The battle for governor has proved a microcosm of the looming engagement between Republicans and Democrats, writes LARA MARLOWEin Milwaukee
WISCONSIN GOES to the polls today to determine whether the state’s hard right Republican governor Scott Walker will be replaced by Milwaukee’s Democratic soft centre mayor Tom Barrett in a recall election.
The race is widely viewed as the second most important election in the US this year and has taken on the aura of a presidential campaign. Fundraising was on a scale never before seen in the “Badger State”.
Four Republican vice- presidential hopefuls campaigned for Walker. Republican candidate Mitt Romney reportedly intends to build on Walker’s organisation in the hope of becoming the first Republican to take Wisconsin since Ronald Reagan in 1984.
A Public Policy Polling survey shows Barrett only three points behind Walker, at 47 to 50 per cent. It is doubtful a last minute Democratic surge can bridge the gap between Republican motivation and Democratic division in the campaign.
While Walker attained national status as a leader of the Republican cause, Democrats, including President Barack Obama, were noteworthy for their silence.
“We think it [the national Democratic party] could and should have done more,” said Gerald McEntee, head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
The federation has been decimated by Walker’s war on public sector unions. Since Walker ended the automatic collection of union dues, its membership has fallen from 62,818 to 28,745.
Labour unions contributed $400 million to Barack Obama and Democratic candidates in 2008. If Walker survives the recall, it will embolden politicians across the US to attack organised labour. Trade unionists will join environmentalists, pacifists, defenders of civil liberties and would-be immigration reformers in the ranks of disaffected Obama voters. With the US recovery flatlining, it is not hard to see how bad a Walker victory would be for Obama.
Three in 10 Wisconsin voters tell pollsters they have stopped discussing politics with someone close to them because of the animosity fanned by the election.
“This is a 50-50 state, and whoever gets the greatest turnout wins,” says Daniel Bice, a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It’s whoever is angriest. This is a population driven by outrage.”
Walker and Barrett engaged in tit-for-tat accusations over an ethics scandal and violent crime in the city of Milwaukee. They offered opposing assessments – supported by contradictory statistics – of the state’s economy.
“People are consuming about half the news,” says Bice, “so long as it fuels their outrage.”
At one of Barrett’s last rallies, a woman carried a placard equating Walker with senator Joe McCarthy, the infamous Wisconsin communist-baiter. “Extremism Makes For Toxic Politics,” it said.
“I think Walker is as extreme as McCarthy,” Bernadette Rainsford (61) told me while holding the placard. “He’s taking away women’s rights and workers’ rights. Now he wants to privatise state parks and make people pay to go hunting there, as they did in Texas. It’s Robin Hood in reverse.”
When the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel endorsed Walker on the grounds a recall election was an extreme reaction to policy disputes, the state’s Democratic party chairman said that 60 years ago, the precursor to the newspaper had endorsed Joe McCarthy.
Historian John Gurda, the author of 19 books on Wisconsin, says Walker has not embraced extremism to the extent McCarthy did. Elected to the US senate in 1946, McCarthy discovered anti-communism in 1950, was re-elected in 1952 and self-destructed in 1954, after accusing the State Department and Pentagon of harbouring communists. “He was drinking heavily, sending subpoenas to uniformed officers,” Gurda recalls.
“Have you no decency, Sir?” a military man asked in one of McCarthy’s hearings, precipitating his downfall.
Wisconsin has a history of voting for mavericks who did not work well with other parties, Gurda says. At present, it is viewed as a laboratory for radical Republicans. Representative Paul Ryan, another Wisconsinite, has drafted a federal budget, endorsed by Romney, that would slash taxes and government spending and rip apart America’s social safety net.
It was not always thus. At the turn of the last century, Wisconsin Republicans split between progressives and stalwarts. The former opposed the trusts, including railroads who charged extortionate fees to farmers.
Under the populist senator and governor Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the progressives espoused recall initiatives, referendums and direct democracy. The stalwarts were business- oriented and favoured small government.
Wisconsin progressives worked with socialists, the descendants of Germans who emigrated there in 1848. The groups brought about key change in the 1911 legislature, including worker’s compensation, limits on the labour of women and children and a forest conservation Act. Theodore Roosevelt praised the state as a “laboratory for wise, experimental legislation to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole”.
Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal drew Wisconsin’s socialists and progressives into the Democratic party, although Milwaukee had socialist mayors almost continuously from 1910 until 1960.
“Now it’s the ‘S-word’,” says Gurda, “but then, Milwaukee was the nation’s centre of European- style socialism. It was evolutionary, not revolutionary. They used words like ‘public enterprise’ and ‘public good’.”
Milwaukee’s socialist history endowed it with 15 acres of public parks, a port, libraries, public housing and swimming pools.
For eight years before he became governor, Walker, as chief executive of Milwaukee county, chipped away at the city’s socialist legacy. The park system ran up a $200 million maintenance backlog. The bus system, which had twice been rated the best in the country, reduced services and raised fares. Passenger numbers declined and the system is in distress.
Now Walker is applying the same philosophy statewide. He ended collective bargaining rights for most public employees on the grounds taxpayers could not afford them after he passed tax cuts for businesses totalling $142 million. This is the model Romney and the Republicans would like to graft on to the entire nation; all liberty, no equality, zero fraternity.
“It’s short-sighted,” says Gurda. “What is being cut is basic services and the quality of life.”