The Weekly Screed (#585)

Sympathy for the goon
by David Benjamin

TOKYO -- Anyone who has spent any time in Wisconsin knows the populace there as easygoing folks, hospitable, practical and sometimes maddeningly moderate -- not the sort of gene pool that normally spawns ideological firebrands. Yet, from the mild-mannered Badger State, in the last few years, two "right-wing rock stars," Rep. Paul Ryan and Gov. Scott Walker, have hit the bigtime, jetting from red state to red state, collecting five-figure fees and whipping the yahoos into a blood-flecked froth.

Wisconsin's "tradition" of wingnut celebrities is a brief one, harking back only as far as the 1950's to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, the mendacious red-baiter who blighted thousands of lives and came to the nasty and ignominious end that he had earned in a vindictive, solitary and wasted lifetime.

On the fifth of June, Gov. Walker faces a comparable ignominy, in only the third gubernatorial recall election in U.S. history. I'll be there to vote against him, but I''m already braced for disappointment. As the recall race looks now, unless Walker gets arrested for the stuff he did while running Milwaukee County, Wisconsin's going to be stuck with him for three more years.

I'm pessimistic about the prospects of recall for several reasons, the first of which is Nate Silver. On his website, called Five Thirty-Eight, Silver last week established Walker's survival at a 90-percent likelihood. Silver is the most fool-proof analyst of polling numbers in contemporary politics. When he handicaps a candidate at 9-1 in favor, with less than two weeks to Wapner, he's almost infallible.

Another reason my hopes of dumping Walker are fast fading is the imbalance in TV spending by the Walker forces compared to his Democratic opponent. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. At one point, the spending disparity stood at 25-to-1. Barrett has narrowed the gap lately, but it remains in double figures. Thanks to a decision sardonically called "Citizens United,"engineered by the five most activist conservative justices in Supreme Court history, Wisconsin's voters have been the media guinea pigs in a one-sided propaganda blitzkrieg in Walker's favor, on a scale unprecedented in any free democratic country. For the months of April and May, 2012, Wisconsin's voting public has discovered how it might have felt if there had been television in Berlin in 1939.

But the clincher, for me, in Scott Walker's undeserved deliverance surfaced last Thanksgiving up in Tomah, when I took a recall petition to the family feast. Although I scrounged a handful of signatures, my reception among the vast majority of my loved ones featured anger, dismay and naked hostility.

The word my stepbrother Tom threw at me was "divisive."Tom was hurt and appalled that I would intrude on a family occasion with an act of political provocation.

Tom's reaction stung. "Divisive" is a term rarely applied to Wisconsin politics. I mean, this ain't Minnesota! Walker's two gubernatorial predecessors, for example, were a moderate Republican with friends in both parties and a homely Irish Democrat who survived two terms without raising anyone's hackles more than an inch off the skin. Tommy Thompson and Jimmy Boyle are typical of the Badger governors who date back 40-odd years to my birth of political awareness -- amicable men of limited gifts , but with a talent for working across the aisle in a state equally represented by both parties but hardly ever "divided."

Divisive doesn't work in Wisconsin. But there I was, at Thanksgiving, accused of it, by my own family, in friendly Wisconsin.

But I swear to God and "Fighting Bob" LaFollette, that it wasn't my fault! It wasn't me doing the dividing. It was that son-of-a-McCarthy Scott Walker. He started it!

Early last year, with both houses of the state legislature controlled by Shiite Republicans, Walker launched a veritable right-wing coup d'etat that was born not in middle-of-the-road Wisconsin -- where strangers passing in the street always say "hi!" -- but in the boiler rooms of outfits like FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Apropos of nothing he had mentioned in his campaign, Walker launched a take-no-prisoners agenda featuring guns (he was for 'em), abortion (against it), corporate welfare (he loved it), collective bargaining (hated hated HATED it!) and Jim Crow voter ID laws -- written by the boys at ALEC --that were tailored to disenfranchise the old, the black, the immigrant, the crippled, the poor and the Democratically inclined.

The reaction to all this -- the movement that split once-amiable Wisconsin into two warring camps -- was the month-long occupation of the state capitol in Madison by embattled unions, by teachers and students, firefighters and students, even by off-duty cops. Meanwhile, every Democrat in the state Senate -- to forestall passage of Walker's coup -- took it on the lam to Illinois, with Walker's state troopers in warm pursuit. Walker, of course, ended up getting everything he wanted -- plus rich and famous.

In retrospect, the whole thing reminds me of a hockey fight. You know how it goes. The first blow -- a sucker punch -- is so sudden and unexpected that the referees and most fans see it -- if they see it at all -- out of the corner of an eye. By the time everyone has focused on the fight, the victim is up off the ice and whaling away at the guy who started it. Everybody sees the second haymaker. The retaliation becomes the provocation.

In a hockey fight, the guy who hits back is the one who pays the price. He's the one who hears the boos raining down and whose voice -- "But he hit me first!" -- is drowned in the uproar. He's the sorry sad sack who ends up in the penalty box while the goon who bushwhacked him scores the winning goal on the power play (on a deflection!).

So goes the recall in Wisconsin. Walker, the goon who picked the fight, basks in the sympathy of inattentive fans who only saw the second blow. As the skirmish winds down, as the AFL-CIO and the teachers union and Tom Barrett head for the penalty box, I remember what my usually sweet stepsister Sherry hollered at me on Thanksgiving. Scowling at me and my nasty old petition, she cried out with a finality that precluded any discussion. Her words were the perfect motto for Scott Walker and his billionaire backers during this supreme moment of division in Wisconsin:

"Leave him alone!"