOP hit parade. Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida has joined the email scamper, pointing out that Trump recruited Florida Gov. Rick Scott to join a violently expensive effort to defeat him despite solid acceptance since 2001.

Even Massachusetts’ popular Elizabeth Warren is under fierce money attack, but typical of her support for underdog candidates elsewhere, she has announced she is splitting national donations with Doug Jones, the Democrat running against heavy odds in the growingly strange state of Alabama.

Alabama's Doug Jones
Jones is well worth a look in an election scheduled Dec. 12 – particularly if you know sensible voters in Alabama. A former prosecutor and centrist as a Southern Democrat, Jones in his commercials have tried to chide Alabamans into a less negative US reputation after tons of GOP corruption and private scandals involving its chambers and its former governor, who resisted impeachment until after he appointed Luther Strange, the state attorney general who delayed charging him, to replace Jeff Sessions in the Senate.

It is a crazy ugly history that helps explain why twice defrocked state supreme court justice Roy Moore is now on the GOP ticket for the senate against Jones, who was given a boost by a Fox News poll showing the race tied.

As good as that might make Democrats feel, deeper surveys suggest Jones is still 10 points behind in a deep red (for embarrassment?) state, but that’s still in striking distance because of the latest well researched scandal to descend on Moore, who has had almost a deity status in Alabama.  But minigods are hard to tarnish.

Moore’s self-publicized views have outraged both sides of the aisle, which may explain how quick Republicans were to believe the child molestation report about him and urge him to resign.

But he won’t, though the details of women chasing and juvenile prowling expose a hypocrisy that has become familiar to observers of evangelical pastors and politicians.  But also familiar is how the evangelical faithful refuse to believe it. Some in Alabama think Moore may do better because of the scandal while others hope the state will take this chance to grow up. Electing Jones would be a great sign.

Sometimes, though, the candidates have a natural charisma that draws voters to them, and that is Beto O’Rourke’s best longshot against, of all people, Sen. Ted Cruz.


Beto O'Rourke, a longshot to knock off Cruz
There was deep irony in Steve Bannon’s announcement that his right-wing fury will be unleashed on every incumbent Republican “except Ted Cruz.” It may be because in red Texas they think Cruz is secure against any opponent.

But quietly O’Rourke is actually making inroads early, drawing national mom and pop support.

Despite his youthful appearance, O’Rourke is a seasoned campaigner, having won his House seat in the El Paso area three times with big majorities. His “against the grain” grassroots campaign challenges Cruz not only on ideological fronts but as the spearhead of a progressive youth movement that is raising alarm among Republicans in Texas. Political insiders think he has a narrow chance by picking off moderate Republicans against the much disliked Cruz.

The larger question may be how aroused the voters are.  Will they be swayed by who has the most money or who waves the flag the hardest?  That worked in the past, as did misleading opposition research or insinuations. The vast money being thrown against Senate Democrats is a bet that the techniques of the past will always work because we are a nation of sheep.

To which I say, Baaa.


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 also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as 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 and Internet and consumer news. 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 culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  His award-winning theater reviews appear at urbanmilwaukee.com.


Wednesday, November 8, 2017

TRUMP RETURNING TO A BALANCED AMERICA

By Dominique Paul Noth
Virginia's new governor Ralph Northam, a nine point win
election night.

The timing was impossible to ignore.  Exactly a year after Trump took office, the US electorate awoke.  “A coalition of the decent stood up,” said Republican strategist Steve Schmidt in a TV interview. Others revived a  similar reference from a comic book:  The Justice League.

But those are the simplistic explanation for the runaway Democratic victories in New Jersey and Virginia, including some delegate results in the Virginia House that the most optimistic did not expect.  Shards of the victory were also felt in North Carolina, Maine, New Hampshire, Georgia, Washington State and elsewhere where minorities, one-time refugees and women were wining school districts, mayoral and local elections.

The national nightmare is not over just because the president has to tweet dismay from Asia.

Actually, as angry as the majority was after Trump’s electoral college victory in 2016, many were willing to give him a chance. For a while. The real fury began to emerge as more evidence mounted of corruption, collusion, lies unanswered, hollowed out agencies and trivial declarations. At first, many hoped the tweet storms, the personal insults, the dark knight rhetoric (“I alone can fix it”), the rambling policies were simply a candidate run amuck rather than the stability that would emerge after declaring himself just behind Lincoln in presidential stature

Ten months in office confirmed the worst. Unless the president goes through a remarkable un-Trumpian conversion, or interventions by  his aides more successful than they were on his Asia teleprompter  tour,  the public knows that what it sees now is what it will get for three more years – if he lasts that long.

The curiosity is that hopeful 30%-- the folks he could shoot on Fifth Avenue and still back him.

They don’t seem to live in the same objective world of facts as the once-sleepy majority of Americans.  In an age where women no longer will be dismissed as sexual toys to be fondled by the working man, it is the white women (at least half of them) standing by this shrinking pool of white men who cling to the Donald and blame others, like Congress, for blocking all the good things he has promised. 

They forget how Congress started drowning in the polls – it was  when the Republicans refused to work with a Democratic president who is looking more moderate every day. Last November, gleeful Republicans swore that since they had the White House, too, it was full speed ahead.  Cue the drowning music. 

Turns out ideas  still matter to the public, and theirs are wrapped in bizarre and still  unproven idealism about trickle down and protect the rich.  We will be saved by the tax bill, Paul Ryan pledges, even though his economic view does more damage to the Virginia voters who rose up to destroy his party in an off-year.  The kind of commandments they  keep pushing wouldn’t work if they got the  pie in the sky economy that 20 Koch Bros in a row could never deliver. 

They apparently don’t remember what Trump promised. Or like him they blame  the failures on immigrants he fumes about,  the foreign trade partners he now works with, the hires who keep fumbling and the offshore money he can’t bring back because his campaign coffers rely on it

He would hire great people and  wipe away the bureaucratic regulations interfering with good business. Remember? Instead time and again he wiped away rules few objected to because they kept rivers from being polluted and chemical spills from being controlled. Maybe destroying the earth is how he wanted to help businesses succeed.

Even one of his first acts was  lifting an Obama effort to limit the availability of guns to the mentally ill, yet Trump had the audacity to blame the Texas shooting on mental illness, not the easy access for arms to a proven domestic abuser. 

Repeal and replace Obamacare was sweeping ahead without any replacement or any intelligent reason for repeal. What is still sitting out there and scaring Americans  is not the regular order that bipartisan senators are working on but a GOP  plan that would return the US to the days of unfettered premium heights and lousy health plans.  Now the people on Medicaid are being threatened with work and community service requirements even in areas where there are not jobs or services available. It’s the “go ahead and die, lazy bones” rule.

In foreign affairs even at his best he is clearly being handled (a horrible thing to say about anyone elected to president, something that was whispered about Nixon’s final days).  The scientists still left in the administration see no alternative to human activity contributing  to climate change, and the best the White House can do is drop its harsher  rhetoric while riding its dinosaurs.

The mold has been cast.  But hatred for Trump  has become too commonplace and too ineffective.  In fairness there was an effort by many liberals to give him a chance until fool me once, fool me twice, turned into how many years can we play the fool. But the disaster of his methods at least opened a more positive door for the nation’s future.
Danica Roem (center) embraced by supporters election night

The lesson of Virginia moves far past Hillary’s method in 2016 to point out how ridiculous Trump sounded. The delegates who may actually take over an amazingly unbalanced Virginia House – 66-34 strongly gerrymandered  for the Republicans, even more than that 63-36 Wisconsin  Assembly -- emphasized local issues such as jobs, health care, even gun control.  The first openly transgender candidate, Danica Roem, rode the bathroom bill right-winger out of town by  9 percentage points  emphasizing infrastructure and traffic  issues! 

The lesson seems to be even deeper than running away from Trump but running on something people can grasp -- making their lives better on a local realistic front.  Now the Democrats have to stifle their internal distractions about who is progressive enough.

Some Democrats say this election shows the public is turning more radically left, pointing to the minorities that succeeded as almost an “in your face” vote to the right-wing.  Others are looking deeper. People did not elect candidates because their color or religion suggested an openness.  Their ideas did. They seemed closer to the problems of the people and committed to grassroots  door to door involvement.  Latino, black or white, they took a  “get it done” tone, ignored divisiveness and spelled out the importance of listening.

It will be interesting to see if Wisconsin learns these  lesson.  The Democrats here have not been as politically motivated and organized as folks in Virginia, even though the similarities between the  states are striking – rural vs. urban, horrible gerrymandering, entrenched GOP machine. 

There are efficient groups hereabouts to attract candidates and hit the streets, but not as many or as determined as it seems looking back at Virginia. There it was a commonality of purpose that brought together diverse Democratic factions while I still sense in Wisconsin some tugs of war among groups like Citizen Action, Indivisible, OFA, Emerge Wisconsin, Working Families Party and the Democratic state party under Martha Laning, which may at least have the most money on hand to work with.

Even in Virginia, the Trump side seemed pretty  hardened in more rural communities and the victories seemed built on suburbia.  True in this state as well. But even the rural communities in Wisconsin, whose numbers wouldn’t balance a furious outpouring from urban centers, will respond to policies and their own people that strike their needs not just seek to inflame and manufacture social values. 

Many progressive Catholics, for instance, tell me how disgusted they are that the abortion positions are described in the media  as pro-choice vs. pro-life.  They believe choice and life are compatible and their commonality in many ideas is butting against a simplistic journalistic cliché.  It has now translated to the streets, sort of a purity test of who is a real Democrat. That is so foolish.

People running for state or US legislature are beginning to get that, inviting people in on shared community values rather than trying to demonize on single issue statements.  Trump surely succeeded by sowing dissension on religion, place of birth, guns in the household, 19th century attitudes, waving the flag. The Nov. 7 winning candidates looked past that, and so did the voters.

It’s too early to pronounce dissension politics dead.  But Wisconsin could help drag such politics further toward the coffin.


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 also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as 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 and Internet and consumer news. 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 culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  His award-winning theater reviews appear at urbanmilwaukee.com.