Common Cause in Wisconsin - In the News
April 2009
- Area legislators discuss improving politics
Panel debates campaign finance reform, issue ads' negative effects
April 23, 2009 - Breann Schossow, The Spectator
Wisconsin once held a place in the nation as the role model of clean state government and reforms, boasting politicians such as Gov. Robert La Follette and promoting open records and meetings laws.
That is no longer the case, said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin. But that hasn't hindered his hope.
"In the 13 years since I've been director of Common Cause, I've never been more optimistic about the opportunity to change that," he said.
On Monday evening, area legislators joined Heck and others to discuss cleaning up politics and campaign finance reform in Hibbard Humanities Hall.
- Forum tackles election funding
April 20, 2009 - Blythe Wachter , Leader-Telegram
Wisconsin once had a reputation of being a model for clean, accountable state government, but that has changed somewhat in the past 20 years, Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, told a crowd Monday during a forum at UW-Eau Claire.
Heck pointed to the illegal campaign fundraising scandal involving some state legislators a few years ago, as well as money spent by special-interest groups in recent elections.
But he said he's "never been more optimistic" about campaign finance reform, pointing to recent "proactive action" taken by state legislators, including legislation introduced by forum speakers Reps. Kristen Dexter, D-Eau Claire, and Jeff Smith, D-Eau Claire; and Sen. Pat Kreitlow, D-Chippewa Falls. Tom Giffey, Leader-Telegram editorial page editor, also was a speaker.
- Column: Has time for reform finally arrived?
April 17, 2009 - Tom Giffey, Leader-Telegram
"I think the tremendous amount of money in the Supreme Court races ... opened a lot of people's eyes to how bad the current system is," says Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin.
"There is a general perception out there that the corrupt status quo favors those in power, so why would those in power move to change it?" Heck says. However, he adds, more legislators are coming to the conclusion "that it's not good for the public to be cynical about them. ... Because what that also means is that if they do anything good, people will be cynical about that."
- Winners and losers
April 16, 2009 - Rick Berg, Isthmus
"Before closing the book on the last week's electoral showdown, let's wander one last time onto the battlefield to shoot the wounded, award medals for bravery and acknowledge other achievements. To wit:
Lone Wolf Award: Jay Heck. The head of Common Cause in Wisconsin courageously opposed the flow of shadowy third-party money into the "nonpartisan" races for state Supreme Court and Dane County executive. Heck decried the attack ads launched by the Greater Wisconsin Committee, Advancing Wisconsin and even Planned Parenthood, which told voters, 'Nancy Mistele is dangerous to your health.'"
- Identify contributors to attack ads
April 12, 2009 - The Journal Times
Jay Heck, executive director of the advocacy organization Common Cause Wisconsin, predicted in radio interviews [the Government Accountability Board's rule fix] will tone down some of the vitriol. Formerly anonymous contributors might think twice about signing onto the nastiest ads, knowing their names would be attached.
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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
April 5, 2009
By Bill Kraus In the beginning we didn’t know what to do with television advertising. The medium was new, the reach was questionable, and, worse yet, TV ads were thought to be, if you can believe this, sort of beneath the dignity of politicians.
Then George Henman (I think I have the name right), who created great print advertising for Nelson Rockefeller’s gubernatorial campaigns, legitimatized TV by telling us that we should think of our candidates as Buicks instead of as tubes of toothpaste. And TV ads for candidates were off to the races.
The stuff we were doing in Wisconsin was still pretty amateurish until the Doyle Dane Bernbach ad agency produced ads for Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign against Barry Goldwater. The famous nuclear countdown ad (which ran only once) was what everyone remembers, but the series included ridiculing Goldwater’s social security ideas and his wish to cut off the northeastern states and set them adrift in the Atlantic Ocean.
These ads were not why Johnson won, but they may have turned a flood into a tsunami, and they surely set a new quality standard for political ads which made the making of the ads a lot more expensive.
No more talking heads. Now the candidate commercials had to look as good as those Coca Cola and and Miller Beer were producing.
I dodged this bullet in Warren Knowles's 1966 campaign for governor by hiring the documentary geniuses the Maysles brothers to do cinema verite commercials. They followed the governor around for a week with a camera, showing who Knowles was and what he did as governor.
The good thing about these commercials was they mostly informed, were wholly positive, and they were cheap. Others used the technique in other places, but the cinema verite phase fell out of favor for many reasons, one of which was that it was pretty obvious that they were a lot more cinema than verite.
As campaign consultants came into politics in waves, campaigns got more expensive, more glitzy, and more one-dimensional. The consultants' advice was to spend everything you’ve got on TV, and if there’s anything left over spend that on TV, too.
Inevitably the ads got more aggressive. Candidates talked less about their virtues and more about their opponents' faults, which, of course, led to counterattacks and defensiveness.
A more disturbing trend was the drift to irrelevance, a kind of orchestrated deception.
This political advertising addressed issues that the polls said were important to the voters whether whoever won the office being sought had anything to do with those issues or not.
The appalling thing was these kinds of ads--which are designed to evoke not inform--worked, and political consultants, who are the biggest imitators since football coaches, expanded their use exponentially.
What was not apparent is that irrelevant political advertising is based on several unflattering assumptions: The voters are uninformed, respond to emotional appeals, are uncritical, uninterested, even stupid.
Are you mad yet?
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Common Cause in Wisconsin
Public Forum - Eau Claire
“What Ever Happened to Good Government
in Wisconsin?"
How We Can Fix It and Why It Matters During a Recession
Monday, April 20, 2009
6:30–8:00PM
Room 102 – Hibbard Humanities Hall – UW-Eau Claire
Garfield and Park Avenue - Eau Claire, WI
** Free and Open to the Public -- Light Refreshments will be Served **
Please come join in the discussion and learn more about:
- Campaign finance reform — and why it is needed
- How money corrupts our elections, public policy, and the state budget process
- How we can clean up our disgraceful state supreme court elections
- How reform measures stop corruption and return power to the citizens of Wisconsin
Moderator: Professor Rodd Freitag – Chair, Political Science / UW-Eau Claire
Panelists:
State Representative Kristen Dexter of Eau Claire
State Senator Pat Kreitlow of Chippewa Falls
State Representative Jeff Smith of Eau Claire
Editorial Page Editor Tom Giffey of The Leader-Telegram
Executive Director Jay Heck of Common Cause in Wisconsin
Presented by: Common Cause in Wisconsin
(Underwritten by The Joyce Foundation)
Co-Sponsors: League of Women Voters of Wisconsin Education Fund, American Association of University Women - Eau Claire Branch, UW-Eau Claire Political Science Department, The Coalition of Wisconsin Aging Groups
For more information: call Sandra Miller at (608) 658-2109
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