The Wisconsin Recall Aftermath

By Charles Pierce, Esquire Magazine

06 June 12

ake no mistake. A star was born last night. You will now see Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to run their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, everywhere in the energetic precincts of the revived American right. He will be on the covers of their startlingly advertising-free little magazines. He will be the darling of every wingnut blogger in the extended monkeyhouse; poo will be flung high and far in celebration of him. He will have a high-profile speaking role in Tampa this August, and it is very likely that there are people in Iowa who already are booking house parties for the late autumn of 2015 in his honor. He will be a bigger presence on Fox News than are Brit Hume's jowls or Shep Smith's gradually swelling public rage. I will tell you what: Willard Romney better be damned glad that he's already clinched the nomination, and that Walker didn't win this recall a year ago. And, because they are a timid flock of ruminants, the rest of the elite political press corps will wander, sheeplike, in his general direction, grazing amid the unmitigated manure of his victory speech here last night. Oh, Lord, are we going to be hearing about what a "turning point" in Walker's career that speech was.

He's going national. We know that now because last night, in his triumph, we got the humble act. He thanked God for "His abundant grace." We heard about "moms and dads and grandmas and grandads." He told us about how moved he was to visit Independence Hall and see "the desks and the chairs" that the Founders used, and how the Founders were men of courage who put their lives on the line because they made "the tough decisions." Breaking away from the British Empire. Gutting the benefits of elementary school teachers. You'd have to be blind not to see the parallels.

And we even, mirabile dictu, got a quasi-acknowledgement that he could have handled the evisceration of collective bargaining — in the state where it pretty much was born — a little better than he did. "I learned a few lessons this year," he told a steaming crowd of supporters at the county expo center. "I learned that sometimes, it's a problem when you try to fix things without talking about them. I believed that so many politicians talked about what they were going to do and then didn't do them, that it would be better just to try and fix things before I talked about them. Looking ahead, we know now that it's important to do both."

Nobody understood what was going on here. Almost everyone watched the crowds in Madison in the snow last year and missed the great force of resentment and anger that was building on the other side. Almost everyone listened to the exit polls early last evening and missed the great frustration of people who might not like what Walker had done, but they hated the idea of a recall even more.

(One MSNBC exit poll had 60 percent of the people who voted believing that recalls should only be employed in cases of actual criminality. Two points: 1) the last recall of a governor was Gray Davis in California, and he was dumped primarily because Enron rigged the electricity market and because a lot of important people — coughChrisMatthewscough — wanted a political career for meat-puppet Arnold Schwarzeneggar; and 2) if the John Doe investigation now lapping around Walker's heels begins to heat up, those 60 percent of the people may get what they want after all.)

(And, while we're on the subject of exit polls and "calling" races, shame on NBC and MSNBC for waiting an entire 49 minutes to show the rest of the country how very, very smart they are. A full hour after NBC made their call, there were still people waiting in line at the Zeidler Building in downtown Milwaukee, waiting to vote. Thought experiment: Imagine if NBC had "called" a race for a Democratic candidate while there were still voters waiting in line in heavily Republican districts. The howling from the wingnut peanut gallery would drown out the Indy 500. Milwaukee had trouble all day with precincts having sufficient ballots and registration forms. Remarkably, this was not the case in the suburbs, where turnout was equally heavy. Remarkable.)

(Oh, and the Zeidler Building is named for Frank P. Zeidler, the last Socialist mayor of a major American city, and someone whom I knew, and who would not take any of this nonsense lying down.)

But those were the forces that combined with an overwhelming flood of out-of-state money to make liars out of practically everybody. This was a winning electorate that found itself besieged by the images it saw on its television, and it felt its concerns being drowned out by drum circles and chants. When Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch got up and began her speech with the line "this is what democracy looks like," she was doing more than simply engaging in some stunningly high-level gloating; she was telling her audience exactly what they wanted to hear. Their democracy was hijacked by other people. The out-of-state special interests that most bothered them were not the Koch Brothers; it was Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz. Upwards to $50 million poured into Wisconsin from various plutocrats and their front groups to tell the people in this hall that people from outside Wisconsin were taking them all for a ride. The money was a balm. The money was an amplifier. The money gave them absolution because the money told them what they already believed. It was not all the money, although the first pundit that downplays the fact that the same people have now bought Scott Walker an election twice in favor of Walker's new "conciliatory tone" is going to have to carry the weight for my going Keith Moon on my Hyatt TV all the way down to the sidewalk along Kilbourn Avenue. It was the fertile ground on which all that money fell.

The people of the winning electorate last night have a Wisconsin in their minds and hearts that is radically different from the Wisconsin that exists in history, that great catch-basin for all the dissidents and political bounders who fled Germany and Scandinavia and the revolutions of the mid-19th century, only to come to Wisconsin and organize the mills and the factories, or become prairie populists who raised hell with the railroad bosses and the timber barons, the people who thought Fightin' Bob LaFollette should have been president of the United States, until, of course, he resisted the entry of the United States into World War I. Then a lot of them drew cartoons of LaFollette wearing an Iron Cross, or suggested, quite seriously, that he be hanged. The political emotions in Wisconsin have always ranged freely and very close to the surface; this state elected two LaFollettes, and the second one, Fightin' Bob's kid, lost a primary to Joe McCarthy. The political emotions of Wisconsin are not easily controlled, but they can be channelled, and that's what happened here. The anger on the capitol lawn, which now seems a relic of a distant age, was overwhelmed by the emotions of people who felt as though the very ground had been stolen from beneath their feet. That I believe they're wrong is of no matter. The inescapable conclusion from last night's election results was that, with a big assist from the new dynamics of campaign finance, their view of Wisconsin won out. They got back again the Wisconsin they see in their minds.

As the room grew steadily more rowdy, I fell into conversation with Ed Hannan, a lawyer from Greendale, who was glad-handing anyone who walked by, which showed considerable pluck, since one of his arms was in a sling. "I am surprised by the margin," he said. "I expected large amounts of voter fraud, both in Milwaukee and in Dane County. That has had me concerned. Given the level of participation today, I can tell you, I voted at 7:30 this morning, I was number 78 at 7:15 in the morning. That has never been seen before.

"It means the restoration of integrity in government," he continued. "It means an understanding of the role of government, the limitations of the role of government, and the return of power to the taxpayers, as opposed to union organizers. That is how important this is. Going forward, what we will then see is more legislation that is going to limit the role of government and, more than that, a repeal of laws. For instance, the Minimum Mark-Up Law, a limitation on the environmental laws. We need to have sunset laws on environmental restrictions and the employment-related laws. This election was never about collective bargaining. It was about legislation that removed the state as the collection agency for union dues."

There was no point in arguing with the man. There didn't seem even to be any sport in pointing out that the "restoration of integrity in government" that he saw in the results was on behalf of a guy who took to the podium last night three steps ahead of a sitting grand jury. The distance between what I saw and what Ed Hannan saw was too great. I might as well have been talking to him in Finnish.

As hard as Scott Walker may want to pretend to be a conciliator, as hard as he wants to fool the national press in their hopeless quest for a "reasonable" Republican that they can hitch to their centrist Cinderella's carriage, he knows good and goddamn well that it's not in the cards. The forces that put him in office, and the forces that kept him there last night, are too strong for any of that, even if he were sincere, which he most assuredly was not. He is a political creature of the Wisconsin that the people in the Exposition Center last night see in their minds. He cannot exist as a political creature outside of the Wisconsin his supporters believe themselves to have re-captured for good. They are not going to be reasonable. They are going to move further toward the extreme and he's going to move with them, because he is a star now, and he has a role to play.

The next step for them will be the upcoming primary for the Republican nomination for the United States Senate. In that, former Governor Tommy Thompson is being sorely pressed by a former congressman named Mark Neumann, who lost to Scott Walker in the 2010 gubernatorial primary. Neumann is of the new Republican party — a gay-baiting firebrand who, yesterday, in an interview, placed himself squarely in Walker's sunlight. Thompson already has been beset by commercials questioning his conservative bona fides, most of them the product of the Club For Growth, which has endorsed Neumann. Thompson is leading in the polls, and he showed up last night to shake hands and bask in the warmth of the evening. Long ago, he was practically the only Wisconsin Republican who kept the torch burning for Ronald Reagan, as Wisconsin Republicans still felt themselves heirs to the LaFollettes and considered Reagan unacceptably extreme. Now, because he worked with Democrats while he was governor, and because he and Michael Dukakis once put together a plan for a high-speed rail service that would cover almost the entire Midwest, and (I suspect) because he's 71-years old, he's fighting off a challenge from his right because the world in which his party lives now is strange terrain for him. He did a great job pretending that half the people in the hall didn't want to bury his career a few months down the line.

"The fact of the matter is that Walker has shown that, if you stand your ground and win, you're going to be able to be rewarded by the voters," Thompson said. "I did the same thing with welfare. When I started with welfare, people said, 'Don't do it, Tommy. You can't win.' But I did it and people stood with me. I think it shows that people are thirsty for leadership.

"I know they're coming for me. When I first ran for governor, people said I was too conservative to be governor. I still am. I still have the principles, but I happen to talk to people and some people don't like that."

Scott Walker finished his speech and spent a long time working the crowd. Outside, the TV lights on the lawn grew dim. Horns honked in the distance. Tommy Thompson shuffled off into the night. He reminded me of all the people I'd talked to over the past few days who looked back so fondly to those heady times in Madison. He had something in common with them. He was of another time. He was of another place. One world had beaten another, decisively. One Wisconsin of the mind was triumphant, and many of us are simply of another time and another place, and it was not here.