The doyenne (I love using that word but it always feels slightly sexist) of Wisconsin letters and a great advocate for the use of parentheses (I’m totally in support), Lorrie Moore (yes, that Lorrie Moore, didn’t you know she teaches at UW-Madison?) describes the rise and fall and now somewhat marginalized persistence of the anti-Walker movement in a piece for The New York Review of Books. She ends on amateur astronomers observing “a small dot traversing the broiling sun,” Venus, thanks to binoculars reflecting onto a clipboard carefully positioned outside a Madison jazz concert advertised as a “Jazz Salon for Secular Humanists, Arch Democrats and Freethinkers.” The ending’s a little dire (“it looked like the world was going to hell in a handbasket”) but we’re also given a comparison of Bill Clinton and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who she says outclassed the frosty old character. (See below for photographic evidence, via YouTube.)
Barrett, the people’s mayor of Milwaukee, is chiseled, handsome, and dignified in an almost regal way; in a rally with Bill Clinton the weekend before the election, even while costumed in a Milwaukee Brewers jacket, the very tall, polite Barrett made the crowd-pleasing Clinton look like a raspy, wispy tough guy.
Moore admits to being faintly impressed by Walker having been an Eagle Scout but notes that so was David Lynch (an Eagle Scout, not impressed).
