Wisconsin Republicans are like that cranky uncle at family gatherings. The old blowhard with the loud, stale opinions. The scold who picks a fight at the dinner table. That’s your average GOP politician, circa 2009.
For almost 20 years, Republicans had dominated state politics. They set the agenda. They drove the discussion. They attracted the best young political minds. That is, until the party slid into self-caricature and jihadism after Gov. Tommy Thompson resigned and left for Washington in 2001.
Last November, Wisconsin Republicans hit rock bottom, as Democrats captured the Assembly. This completed the rare state trifecta of single-party control of the governor’s office, state Senate and Assembly (not to mention both U.S. Senate seats and five of the eight U.S. House districts).
The GOP’s meltdown is closely connected to its increasing preoccupation with ideological purity. The party of President Ronald Reagan – his celebrated “Big Tent” Republicanism – was essentially conservative, but it still had enough hooks on which many could hang their hats, including disaffected Democrats.
Avowed Republican moderates like Scott Klug and Steve Gunderson held House seats in Democratic-leaning Wisconsin districts. Gov. Thompson was a big-government activist who reformed welfare and public education in Milwaukee.
But the Republican glory days have passed as the party has gravitated to social conservatism, revanchism (conservative writer Sam Tanenhaus’ fine word to describe the hard right’s crusade to roll back all social welfare programs) and an obsessive belief in tax cuts as the solution to any problem in America.
None of this, of course, describes how Tommy Thompson became an immensely popular four-term Republican governor. Despite coming out of the revanchist wing of the GOP, the Assembly minority leader who was known as “Dr. No” transformed himself as governor. Thompson exemplified what Irving Kristol once
described as “the reforming spirit with the conservative ideal.”
Smart young conservatives flocked to Thompson’s side, as they did to Reagan’s. Nowadays, when even children of rock-ribbed Republicans are Obama supporters, it’s hard to believe that in President Reagan’s 1984 re-election bid, he carried two student wards on the perennially liberal UW-Madison campus.
But as UW-Madison political scientist and Pollster.comco-founder Charles Franklin explains, young people are inevitably “moved more by the current political winds” because they have no experience of earlier political events. Back in 1984, they saw Democrats as tired, uninspired and mired in the past, and Republicans as the voice of the future. Led by Thompson’s one-time whiz kid Scott Jensen, Assembly Republicans gained seats in seven straight elections, climbing from 41 to 60 members in the 99-seat chamber, and Jensen rose to Speaker.
But by the 2006 election, Jensen and Thompson were out of office. The state’s GOP brain trust, following the well-thumbed playbook of Karl Rove, chose to flog issues that would maximize turnout of their conservative base. Scheduling a constitutional referendum to ban gay marriage on the November 2006 ballot seemed a stroke of genius. In lockstep with the strategy, GOP gubernatorial candidate Mark Green embraced Wisconsin Right to Life’s opposition to embryonic stem cell research.
Sure enough, the referendum cruised to victory, breaking the hearts of gays across Wisconsin. Yet Gov. Jim Doyle, a decidedly uncharismatic candidate, was unaffected. He won re-election easily, while Democrats picked up eight seats in the Assembly, shocking Republicans.
Tellingly, five of those new seats were in college towns like Oshkosh and Platteville, where young people turned out to oppose the referendum and vote Democratic. Exit polling caught the sharp generational split: 20-something voters opposed the gay marriage ban, 60 percent to 40 percent.
Doyle, meanwhile, had capitalized on public support for embryonic stem cell research. Surveys showed seven of 10 Wisconsin residents favored the research made famous by UW’s James Thomson because of its potential for life-saving medical breakthroughs. The GOP had played the social conservative card one too many times.
Republicans are increasingly defined by what they don’t like – gay people, illegal Hispanic immigrants, college professors, public employees, teachers, trains – rather than what they stand for.
The constant carping gets old quickly. It’s hardly a recipe to attract young people. Nor does griping about a cigarette tax hike hold any interest for a nonsmoking, high-tech business owner worried about finding venture capital and the right code writers.
Republicans will never rebound until they find a way to wrap their core principles – individual responsibility, limited government, economic opportunity – around creative solutions for problems like education and health care. But they also must recognize that when the economy tanks, a fearful electorate expects its leaders to do something.
One certainly can imagine Thompson rising to the challenge, consulting the best business and university experts to stake out a plan. Thompson, in fact, exemplified what Tanenhaus described in a recent essay in The New Republicas a Burkean conservative – one so vested in maintaining societal stability that he or she believes “governments were obligated to use their powers to ameliorate intolerable conditions.”
But the Thompson era is no more.
The Big Tent has folded. The revanchists now rule.
