There’s nothing like a Rotary Club luncheon to take the measure of a candidate. That’s what brought me to Wauwatosa and Edgerton to watch, respectively, Republican gubernatorial hopefuls Scott Walker and Mark Neumann.
Both seemed cut from the same conservative cloth of fervent, pro-business tax-slashers. At times, their easy certitude begins to take on the feel of a patent-medicine pitch.
Suffering from catarrh? Lumbago? The vapors? Dropsy? Do you have the nervous fidgets? Never fear, friends! Take two strong tax cuts and you’ll be fit as a fiddle!
But in the midst of a scary recession, a jobs-focused, economic message is powerful, all the more so after seven years of Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle’s steady-but-unspectacular rule. One of these guys – Walker, Neumann or a Republican to be named later – has an excellent chance of winning the 2010 gubernatorial election.
“The wheelhouse issues now are jobs and the economy. That lines up well for Republicans,” says Steve Baas, a former aide to two GOP Assembly speakers who now lobbies for the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce.
It also means Republicans won’t be emphasizing the social conservative agenda that contributed to losses in the ’06 and ’08 state elections.“The base is not as able to pull people into gay-marriage, anti-abortion debates,” says Baas.
Walker, 42, quietly acknowledges this. He seems primed to seize the moment. He’s out front in the polls, fundraising, endorsements and just plain candidate savvy.
To the fury of progressives and union leaders, Walker won heavily Democratic Milwaukee County while championing spending cuts and program reductions in three races for county executive.
“Walker is a natural-born politician,” marvels Mordecai Lee, a former Democratic lawmaker and now a UW-Milwaukee political scientist. “He’s Hollywood level. That’s how good he is.”
I saw a demonstration. Unexpectedly, the first questioner at the Wauwatosa Rotary challenged Walker, suggesting he wasn’t ready to run state government because he had allowed the Wisconsin Shares day care program to be corrupted. The comment was somewhat unfair: Most of the problem rests with Madison’s poor oversight. But Walker was unfazed, calling it a “good question,” and he proceeded to reframe culpability in a friendly, nondefensive way.
Neumann, 55, lacks Walker’s easy grace. A businessman, former two-term U.S. representative from the 1st District, and an unsuccessful challenger to U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold in 1998, Neumann comes across as a voluble, five-point-plan kind of guy. He’s someone who outlandishly pledges to make Wisconsin’s schools “the best in the world” with apparent sincerity.
“Neumann’s intensity – that’s a scary thing as you try to define yourself,” says one Republican. “I’ve known Mark forever and love him, but sometimes that intensity comes across as creepy. It’s the big eyes, him leaning in. But Mark’s not really a creepy guy.”
Neumann reminds me in many ways of successful developers: driven, single-minded, willing to jump into the void because they’re utterly confident of the outcome. He is exactly the kind of entrepreneur Republicans like to celebrate.
But he lacks Walker’s preternatural message control. “He tells you everything he knows about everything every time he starts talking,” grumbles my source. At the Edgerton Rotary, when a real estate agent asked Neumann if he thought Congress would renew the homebuyer tax credit, Neumann dismissed this stimulus effort as ineffective. But the agent in a quiet voice defended the tax credit, saying it had given “hope” in a real estate market awash with despair. That ker-chink was recorded as a no-sale for Neumann.
Neumann certainly has a resumé. He is a co-chair of three Lutheran choice schools in the central city. “We’re in the toughest parts of Milwaukee,” he told the Rotarians. “Our kids are learning faster than students in the surrounding public schools.”
Neumann may also be the most green-minded major party candidate to ever run for statewide office. He boasts of building homes so efficient, they produce surplus energy to run an electric car. His goal as governor sounds positively Green Party: Make Wisconsin energy-independent with renewable power and no carbon emissions. New clean-energy jobs, he says, “are the jobs of the future.”
This is heady stuff. One could imagine Neumann appealing to young voters and free-thinkers in a general election. But his open hostility to gay rights could sour some of those voters.
Can he beat Walker? Neumann’s face lit up in an interview as he revealed his ace in the hole: the statewide disgust with Milwaukee’s economic, social and educational woes. That could doom Walker or any Milwaukee candidate.
“I don’t believe they can survive the election without the people looking at them and saying: ‘Wait a minute, you guys have been in charge of Milwaukee. Look what’s happened there!’ ”
And that would open the door wide, Neumann believes, for the election of the most socially conservative, yet fervently green governor this state has ever seen.
