Common Cause in Wisconsin
Public Forum at UW-Eau Claire

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April 28, 2009

Images from our April 20th forum:

Coming soon... the date and location of our next event!

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Government as if government mattered

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
April 26, 2009

By Bill Kraus
It goes without saying that most of the participants in the recent tea party demonstrations can be found on the rolls of the Republican Party. The Republicans attract anarchists. The breeding ground of this “lower taxes; less government” faction in Wisconsin used to be the North Shore Republican Club of Milwaukee County and may still be. Although there are signs of infestations in some nearby counties.

The anarchists and the communists believe that in their disparate versions of the perfect worlds the government can be made to go away.

The communists seem to have spawned mostly autocracies, many of them tyrannical. This was not what Marx promised.

The anarchists’ high point in this country was the Ronald Reagan presidency. Reagan’s “the government is the problem not the solution” rhetoric was the kind of talk the anarchists had been hoping to hear.

The walk, however, didn’t match the rhetoric. The government grew during his presidency. Not as fast as the Democrats would have liked perhaps, but fast enough to disappoint his most ardent admirers and pretty much put the underlying myth that he was God’s gift to the cause to bed for good one would think. One would be wrong. The myth persists and even grows as memories fade.

The Reaganites to the contrary notwithstanding all of the revered Republican leaders have been government activists not dismantlers. Tommy Thompson, our own most recent activist Republican, put it succinctly in a recent interview when he asked, “If you don’t want to do something, why would you run for public office.”

Despite the distractions of the Civil War, Lincoln built the transcontinental railroad and established the land grant colleges.

Teddy Roosevelt is remembered more for national parks and public lands than anything else.

Dwight Eisenhower built the I-system.

And in Wisconsin Warren Knowles gets as much credit as Gaylord Nelson for saving the environment and acquiring land for public purposes. Lee Dreyfus counted the building of the veterinarian school as his high point, which he insisted on over the dead bodies of most of his advisers and the UW administration. He said, “It’s about research.” And it was when Jamie Thompson made his stem cell discoveries there.

And Tommy Thompson was almost manic in his activism. He built and built and built.

The government is here to stay, and the Republicans will get to run it as, if, when they demonstrate they can and will run it better than the other guys. The practitioners of electoral segmentation will say that the Republicans must attend to the anarchists or they will go away. The likelihood of that is zero. Not only will they not go away, they are harder to get rid of than teenage acne.

Their virtue is that they throw tea party protests instead of blowing people up like their more violent counterparts in other places.

The tea parties were a sideshow. The people want a government that works.


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Common Cause in Wisconsin
Public Forum - Eau Claire

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Significant Gathering in Eau Claire is Encouraged, Optimistic About Chances for Enactment of Campaign Finance Reform This Year

Approximately 100 citizens from all over the Chippewa Valley gathered at the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire Monday evening for Common Cause in Wisconsin (CC/WI) organized public forum, "Whatever Happened to Good Governmet in Wisconsin? How Can We Fix and Why is it so Important During a Recession?"

Panelists included State Reperesentatives Kristen Dexter and Jeff Smith, both of Eau Claire, State Senator Pat Kreitlow of Chippewa Falls, Tom Giffey, the editorial page editor of the Eau Claire Leader Telegram, and yours truly. The forum was ably moderated by the Chair of the UWEC Political Science Department, Professor Rodd Freitag. The large audience consisted of Common Cause members, members of the American Association of University Women and the League of Women Voters of the Eau Claire area, members of the Coalition of Wisconsin Aging Groups, students and faculty from UW-Eau Claire, and other area residents interested in seeing Wisconsin regain clean, honest and accountable state government.

Rep. Dexter is the primary Assembly sponsor of legislation that would require the disclosure of the donors and regulation of the money behind widely-disseminated campaign communications masquerading as issue advocacy. These "phony issue ads" have undermined and demoralized the election process in Wisconsin since the mid 1990's and CC/WI has been seeking to require their disclosure and regulation since 1997 - the first reform organization in Wisconsin to do so.

Sen. Kreitlow is the primary State Senate sponsor of legislation to provide full public financing to qualifying candidates for the State Supreme Court who agree to abide by revised spending limits. The "Impartial Justice" legislation, like the phony issue ad legislation, has the stated support of the leadership of both the Wisconsin Assembly and the State Senate, as well as that of Governor Jim Doyle.

At the forum last night, Rep. Smith, the Chair of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns & Elections and a strong supporter of both of these and other campaign finance reform legislation, announced that a public hearing on the two reform measures will be held on or about May 27th, most likely in Eau Claire.

For more on these very encouraging developments and on Monday night's forum, go here: Forum tackles election funding, and for Tim Giffey's column on campaign finance reform written right before the forum, go here: Column: Has time for reform finally arrived?

- Jay Heck

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Behind the curtain

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A Wisconsin Political Fix
not just another blog
April 19, 2009

By Bill Kraus


Dick Cheney would be most people’s nominee for the Bush Administration’s eminence grise.

Not so fast.

John Roach orchestrated a wonderful interview recently with Tommy Thompson for broadcast on the Big Ten Network. I know. I know. The viewers are going to think they clicked on the wrong channel when they get a non-jock program, but put that aside.

The John and Tommy show was first-class theater and journalism. John crafted excellent questions and Tommy delivered candid and articulate responses.

Two subjects in particular offered an interesting insight into the workings of the Bush White House.

Tommy, of course, was the entire left wing of the Bush administration once Christine Whitman got the bum’s rush early on.

He was a consistent advocate of more extensive federal involvement in anything having to do with stem cell research. He didn’t go into the entire history of this advocacy, which must have been extensive.

The one instance he talks about in the show was at a lunch in the White House with the president and Karl Rove. He didn’t claim any progress beyond keeping a bad situation from getting worse.

It is hardly surprising that Karl Rove was at the table when stem cells were on the menu or that there was no winner. Rove would be expected to be in any discussion of a subject where the interests of his beloved base were at risk.

The other Tommy tale that was more surprising was about Tommy’s proposal to put the computerization of medical records on a fast track.

Tommy told the president th at if he was given a high priority he could put the wheels under an initiative to program everyone’s health records in 18 months.

Another lunch in the White House. Same cast of characters. Rove liked this idea but wanted it to be positioned like a moonshot, something that would be done in ten year's time.

Tommy pointed out that putting the merits aside, a ten-year program would pass up all the political benefits.

The president called Tommy later that same afternoon and said, “You lost.”

The question is not why Karl Rove passed on this interesting idea. The question is why he was even in the room.

Do you get the impression that Bush was afraid of Rove and Rove was afraid of his precious voter base?

So do I.

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