A decade from now, one can imagine a beaming septuagenarian named Jim Doyle sitting on a dais in Milwaukee as the former governor is honored for ushering in a bold new era of train travel.
He will be lauded for laying the tracks of a 21st-century Wisconsin economy. The KRM commuter rail he helped launch would have by then joined I-94 as one of the main streets connecting Milwaukee with the booming Chicagoland economy, drawing thousands of new jobs to Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha. And he will be celebrated for securing the breakthrough $810 million federal grant for his high-speed rail line, thereby creating the “I-Q Corridor,” as tech-booster Tom Still first dubbed it, connecting bustling technology clusters in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago.
Or maybe not.Such are the iffy prospects of a burnished legacy for a governor whose two terms were haunted by the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and distinguished by
a leadership style that shunned risk and punted too many important issues.
Doyle can’t be blamed for the economy, argues UW-Milwaukee political scientist and former Democratic lawmaker Mordecai Lee. “The ability of state government to influence the economy has the weight of a feather,” he says.
But Joel Rogers, director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy, thinks Lee misses the point – that while governors can’t gin up economic growth, they “can powerfully influence” the setting for it: the state’s infrastructure, worker training, the regulatory and tax environment, and the quality and focus of government services.
And by that measure, Doyle has been a sorrowful disappointment. Among the glummest observers are liberals who waited for their moment after 14 long years of Tommy Thompson and Republican rule. It never came.
Doyle chose to surround himself with loyalists, lawyers and political apparatchiks, all focused on guarding their boss from any policy remotely controversial. He maintained tight control over the bureaucracy through departmental executive assistants reporting directly to his chief of staff, Susan Goodwin. She kept agency secretaries on short leashes.
“The cabinet doesn’t sit around deliberating over policy,” says a former insider. “Their job is to stay on message.”
That imperative filtered down to the troops with dispiriting results. “Everything was designed to protect the governor from any potential bad publicity,” Cheri Maples, a retired Madison police captain, told me in 2006. She briefly worked with the Department of Corrections on parole and probation policy before resigning in frustration at what she described as a “fear-based” environment in the department.
Among the early casualties of Doyle’s bunker mentality: a cutting-edge but controversial proposal to retrofit Milwaukee’s building stock to make it energy-efficient. Doyle’s team wouldn’t touch it. The irony, of course, is that seven years later, President Barack Obama has proposed a major “cash for caulkers” program with the exact same premise – weatherization creates jobs, saves money for families and reduces air pollution. Wisconsin, which could have been a national leader, is now struggling to catch up.
“The Doyle people were focused on maintaining power and not governing,” observes a retired staffer from the Department of Administration. “They wanted loyalty as opposed to reality from staff.”
Goodwin set the defensive tone. “She has the absolute, 100 percent trust of the governor,” says veteran Capitol reporter Dick Wheeler. Indeed, the two may think too much alike; as a former staffer told me, Goodwin “reinforces Doyle’s worst instincts.” A former Capitol reporter puts it bluntly: “They’re like Nixon and Kissinger.”
Working in Madison, I regularly heard from distressed liberals in state government who would awkwardly confess they preferred working for Thompson. Sure, he was intensely political in his appointments, but his can-do attitude permeated through the ranks.
Government under Doyle was more can’t do: “a suspicious, closed and confidential process,” says UW-Madison’s Steve Born, a player in state environmental policy since the days of Gov. Pat Lucey.
Born praises Doyle for passage of the watershed Great Lakes Compact and for greatly increasing the acreage preserved under the state’s stewardship program. Rogers and others give Doyle props for methodically expanding health insurance coverage to the poor and bumping up the state’s minimum wage. Liberals also appreciated Doyle’s deft stick work against Republican slap shots.
Still, the Doyle checklist is awfully thin. The governor refused to tackle the big issues, including fundamental fiscal and equity issues that have crippled state aid for education and shared revenue for communities. The state’s tax policy cries out for revision.
Activist governors such as Lucey, Thompson and Gaylord Nelson took on daunting challenges and reveled in retooling government to meet the needs of the times. But not Doyle.
“The whole idea of a dynamic, experimental, progressive Wisconsin being willing to do something new has faded,” says Rogers.
Ultimately, even the creation of a new rail-connected, high-tech economy, should that dream materialize, may not be enough to save Doyle’s standing in the state history books.
