--Jeff Daniels, playing news anchor Will McAvoy on "The Newsroom"
Lisa Neubauer has my undying respect and admiration. But that's not much more than she now has.
Oh, she's a state appellate court judge. Nice position, but she's not on the state Supreme Court. She ran but was defeated.
She must have forgotten about Louis Butler. That was more than a decade ago. The memory might have faded. It might have been written off as one of those 'exceptions to the rule.'
Except the rules have changed, and Democrats or those leaning in their direction don't want to face it. They keep getting after Republicans for denying the way the world has changed, for dreaming of a life that has long since passed and making rules to return to it. In every way but politics, they would be right.
But in politics, the Republicans have taken charge of the narrative, the process, and the attitudes behind them. This one part of our culture, which ironically has become the passageway to controlling it, represents a flipping of the mentality.
The Democrats don't get it anymore. They don't get what they need to do, so they don't get the positions they crave, either.
I got another earful of that at the Milwaukee County Democratic Party meeting last week. I heard from state party chair Martha Laning that Neubauer had a chance to accept monies from Democratic Party donors, but refused. She didn't want to be tainted with Dems-versus-Reps rhetoric; you know, bias.
So she ran on the high road. Meanwhile, according to internal polling, she was leading by eight points--nearly a landslide total--with a week to go in the campaign. Her campaign ads were straightforward, featuring mostly her own voice, and filled with supportive facts, namely, that she had the support of over three hundred state attorneys, judges, and law enforcement officers. Brian Hagedorn, her homophobic, excessively religiously afflicted opponent, who had been an assistant attorney general, Scott Walker's personal lawyer, and a law clerk for outgoing state Supreme Court judge Michael Gableman (more on him below), had six, according to her campaign's count. Six.
It was looking like a slam dunk. She was in cruise control. On Election Day, Neubauer polled some 48,000 more statewide votes than the winner of the previous state Supreme Court election, Rebecca Dallet, also a liberal, who had won handily, just the previous year.
Yet, Hagedorn won by 6,000 votes. He did take last-minute money. It suddenly rained down like an Asian monsoon. At least 1.3 million dollars, said Laning.
That was enough to scare up, and I mean exactly that, 168,000 more Republican-leaning voters, many of whom were probably not going to show up otherwise. How? By buying fear-mongering ads that had next to nothing to do with whatever issues that the campaign was actually supposed to represent.
"They were [45] ads," said Jeff Neubauer, Lisa's husband, who ran her campaign, with whom I discussed the stunning defeat at the Democratic Founders' Day dinner. "It was like they were voting for [45]."
All of this tells us that:
- Wisconsin is gripped by fear as much as any other state;
- 45 supporters will answer the clarion call in 2020--you can count on it;
- Putting this result together with the closeness of the gubernatorial race in 2018, Wisconsin is as purple as any state could possibly be;
- Citizens United surfaced its ugly head at exactly the most cogent moment; and
- Democrats forget what happened to Louis Butler and, once again, paid the price.
Butler, whom I have known for a half-century (we were fellow political science majors at Lawrence University in Appleton, and he obviously did a lot more with it than me), was appointed to the state Supreme Court by then-governor Jim Doyle in 2004. Butler became the first black person to have ever served in that position. He served out the last two years of the term of Diane Sykes, who was appointed by Bush-43 to the 7th Federal Appellate Circuit (and who may replace RBG if the latter succumbs during 45's tenure; she's been mentioned before, and though not as radical as others, wouldn't be as controversial a choice). Butler ran for a ten-year term in 2006, and was defeated by Gableman, a circuit judge from the northwest corner of the state.
The campaign was perhaps the most controversial in at least the last century. As Lisa Neubauer tried to re-introduce, state Supreme Court races are, or were, supposed to be run on the fairly vague issues of qualifications and temperament, which tend to be appropriate because of the more general, overall character of the court's interpretive rulings. But, just as the national Supreme Court appointments have evolved from something akin to high-mindedness, Gableman injected issues such as criminal rulings in cases involving violence and drugs (He accused Butler of finding a "loophole" in the law to put a child molester back out on the street, for example), leaning on Butler's experience in the far more cosmopolitan area of Milwaukee County, where he, too, had been a circuit judge. When the campaign turned in that direction, Gableman was able to utilize hot-button phraseology ("putting criminals on the street") that brought forth accusations of being racially tinged.
In other words, relative to those former standards, Gableman played dirty. And he got away with it, since the Wisconsin Supreme Court tied 3-3 on whether Gableman had committed ethics violations. Butler addressed that matter tangentially in ads late in the campaign, but low turnout--another bellweather of Republican strategy--did him in.
Hagedorn replaced Gableman, who resigned amidst rumors of a federal appointment by 45. The U.S. Supreme Court booted the lawsuit filed to address the severe gerrymandering of Wisconsin state and federal representational districts back to the State of Wisconsin, which means that the next legal decision will, eventually, belong to the state Supreme Court. With Hagedorn's election, conservatives (a.k.a. Republicans) reclaim a 5-2 margin. Had Neubauer won, the margin would have been narrowed to 4-3, with another statewide election next year.
That's what was at stake. No wonder the Republicans panicked and brought emergency big bucks to bear. And they could, because of Citizens United. It doesn't even have to be traceable to a specific source. The dog whistles were sounded, and the minions reported dutifully. (Expect all the more in 2020.)
As mentioned in the previous blog, though the Democrats won 54% of the total, statewide assembly vote in 2018, Republicans still hold 63 seats to the Democrats' 36, a raw, naked imbalance, a rubber stamp exposed every two years. Hagedorn's election probably took away any significant reversal in that condition for at least another decade.
All because, said Laning, "A couple of donors just took out their checkbooks." A local blog report written the day after the election said that Neubauer outspent Hagedorn by some $400,000, but listed Hagedorn's total spending at $1.3 million, which meant that he had spent next to nothing up to that point. That can't be true, because Hagedorn was up on television before the rush of the final week. In all likelihood, if Laning's comments were accurate, that reporter hadn't yet known of the effects of the later Republican financial infusions.
Said Laning of Neubauer's highly ethical but naively futile campaign: "I don't think that's going to happen again." Now Wisconsin Democrats have two recent examples of what too many of them have refused to see: That the bottom line of politics is power, and the bottom line of power is winning. The rest of the blanks get filled in with those who have done what they needed to do to get the offices they lust after.
Who knows if extra money from Democrats would have held off Hagedorn's last-minute surge? But it would have been interesting if Neubauer could have spent enough on one last ad of her own, refuting and diminishing Hagedorn's histrionics.
That's the second lesson Democrats are very slow to learn. The third is not that they don't know what they stand for, but they're too scared to say so. This fear has two levels: One internal, the other external. But that's for later, as the new campaign ramps up. There will be plenty to write about on that topic.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
That's what was at stake. No wonder the Republicans panicked and brought emergency big bucks to bear. And they could, because of Citizens United. It doesn't even have to be traceable to a specific source. The dog whistles were sounded, and the minions reported dutifully. (Expect all the more in 2020.)
As mentioned in the previous blog, though the Democrats won 54% of the total, statewide assembly vote in 2018, Republicans still hold 63 seats to the Democrats' 36, a raw, naked imbalance, a rubber stamp exposed every two years. Hagedorn's election probably took away any significant reversal in that condition for at least another decade.
All because, said Laning, "A couple of donors just took out their checkbooks." A local blog report written the day after the election said that Neubauer outspent Hagedorn by some $400,000, but listed Hagedorn's total spending at $1.3 million, which meant that he had spent next to nothing up to that point. That can't be true, because Hagedorn was up on television before the rush of the final week. In all likelihood, if Laning's comments were accurate, that reporter hadn't yet known of the effects of the later Republican financial infusions.
Said Laning of Neubauer's highly ethical but naively futile campaign: "I don't think that's going to happen again." Now Wisconsin Democrats have two recent examples of what too many of them have refused to see: That the bottom line of politics is power, and the bottom line of power is winning. The rest of the blanks get filled in with those who have done what they needed to do to get the offices they lust after.
Who knows if extra money from Democrats would have held off Hagedorn's last-minute surge? But it would have been interesting if Neubauer could have spent enough on one last ad of her own, refuting and diminishing Hagedorn's histrionics.
That's the second lesson Democrats are very slow to learn. The third is not that they don't know what they stand for, but they're too scared to say so. This fear has two levels: One internal, the other external. But that's for later, as the new campaign ramps up. There will be plenty to write about on that topic.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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