The recent flurry of Feingold adulation (in which I've participated) has me in a reflective mood about the Badger State...
I was essentially raised in Wisconsin; the family moved here when I was a few months shy of my 5th birthday. It's the place that shaped me, formed me; it's the only place I really remember. I grew up, I left, and I came back again... and when I did, I knew a bit of what Chrissy Hynde meant when she said "My City Was Gone". A lot of the spirit and dynamic I thought I'd known was nowhere to be found. But maybe, just maybe, it's coming back again. Maybe.
As a tyke, I fully absorbed the Wisconsin history lessons they taught us in grade school, all about the Ice Age and
Father Marquette and the
Peshtigo Fire and Robert LaFollette and the difference between a Guernsey and a Jersey (those are breeds of cow, by the way). Funny thing, they left Joseph McCarthy out of the lesson plan... They taught us about our progressive heritage and our squeaky-clean government and the
Wisconsin Idea. Cool stuff. Looking back, I'm amazed it was in the curriculum.
Of course, like all precocious Midwesterners, the last place I wanted to be at the age of 18 was my home state (so unsophisticated, you know), so I left, and I stayed away for more than a dozen years.
During that time, when people would ask me where I was from, I'd tell them with a certain amount of pride that I'd come from one of the more unabashedly progressive states in the Union. We'd produced the LaFollettes and Gaylord Nelson, the father of Earth Day. We passed gay rights legislation before the rest of the country even thought of it. Sure, McCarthy was our fault, but we replaced him with William Proxmire, so that at least helped make up for it...
But things happened while I was gone. For starters, Tommy Thompson became Governor, and stayed there for about 14 years (eventually being referred to as "Emperor Thompson"). As avuncular and down-home as he was, his misrule started the downward slide. Those close to the political ground knew that the times were a-changin'.
It wasn't until he left to become HHS Secretary in 2001 that the full extent of Wisconsin's problems became clear to everyone. He was succeeded by his Lt. Governor, Scott McCallum, who can best be described as Thompson without the political skills (although many in this state would say that's like "John Bolton without the fine sense of tact and diplomacy"). The economy had been sliding into the shitter for a while, and McCallum didn't have the skill to hide it.
To darken matters, the Legislature's Republicans, in a deal apparently ratified by Beelzebub himself, chose John Gard as their leader. Gard, the wunderkind of Wisconsin Republican politics, initially showed signs of being a responsible and conscientious legislator. That lasted until about five minutes after he first heard the name "Newt Gingrich". From then on, Wisconsin politics basically became a three-ring circus, a harshly partisan search-and-destroy mission populated by such upstanding figures as Atwater/Rove-wannabe Todd Rongstad, who once ran an ad campaign literally asking if an incumbent Dem legislator was still beating his wife (Denouement to Rongstad's saga: one of his targets finally sued him for defamation; the worthless bully broke down crying in court).
This was the state I came back to. Nastily partisan, and increasingly wingnutty. I began to despair, I looked for jobs in Asia, I took the immigration tests for Canada and New Zealand... and then I looked around at where I was and decided to just put my shoulder to the wheel.
In the spring of 2004, I was at such a low point that I was convinced Russ Feingold was going to lose to some dumb used-car salesman named Russ Darrow (Campaign slogan: "The Right Russ"). But I decided I may as well do what I could, so I volunteered, at the same time as I was managing a long-shot State Assembly campaign. Gotta do what you can, I figured, although by November I was a complete wreck. But that's another story.
So one fine spring day we're doing a Feingold lit drop in Appleton, home of the aforementioned McCarthy and the world headquarters of the John Birch Society, and lucky me, I get assigned to a particularly R-leaning ward. I was not looking forward to a fun morning. One of the first houses I walk up to has a beat-up pickup in the driveway with the requisite assorted NRA/ death-to-liberals bumper stickers. My stomach dropped as I realized I was going to be greeted at the front door -- no drop-and-go on this one. The muscular, bearded escapee from a WWF event threw open the screen door and asked me what I wanted. I spouted my rehearsed line about this brochure about Senator Feingold and what he's doing for Wisconsin.
The guy's eyes narrowed and bored through my skull as he said "That's the guy who voted against the Patriot Act?" I swallowed and squeaked "Yeah."
He grabbed the brochure and bellowed "He's got my vote!"
And that's how I started to regain my faith in my home state.
As I and others have frequently pointed out here, Feingold won in 2004 by the largest margin of his career, outpolled Kerry by quite a bit, carried counties he'd never carried before (a liberal Madison Democrat who wins north of US Highway 8 -- that just doesn't happen). Lots of folks said his Patriot Act vote would hurt him. But he didn't run away from that vote -- he ran on that vote. He made commercials bragging about it! And he won!
This week, when I saw Russ was standing up to the Administration again, I felt the stirrings of Wisconsin pride I'd had so long ago, and had started to regain last year. I look at what he stands for and I see everything I'd been proud of about Wisconsin in my youth.
Russ will be a Senator from Wisconsin as long as he wants to be. If he runs for President in '08 he's got this state's primary in his pocket. Polls this week show Governor Doyle running ahead of his Republican challengers. Herb Kohl isn't facing serious opposition as of yet (sorry, Ben). Polls show that the open WI-08 seat is actually competitive. Polls show Dems might retake the State Senate and will most likely make gains in the Assembly. Anecdotal evidence shows that people are getting sick of the crap they've been fed.
Twenty years ago, this state was on course to becoming a model for the nation: progressive, productive, egalitarian. To those around the country who wonder if Russ Feingold is some kind of aberration, I'll say no: he's the epitome of what we as a state (and frankly as a nation) could be, and of what we like to see ourselves as being. If the term "Blue State" has any meaning, this should be one.
Unfortunately, we descended into a couple of decades of animosity, greed, hypocrisy, and general madness, egged on by the selfish power-hungry ambitions of a small handful.
Maybe, just maybe, we're starting to wake up.