The large brick buildings of urban Wisconsin are the most prominent features of this otherwise flat landscape. They stand faded, sturdy, and tall over bare deciduous trees and cracked pavement, dimly lit up at night by sparse fluorescent lighting faintly flickering within. Other structures are more neglected, completely dark with boarded up windows and For Lease signs out front reminding the visitor that all is not well in the Badger State.
Much has transpired since Wisconsin acquired statehood in 1848, from the collapse of soil-depleting wheat cultivation and its replacement by dairy farming, to the rise of an influential labor movement and its harsh fall into powerlessness. The land of Progressive champion Robert La Follette later spawned the deranged Joe McCarthy, who frothed and hollered on national television that sanity itself was a Communist conspiracy. McCarthy was eventually censured by his fellow Senators and slunk off to drink himself to death a few years later at the age of 48, marking a temporary return to normalcy for a state justifiably known for the reasonable temperament of its people. Decades later, a strange belch of Crazy has bubbled up to the surface once again, in the form of a new Governor and his frantic attempts to turn Wisconsin into a low-wage playpen for big business.
A general revulsion with America’s reigning institutions has steadily metastasized over the years, and how this pent up frustration is expressed is often contradictory. Eight years of Bush fouled America’s appetite for fear and apocalyptic fantasy, compelling the electorate to give the keys to a hopeful new President who could spell and even read. This quickly became tiresome and two years later voters rebelled again, electing a wave of Republican candidates promising to lower unemployment by firing public employees. In Wisconsin the fickle electorate voiced their discontent by installing a mild-mannered son of a preacher in the Governor’s mansion.
How Scott Walker became Governor I have yet to fully discover, as most of the people with whom I’ve spoken attribute his rise to some powerful force independent of his unremarkable character. To the people here in Madison he is a cheap hack, a throw-away puppet at the beck and call of the super-rich who climbed out of the same bottomless cloning vat as every other bland Republican errand boy. While liberal Madison can perhaps be dismissed as unreflective of statewide sentiment, Wisconsin as a whole is reliably blue, with Democrats enjoying an 18% advantage over Republicans in party affiliation among adults.
So how did a guy like Walker slither into the highest office of a state like Wisconsin? A college drop-out with a career in sales and marketing, prior to his stint in public office his most notable achievements were attaining the rank of Eagle Scout and losing a student body election at Marquette University after being caught repeatedly violating campaign rules. Failing in his first race for State Assembly in 1990, he moved his family to a heavily Republican exurb outside Milwaukee and won a newly created Assembly seat on a platform opposing mass transit. When a scandal involving the county pension fund forced the Democratic Milwaukee County Executive from office in disgrace, Walker smelled blood and won the position in a special election in 2002.
I caught a glimpse of the unenviable condition Scott Walker left the county when taking a bus west from the airport in Milwaukee to the state capitol of Madison. “Badger Bus,” as this cold and slow service is known, was the only public route connecting the airport to my destination, a sad fact that will probably remain in place for the foreseeable future as Governor Walker has rejected federal money to connect the two cities with high-speed rail. Snaking through a couple of stops in downtown Milwaukee and then out through the surrounding area, shuttered industrial facilities and unused smoke stacks abound, and by the dearth of parked cars and pedestrians, one can easily see that the city is well past its prime. From a peak of around 750,000 in the 1960s, the population has declined to about 600,000 today, owing to the region’s steady deindustrialization and the gradual relocation of its middle class to the suburbs.
Walker’s plan to address the plight of Milwaukee as County Executive consisted of little more than destroying the functions of the county government itself. After laying off parks personnel, janitors, and social workers, he also took to funding public pensions with borrowed money so he could make good on a promise not to raise taxes, deferring the issue for future politicians to deal with. Yet he also gave back large portions of his own salary to the county, a neat gimmick that won him praise as “fiscally responsible” and overshadowed his devastation of county services.
Leaving Milwaukee in ruins, Walker has big plans for Wisconsin. Phase One has already been accomplished: a large package of tax cuts for businesses, exploding the state’s projected deficit for the 2011-2013 period. Phase Two is the more interesting part: closing the existing deficit by slashing health and pension benefits for public employees, and inserting provisions into the budget bill that strip state workers of nearly all of their power to bargain collectively. The bill also gives the Governor emergency power to alter public health spending and allows him to sell off public utilities without a competitive bidding process. Presumably the state’s power plants will end up in the hands of his campaign contributors, particularly Koch Industries, which has already begun recruiting new plant managers for work in Wisconsin.
Wisconsinites seem to be taking this about as well as one can imagine, flooding their capitol with tens of thousands of disgruntled state employees, students, and sympathetic private sector workers who understand that an injury to one is an injury to all. Teachers briefly went on strike and Walker has threatened to bring out the National Guard to settle the matter if need be. For their part the unions have agreed to completely surrender on the matter of benefit cuts but are unwilling to give up their bargaining rights. Walker won’t budge and all fourteen of Wisconsin’s Democratic state senators have fled to Illinois to prevent a vote on the budget until he compromises.
The Governor is becoming more hated by the day, and Americans oppose weakening public sector unions by a margin of almost two to one. Though time will tell if the protesting workers or the Republicans will prevail in the end, so far the unions are successfully making their case, according to Pew Research out-polling Walker in Wisconsin by a margin of eleven points. A campaign to recall multiple Republican state senators is just getting off the ground, further turning up the heat on the Governor’s allies.
And at least in Madison, where I’m currently holed up with a front row seat to the future of American labor, the mood is resolutely anti-Walker. Signs supporting state employees are in the windows of businesses across the city while talk in pubs and cafés buzz with contempt for the Republicans. Perhaps most tellingly of all, the Governor was recently booed out of a local restaurant by a crowd of angry patrons. With any luck, Scott Walker will meet the same fate as Joe McCarthy: defeated for his brazen political overreach and exposed for the crude charlatan that he is. Over two weeks into this dispute and counting, all eyes are on Wisconsin’s capitol. We shall see.
