View From Just Outside the Cage: Wisconsin Across the River
Living near the Wisconsin border has its joys, because it is both a beautiful state and home for a lot of friends. It also means that there are things, to paraphrase Churchill, up with which we must put.
The first is the constant, over-the-top, shark-jumping worship of the Green Bay Packers. About which, in the interests of world peace and my own state of mind, I will speak no more.
The second is the fact that, as with Philadelphia and the Camden, NJ congressional races, people who turn on local television stations in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul not only get their own political commercials during election season, but also get those from the next state because the border areas are in the same television market.
We endured the last half of 2010, ending on the first Tuesday in November, and thought that we could live in peace till around June of 2012. Nope.
All of 2011 has been the province of Minnesota-Wisconsin soap opera. First, there was the Wisconsin senators AWOL flight with attendant street protests and the nude bicycle parade, then we got the Minnesota government shutdown engineered by Target Corp. heir Gov. Mark Dayton (whose money is kept in a trust fund in South Dakota, thank you), which ended when the governor realized that no one noticed the shutdown, and the consequences of that discovery to his cherished state bureaucracy could be a problem.
But for the last month, we have been assaulted on local TV by more political ads, because one of the most hotly contested races was between incumbent Republican Sheila Harsdorf and Wisconsin Education Association official Shelly Moore, which is just across the Mississippi bridge from Minnesota, 17 miles from St. Paul. I now (unwillingly) know more about both Moore and Harsdorf than I have ever had any interest in learning. We didn’t get any of this nonsense last November- all the TV time was bought up by state-wide and congressional contests.
But Harsdorf was deemed to be a possible pick-up by the national public employee unions, who desperately needed to find ways to overturn the new laws against state withholding of union dues from employee paychecks. When the dues are not automatically withheld, payment of dues and union participation drops by more than 80%, which sort of puts a crimp into the electoral influence of organized labor.
So, the plan was to put six “vulnerable” Republican Wisconsin state senate seats up for grabs and win control of that chamber by flipping three of them, then using the generated momentum to fuel a recall of Gov. Scott Walker, the antiuniondebbil himself in 2012. And key to that was non-stop TV spots, from morning till night, that told us how much Harsdorf hates working people and how much Moore “breathes union”.
The woman in the office next to mine is one of several colleagues who live in that district. She tells me that there were no large influxes of door-to-door contact, but a lot of direct mail on top of the incessant television ads. She’s also glad it is over with.
We in the Midwest would appreciate it if the national spotlight would please go elsewhere for a while. We have only two weeks before schools start up again and we begin the process of dreading yet another Winter.
We don’t like to have our all-too-short Summer swallowed whole by unnecessary attempts to play out the 2010 election all over again.
- Comment (5)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (2)
Comments :
Apr '11
Re: View From Just Outside the Cage: Wisconsin Across the River
Don't worry it will be a mild winter in the upper Midwest because of global warming.
Jul '11
Re: View From Just Outside the Cage: Wisconsin Across the River
When will someone important point out the obvious, namely that this whole exercise was a gross abuse of the democratic process? Recalls are intended to remove office holders who turned out to be corrupt or incompetent. They should not be vehicles for sore losers who didn't like the results of the last election and its subsequent political consequences. The Dems up for recall next week are legitimate targets, as they are clearly guilty of dereliction of duty, but the Republicans who merely voted for the legislation they promised to support should not have been subject to recall for doing what voters elected them to do.
May '10
Re: View From Just Outside the Cage: Wisconsin Across the River
Maybe if the Gophers had a decent football team all this would be no more than background noise....
May '10
Re: View From Just Outside the Cage: Wisconsin Across the River
The link to the nude bicycle parade yields a caption but no picture. Correct that, Duane.
One of the most fun evenings of the last year was following election returns on that WI judges' race -- Waukesha County and all that -- but it's all probably best from a distance. Alas, here in Ohio our public sector unions have managed to get Kasich's reforms up for a referendum in Nov. It's getting shrill already. Oy.
Apr '11
Re: View From Just Outside the Cage: Wisconsin Across the River
Um, you still watch TV commercials?