Last week’s election was a brutal rejection of base politics —
the Karl Rove idea that Republicans need not compromise and can simply
please their conservative base and get re-elected. This was an upsurge of
moderate Republicans and independents informing the country — and this state —
that the GOP will get punished for ignoring them.
The primary practitioner of base politics in Wisconsin — and
biggest state loser in last week’s election — was former Assembly Speaker
John Gard, who stumbled in his run for 8th District congressman and saw
his political approach help lose the state Senate and much of the Republican
margin in the Assembly to the Democrats.
It was Gard who pushed the Republicans in both legislative
houses to attack Gov. Jim Doyle from the moment he took office and
repeatedly send him bills he’d already vetoed and had made clear he would
continue to oppose. This was not about governing; it was about scoring political
points for the next election, and it didn’t work.
Polls showed that a majority of voters in this state opposed a
law allowing people to carry concealed weapons, yet Gard pushed the Republicans
to repeatedly send this bill to Doyle. Why? The Rove-influenced theory was that
conservative voters in Wisconsin would turn out in big numbers and reward
Republicans for this stubbornness. Whoops, bad idea.
With base politics in mind, the Republicans made sure the
marriage amendment was on the ballot for November, to ensure a big turnout of
social conservatives. The turnout happened all right, but some voted for the
amendment while voting against Green, rewarding a fiscal conservative like Doyle
who had cut the deficit he inherited. Meanwhile, the amendment also triggered a
big turnout of college kids and other liberals who overwhelmingly rejected
Green.
Some Republicans have gotten the message. Rep. Dean
Kaufert (R-Neenah) told the press the Assembly had spent too much time in
recent years on divisive bills, like the bills allowing concealed weapons and
letting pharmacists refuse to dispense birth control if it’s against their
religious beliefs. The Legislature, Kaufert now contends, needs leaders who can
restore civility and work with members on both sides of the aisle.
No one was better at that than former Senate Majority Leader
Mary Panzer. Panzer was chosen one of the top legislators in a survey of
Republicans and Democrats reported in a 1996 Milwaukee Magazine feature
story. As the daughter of longtime Republican legislator Frank Panzer,
she was bred on Republican values.
But Mary Panzer was declared a “RINO,” a Republican In Name
Only, by right-wing talk radio. Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling
targeted her for extinction and attacked her relentlessly, helping then-GOP
representative Glenn Grothman upset her in a 2004 primary election.
Many Republicans felt they must engage in uncompromising, John
Gard-style slash-and-burn politics or they would be outed as RINOs by talk
radio. The height of this folly was Sykes’ attack on former Republican Gov.
Lee Sherman Dreyfus, calling him a RINO for opposing a Taxpayer Bill of
Rights. Sykes went further, attacking Dreyfus for raising taxes while serving as
governor.
There is no doubt that Dreyfus is a moderate Republican. He
governed as a social liberal but was clearly a fiscal conservative. Indeed, of
every governor who has served since the mid-1960s, including Republicans
Warren Knowles, Tommy Thompson and Scott McCallum, and Democrats
Patrick Lucey, Marty Schrieber, Tony Earl and Jim Doyle, no
governor raised spending less in real dollars than Dreyfus. Yes, Dreyfus raised
taxes, but he operated as an old-style Republican, the kind who believed in a
balanced budget rather than passing the taxes on to your children through
deficit spending.
Traditional Republicans view Dreyfus with great fondness.
Dreyfus and Panzer were exactly the kind of politicians Republicans thought of
when touting their “big tent.” The “big tent” philosophy was both an embrace of
electoral pragmatism and a rebuke of Democratic political correctness. But the
Rove and Gard idea, enforced mercilessly by talk radio, was to make the GOP tent
ever smaller. Last week, they achieved their goal.
How the GOP Lost the Latino Vote
As a candidate who
could speak Spanish and a president who rejected the more authoritarian
approaches to illegal immigration, George W. Bush showed the way to win
more of the Latino vote. But Republicans like Wisconsin Rep. F. James
Sensenbrenner rejected this approach, calling for more punitive actions.
This was base politics at work again, and done so stridently that even Bush
wouldn’t go along for the ride.
But Mark Green got on the Xenophobia Express, with ads
suggesting that Doyle was soft on illegal immigration and Green would be a tough
guy. Green even proposed prohibiting in-state tuition at the University of
Wisconsin System for illegal immigrants who have graduated from state high
schools. But at that point, after the state has invested in their education, and
given the likelihood that these students will become productive workers helping
to fuel Wisconsin’s economy, does it make sense to bar the college door?
Nationally, the Latino vote for Republicans fell from 44% for
Bush in 2004 to 29% for Republicans in 2006. “The congressional Republicans’
strategy to scapegoat our community failed overall,” said Janet Murguia,
president of the National Council of La Raza, “and will prove even costlier
in the long run by creating a backlash among Latino voters.”
I’ve seen no statistics on the Latino vote in Wisconsin, but
odds are they were anti-Green by a wide margin.
Are Milwaukee’s Elephants Endangered?
A recent New
York Times story reported that the Philadelphia zoo, the nation’s oldest,
established in 1874, was getting rid of its elephants. Zoos in Detroit, Chicago,
San Francisco and the Bronx have also decided to eliminate their elephant
exhibits.
A de-tusked zoo? That’s like a circus without, er, an elephant.
How can that be?
The new thinking among zoo professionals is that elephants need
room to roam, and Philly’s zoo had only a quarter-acre habitat for its four
pachyderms, or about 2,722 square feet per beast.
How does that compare to Milwaukee? Our zoo has a total area of
just over 10,000 square feet, including 8,680 square feet of land and a surface
area of about 1,550 square feet in its 35,000-gallon elephant pool. But
Milwaukee has only one elephant on hand, Brittany, since the death of Lucy in
September.
Bruce Beehler, Milwaukee’s deputy zoo director, says the
zoo would like to find a friend for Brittany. Long-term, the zoo would also like
to expand its area for elephants in order to accommodate the space needs of a
male or “bull elephant.”
“A bull elephant would destroy our building,” says Beehler.
“They have more strength and a greater reach.”
So for now, the zoo will continue to accommodate a maximum of
two lady elephants. That’s not a herd, certainly, but still a lot more pachyderm
than you’ll find in Philadelphia.
