That was Saturday, and until I go to sleep and wake up again, it isn't entirely Sunday.
I spent three hours canvassing for Tom Barrett and Mahlon Mitchell in Fitchburg. Literally pounding the pavement, ringing doorbells. It's not easy for me to do this, especially at first, but once I have rung a few doorbells and talked with a few people, it gets a bit easier. People don't think I'm shy, but ringing the bell of someone I don't know at all is just not natural for me.
It was a positive experience. People I talked to were generally for the candidates I'm for, and that helps, of course. And there were a couple people who were worried about the outcome, and that is entirely natural. When the opposition lies about virtually everything, from his agenda to his achievements to his opponent's record, and has an advantage in funds of 25 to 1, it would take a fool to be sunnily optimistic.
However, some really interesting things have emerged from the day that put things in clearer focus for me. First of all, I realized that there is a lot about Tom Barrett that has gotten completely buried by Scott Walker's--and Walker's friends'--propaganda.
Walker and others who propagate ads on tv and radio that trash Tom Barrett always refer to him only as the Mayor of Milwaukee. And Barrett is, indeed, the Mayor of Milwaukee. But his experience in government is far broader than that. He served two terms in the Wisconsin State Assembly, then served in the State Senate, and then four terms as a Congressman from Wisconsin, before being gerrymandered out of his district. He then ran for mayor of Milwaukee, and won. But more intriguingly, he won reelection by an enormous majority--over 70%--twice!
It is telling that while Scott Walker, who was the Milwaukee County Supervisor all the years that Barrett was Mayor, until Walker became governor, trashes Barrett, but the voters of Milwaukee seem to think that Barrett has done a very good job. And though Barrett lost to Walker 52% to 48% for governor in 2010, he won Milwaukee by a 2-1 margin.
What Scott Walker has going for him is very, very wealthy friends. While he claims to be taking Wisconsin forward, in fact, he has really taken it backwards in terms of the government's service to the people, with his extreme cuts to education, health care, salaries for government employees and many other measures. He even managed to lose $800 million in Federal grant money to the state, before he even took office, by announcing that he would reject the money, which was supposed to help build a high-speed rail link between Madison and Milwaukee, which would have been a huge economic boon to the state, creating jobs, and also encouraging economic development along the rail corridor. It also would have gone a long way toward re-invigorating Scott Walker's home base, Milwaukee.
Why did Walker reject the money? I don't know for sure, but I have noticed that he has given state subsidies to firms that are engaged in construction of highways. There may be a connection there, but I can't know for sure.
But the bottom line here is simply just that. Walker is all about the bottom line. Can anyone whose eyes are open really think that the vast amount of negative advertising paid for by groups that are not his campaign's own but which are aimed at discrediting Tom Barrett is merely the pleas of a concerned electorate?
All one has to do is notice the bus tour of "Americans for Progress," the organization funded directly by the Koch Brothers who have stood behind Walker, and who own the largest privately held oil and energy company in the United States. Can anyone really believe it is a coincidence that these people launched a ten city bus tour of Wisconsin a week before the recall election? They claim there is no connection, and that they are not campaigning for any political candidate.
That may be technically true, but their message is absolutely clear. Their way is Walker's way. And their way is the same way as the way of the far-right conservative Republican way. They claim that we need lower taxes . . . but they've been saying that for ten years, and we have had lower taxes in these ten years, and the results have benefitted only one group of Americans--those who are already most wealthy or most profitable, in the case of businesses.
Tom Barrett has been an able public servant. He has shown an ability to cooperate with others in government, on both sides of the aisle. Even a Republican as conservative as Paul Ryan said nice things about Barrett, when they were both in the U.S. Congress.
We have all--voters, media, everyone--been bombarded by so much negative campaignage by Walker and his friends that Tom Barrett's real virtues, and the many positive accomplishments he has had in a much longer and more effective political career have been terribly obscured. All that Walker has shown is an inclination to bully those he can bully. With a Republican majority in both houses of the legislature, he decided that he could simply eliminate what, to him, was the inconvenient presence of unions in the public sector. No governor of Wisconsin, Democrat or Republican, has ever felt the necessity to do away with negotiations with unions. Every single one of them has managed to govern without eviscerating the function of unions.
And while he claims to have balanced the budget while lowering taxes, that is not entirely true. He has raised taxes for older people; he has lowered government contributions to health insurance for state employees. And he has consistently lied about the role of unions in their relationship to state government, claiming that state workers did not contribute to their retirement funds, when in fact this was never true.
He has lied about a lot. And his claims of job gains in the state, while in small measure true--yes, there have been jobs created in the state, bear close scrutiny. First, there have been fewer jobs created in Wisconsin than he claims. But more significantly, he has been personally responsible for the loss of jobs in the state because of all the jobs he has eliminated in the state government. And no matter how he would like to say it isn't true, the statistics still stand. Under his administration, Wisconsin has LOST more jobs than any other state in the United States.
But his ads--his constant barrage of ads--make it seem as if this is not true.
They are ads. Even the ones that say "facts" are ads. And for every "fact" in those ads, there are many more facts that are conveniently left out of those ads, which completely contradict the "facts" in his ads.
But the worst thing of all may be, as mentioned above, that he has attempted to cloak himself in the progressive tradition of Wisconsin. His ads often trumpet that with Walker, Wisconsin will continue Forward (and with Barrett, Backward). The word "forward" is the motto of the state. And it comes from the Progressive movement. The movement that fostered unions, and worker's rights, and which has been responsible for bringing many laws into being which help to balance the power of moneyed interests by regulating business's excesses and advocating for the rights of workers and the general populace against the enormous powers that wealth and corporate clout muster in the name of profit.
Corporations are made for profit. But that is not the role of government. When people in Wisconsin vote on Tuesday, I hope they will understand that a vote for Scott Walker is a vote in favor of the interests of corporations, not the interests of everyone else. The government is supposed to protect us from corporate overreach. If Walker keeps being governor, we will be surrendering to corporations as never before.
It has been said that we are known by the company we keep. Scott Walker keeps company with the Koch Brothers and with other big business interests. He has proven this in many ways, the most obvious of which was the $130 million dollars in subsidies he doled out to corporations last year when he claimed that he had to eliminate union bargaining rights, cut $800 million from the education budget and eliminate thousands of state jobs. Have those subsidies created a lot of jobs? Not enough to keep Wisconsin from having lost more jobs last year than any other state.
What more proof do we need to know where his interest really lies, no matter what his ads say?
And every time those ads say "Forward," it is a slap in the face to the state motto and the people of Wisconsin.
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