ENVY IS DRIVING WISCONSIN DEMOCRATS

By Dominique Paul Noth

Portion of John Hart's photo in Wisconsin State Journal
 of majority leader Scott Fitzgerald skulking in the
background while Gov. Evers (left) attends
the session rejecting his ag appointment.

The longing to be Virginia – the state, that is -- is particularly strong in Wisconsin, which on paper has a similar state political setup but little chance of duplicating that Nov. 5 election outcome.

Like Virginia it has a Democratic governor, all new Democratic statewide offices (elected in 2018) and a Republican dominated legislature controlled largely, as was once true in Virginia, by decade-old Republican gerrymandering. 

The national media has paid more attention to the Democratic victory in Kentucky, which Trump had carried by 30% in 2016, but state admiration is larger for Virginia. The wins there may prove more important.

Wisconsin, longing aside, is hardly poised to clone Virginia where both statehouses turned comfortably blue after lingering in the other camp. In Wisconsin, after years of choosing a Democratic presidential candidate, Trump squeaked by in 2016 – and Trump people still have hopes there is enough rural and evangelical resistance to Democrats to offset the growing Trump dislike in urban communities.

In Virginia unlike Wisconsin, Nov. 5 signaled an end to the GOP blockade of good state bills on health care, gun control, education and taxes. In Wisconsin the good bills remain horribly bottled up. 

Virginia Democrats were aided just a tad by 2018 federal court rulings (affecting 11 of more than 100 legislative districts).  That and close margins in both chambers was just enough to galvanize voter turnout. No such judicial help awaits Wisconsin, where the state senate is close but not the Assembly. 

The Wisconsin gerrymander was even more extreme in legislative districts.  Earlier this year, the US high court both admitted the Wisconsin districts are warped and washed its hands about doing anything about it.  In its tragic Rucho vs. Common Cause decision it determined that political partisanship was too toxic for SCOTUS to dirty itself with interfering – a remarkably dense decision. 

Meanwhile the state’s high court is the opposite of a helpmate.  Blatantly conservative it does the will of the GOP legislature and is expected to continue down that road unless the slaves rebel against the masters who paid for their election.

The right-wing enslavement has continued to confound Democratic Gov. Tony Evers who keeps trying, inching forward when his sensible proposals supported by voters should leap ahead.  The legislature is even inspecting one by one his cabinet appointments and just flatly rejected the farmers’ friend (and proven administrator, Brad Pfaff) picked to lead the state’s Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.  Evers actually attended the legislative session in Madison rejecting Pfaff in the hope that his presence might embarrass the GOP. It didn’t. He called the result “absolute bullshit.”

He further commented he would be darned if he would withdraw his cabinet choices despite the gauntlet they were being subjected to. "If I was a total cynic I'd say, 'Keep your damn mouth shut,' but I'm not,” Evers told the assembled media. “I want them to be forthcoming. That's why we hired them." The circumstances forced him to elevate  the agriculture deputy. 

(And on Nov. 11 Evers hired Pfaff with more responsibility and a higher salary in the Department of Administration as director of business and rural development.) 

The pettiness has grown. The governor’s call for a special legislative session on gun control left GOP leaders vowing to gavel the session in and out without doing anything. And Nov. 8 that’s what they did, spitting in the face of both Evers and a majority of state voters.

The Wisconsin GOP continues to feel its oats in the legislative proposals it advances, defying the governor with an ugly trail of their own bills, sneaking some high-minded sounding proposals in among their poison pills.

In October, for example, the GOP passed a bill making it a felony to have sex with animals – who could say no to that? But in November it turned down a bipartisan proposal to spend $4 million to fight homelessness, leading the head of the Wisconsin Coalition Against Homelessness, Joseph Volk, to comment sarcastically that they acted with speed to protect cows and goats but “I guess homeless children will just have to wait.”

The Wisconsin GOP is now determined to weaken the strongest veto pen in the nation that allows Evers to adjust budget language, as he did recently to return $65 million to public schools that the legislature had eliminated.

Their idea requires two legislative sessions, the second in 2021, along with court authority. But the Republicans are clearly confident they will win legislative re-election in 2020 no matter who wins the presidential race.  They are confident they will also still control the state  high court in 2021, so they are speeding ahead comforted in their gerrymandered strength and that Democrats can’t muster enough votes to oust them in local races.

So Wisconsin in November 2020 will come down to the Democrats needing enormously heavy voter turnout –abnormally focused, as the state electorate doesn’t usually do, not on the presidential race but on local legislative races.

Most observers predict such changes are way out of reach.  Of course, they said the same about Virginia, where the Democrats have confounded their opponents.

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.

WHEN TYING THE ECONOMY TO THE PRESIDENT IS JUST PLAIN SILLY

Many years of monthly  job graphs  cobbled together

By Dominique Paul Noth

Soon after George Bush was elected, I took over as editor of the Milwaukee Labor Press.  Each month I published a bar graph on the job figures from the US Department of Labor.  These were increasing downward lines that became painfully routine bad news to reproduce. The jobs kept falling and falling, growing  into dangerous length  stalactites by 2008, the  nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The GOP presidential candidate, McCain, panicked and called for a freeze in the campaign.  Obama went on in his solid way promising to handle crises.

The Bush falloff continued into the first year Obama took over as he launched such vital corrections as saving the auto industry and tightening financial controls – all in the face of harsh Republican resistance.  Remember?

By 2010 the job graphs  turned positive --  and every month grew  ever grander above the median, like icicles defying gravity and  suddenly thrusting upward.   It may not be as dynamic today but it continues a strong positive uninterrupted pace, surviving Trump’s costly bailout of farmers in face of his tariffs and even a recession in US manufacturing, absorbed by financial circles since manufacturing is now only about 10% of the US economy.

When statistics sound rosy, every president claims economic success because of his or her  actions --  just as they blame forces beyond their control if the job numbers fall.

While Obama deserves credit, his supporters sought to give him even  more nice words  than  he richly deserved.  Note that Americans increased productivity but stood pat for stagnant wages in a booming economy during his final term, so that an unhealthy side of the realm continues to this day.

Trump is taking credit for aspects that are way outside his doing – and may actually be surviving his interferences. Approving pipelines may look economically good from one angle, but the constant oil spills look terrible from an environmental point of view, which may have longer residue for the economy.

Similarly, the economy is strong enough to survive a range of failed concepts and aborted deals from the Trump administration – at least for now. A recent collaboration of Fortune magazine and Pro Publica news service also states Trump’s 2017 tax bill has cost homeowners, many of them middle class, $1 trillion in equity value.

Economists fear there is a payment  coming due for our economic imbalance between profits and wages, though they blames cycles  in the economy almost as much as Trump.

What is a change in historic civility and common sense is that Trump doesn’t want to admit what a great job picture he inherited from Obama. What even Michael Bloomberg doesn’t care to admit is that government strength and business acumen don’t walk hand in hand into the sunset.

Time teaches us that there are moments when presidents can proclaim enormous influence and times they are just lucky enough to be riding the waves – with the public praying they do nothing to capsize the ship of state.  It’s clear that Trump right now  is benefitting from that ride. The warning signs in the economy deal with hiccups, tariff wars, unhelpful tax relief and threats to the future we have no clue whether he can deal with – or even realize the causes. He has a school of followers swimming in his wake. They credit him way out of bounds from reality.

Let’s go way back to FDR. He also oversaw a  time of enormous influence on the economy because the US needed it.  Back then was a case of a president whose policies influenced the economy for the better.   America longed for his fearlessness and optimism during the Great Depression. 

Not everything he did lasted or worked. But the New Deal became part of American idealism and first principles of freedom  – so much so that many respected intellectuals today argue that it needs to adjust but still serves as an inspiration. As should FDR’s optimism – that “only fear is fear itself” thing. His  new emphasis on the worker, the creation of Social Security, watchful regulations on fiscal behavior and so forth became the moments that inspire history books.

Oh, you will still find Republicans like Mitch McConnell who claim that it was only World War II that rescued America from the Great Depression.  But look who was still president and weigh how much his buoyancy had genuine impact on the intertwined forces of psyche and the economy. 

Like Obama, FDR thought of himself as daring within the mainstream while his foes continue to demean his reign as radical extremism.  Presidents always get extreme credit or blame for the nation’s fiscal health, but the reality is that sometimes they need to interfere and sometimes not. 

And even good presidents are not seers on everything. In 2008 Obama was not a champion of gay marriage. He abandoned the individual mandate in health care to get the needed support for what he thought the more important parts of Obamacare. He put immigration reform on the back burner.  Reparations for descendants of slaves were not even in the discussion. 

Today he is for gay marriage, the individual mandate, the vitality of immigration reform and discussion of reparations – as are all the Democratic candidates for the office he once held.  The last thing the nation needs – and also now has – is a president who interferes where not needed or interferes for his own venal causes, rather than the nation’s needs.

Obama’s rescue of the auto industry; his support of Dodd-Frank and other accomplishments that occupied his time of greatest power – the first two years – were vital thrusts. The better road for the economy he set is mainly something today’s executive could destroy – reminding voters that a president’s importance to the economy is mainly when it gets into trouble.

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.

BLOOMBERG AND DEMOCRATIC ANXIETY

By Dominique Paul Noth

Michael Bloomberg's moves suggest a vote of no-confidence in
the Democratic field from the donor class.

Nothing indicates the panic in the donor class more than Michael Bloomberg’s head fake and baby steps on entering the presidential sweepstakes out of fear that sensible centrist talk, as from Joe Biden who is his same age, may not stand up against the extreme wealth tax ideas simultaneously circling the Democratic field  including -- to be fair about his wiggling toes --  Joe Biden.

This is a two-edged panic.  First panic stems from fears that Trump may still pull off a victory despite his obvious mental meltdown during impromptu White House speeches and interminable campaign rallies. To be honest, this is also part of  a panic about the American electorate. Underneath it has been steadily moving to realizing the realities of impeachment but that movement is not enough to comfort those who so clearly see Trump as "a dangerous demagogue," as Bloomberg called him.

The second panic is that painting the wealthiest of the wealthy as the villains of society – including those who mainly advertise themselves as wealthy, such as Trump – could wind up driving the voters and forcing policies that many consider bad for the economy.  Attacking the moneymakers and wealth accumulators has proven a comfortable campaign reality – always has if you remember history. They have the money but others have the votes.

Some form of wealth tax does not create immediate resistance from that wealthy donor class so heavily recruited by Democratic candidates  – but some of it does since all wealth tax ideas poll so well.

Bloomberg and Bill Gates are leading philanthropists and they have raised their doubts as have upstarts like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg whose wealth is mainly on paper (we’re talking wealth in the ballpark of $50 to $60 billion dollars each!).  They have raised caution flags or heart attacks about some of the proposals but more largely they fear a public attitude treating them as the fountain of salvation for the US woes.  An echo of Trump’s “Only I can do it”?

The public has taken little time to actually analyze the various economic plans of the candidates,  but the donor class is reading between the lines and is  deeply worried.  Some candidates  avoid the wealth tax language but they are all moving in similar directions.

Of course, Bloomberg is almost proving the wealth tax point – or certainly its lure – since no one would treat his entry into the race seriously except for the amount of money he commands and his track record of not usually being a guy who panics.

Have you noticed how we now talk  about “lanes” separating the top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination? One lane is for the pragmatic types, sometimes demeaned as  “half-assed centrists.” The other lane is  the most “leftist” types (assuming “leftist” means something clear anymore) that don’t want to return the US to normal after Trump but seize it and shake it to address climate change, health care, gun control, immigration reform and so forth. These are ideas many of the voters favor addressing,  though they remain  uncertain how much should be grabbed off in one bite.

Smart pundits see the pragmatic types as Klobuchar, Buttigieg and Biden and the most prominent of the “shake it all up” as Sanders and Warren, with Booker, Castro and Harris biting off parts of each and the other candidates scattered among the lanes.

Bloomberg isn’t wrong about the anxieties upending the Democratic camps -- a fight among lane leaders. One group insists  the other get out of the way;  the other group says  the nation is not ready for too extreme measures. 

Thus when Elizabeth Warren details her Medicare for All, critics point out what a shakeup that involves, so that even if she becomes president she may not be able to carry even a Democratic Congress across the same finish line. While 28 million people lack any health care, some 158 million have a form of private health insurance, which she would eliminate.  Some hate the system, some don’t.  All are unlikely to budge unless they know something better is in  place.

Warren fans admire her boldness as much as Sanders fans admire his.  They say it’s high time the US aimed higher than its reach as the only way true reform is possible. Fundamental social changes, the argument goes, comes from leaders burning with grievances and clear about identifying the problems, determined to rouse the sheeplike masses to action. Others say the public admires those who know what can be done and are moving in the same direction as the flamethrowers.

The sides sometimes sound so angry that they make the presidential race an all or nothing contest.  Hence Bloomberg. If you don’t like Sanders above Warren, to hell with you.  If you like Biden over Warren, you’re a relic.  If you prefer Buttigieg, you are not being realistic about his baggage (the way some voters feel about gays). Etc.

Such hard edges to the discussions, both on social media and at Democratic gatherings, seem the main reason why the Trump forces still think they can sneak in there, since if Warren is picked over Sanders, or Biden is picked over both, there are acolytes in the losing camp that sound like they  will stay home rather than vote for anybody. So fierce do their feelings sound.

It’s time to remember that none of this ferocity is new in the big tent Democratic Party.  What is new is the fear, driven  by social media and the political organizing realities of today, that the sides can’t knit together at the end. Trump’s 2016 victory, when many Obama voters stayed home, is often cited as the fear.

But there is also a reality of history about campaign promises and directions.  Sanders may have written the damn bill on Medicare for All, as he insists in debates, but that doesn’t mean he can bring any Congress along.  Neither can Warren.  Neither can Biden on such ideas as eliminating the wage levels on paying into Social Security.

Right now the normal operations of human behavior are not gaining much traction.  Such is the nature of panic. We haven't yet learned to contemplate supporting a Warren, a Sanders or a Buttigieg  or a Biden while recognizing they may not be able to deliver in practical terms what they are promising.  We just like where whoever (fill in the blank) wants to go and the basic ideas of getting there.

The public may vote for something they know is pie in the sky, not as a mandate they insist on but as a direction they want to see their choice moving. 

Another thing we had better learn.   How much wealth you command, even if you use it with a greater  eye for the public good than a Trump, is not a guarantee you know how to govern.  

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.