Following Gov. Scott Walker's victory in this week's Wisconsin recall election, the state's biggest business lobby -- the very conservative Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce group, or WMC -- took up Walker's earlier call for a state constitutional amendment erasing lawmaker recall provisions. WMC said such recalls are too expensive, disruptive and threaten to create a kind of permanent campaign atmosphere in the state. Ironically, WMC itself is a prime example of a business lobby that engenders permanent campaign politics in the state, not only running its own issue campaigns constantly, but doling out millions of dollars in spending on behalf of business-friendly, mostly GOP candidates.
Indeed, WMC's huge financial support for Scott Walker -- reportedly amounting by itself to around half of all the funds raised by Walker's Democratic opponent Tom Barrett -- is in service to Walker's own permanent campaign while in office. Apparently, in the WMC view of the world, citizens who succeed through great effort in compelling ad hoc recall campaigns are a threat to good government and the state's economy, whereas politicians and special private outfits like WMC can campaign and lobby one another almost daily, monopolizing political memes and themes without negative impact. The full story below.
Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the giant business lobby that funds many Wisconsin Republicans, is in the wake of the state's recall elections this week already lobbying to dump the state's constitutional provision that enshrines the process. WMC's self-serving campaign is rife with irony, as when WMC insists that getting rid of recall elections will bring "a return to normalcy" to Wisconsin.
That "normalcy" phrase was the 1920 campaign slogan of GOP candidate and eventual President Warren G. Harding. The Harding administration is considered by numerous historians to be among the most corrupt in American political history. Moreover, his "return to normalcy" was a direct call to return the US to the way it functioned before World War I -- an era not only without public employee unions but without very many worker protections at all.
Perhaps WMC didn't literally mean to suggest Wisconsin needs to return to an era where there are no child labor laws or a minimum wage or worker's compensation. However, given the business group's general posture on political issues over the past couple of decades, voters could be excused for believing so.
The Walker/Republican meme regurgitated by WMC that recall elections are expensive and disruptive is wrong on several levels. Wisconsin elections officials estimated the taxpayer cost of administering this weeks' six recall elections (governor, lieutenant governor and four state senators) at $17 million. WMC found that strangely outrageous.
After all, the required number of residents petitioning for those elections was met, making the elections mandatory. In other words, a sufficient number of voters, citizens and taxpayers legally triggered the elections in service to a cause they thought appropriate. The state will spend many, many times that amount in future, regular elections. It's a drop in the bucket in terms of state spending, and, anyway, there's an unavoidable cost to running democracy by the numbers.
Nor should it be overlooked that, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan watchdog group, WMC spent an estimated $700,000 in the Wisconsin 2011 recall elections that targeted six Republican state senators and three incumbent Democrats. The senators were recalled for their support of or opposition to GOP Gov. Scott Walker's measure to restrict public employee collective bargaining.
Walker, Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch and four more GOP Senate seats were targeted in the second round of recalls decided this week. A WMC executive said shortly before the May 8 recall primary that his special interest group planned to spend $2 million on television ads around the state to support the governor -- nearly half the total contributions to the campaign of Tom Barrett, Walker's Democratic Party challenger.
And yet it's the necessary cost of running the actual voting and vote counting -- not the now-limitless cost of running partisan campaigns -- that WMC insists should concern citizens. Any business major who understands the economics concept of an opportunity cost should know that when businesses spend money on politics, they pass that cost along to consumers, just as if they were taxed.
Needless to say, WMC also spends a lot of money on campaign ads in regular and other kinds of special elections. Summing up the WMC philosophy as we see it: Public expenditures for running a legitimate, constitutionally mandated set of elections: Bad. Whereas, with regard to much greater private spending on those elections: Sky's the limit! Looks like WMC is in favor of taking this whole democracy thing private.
Indeed, WMC contributions along with other, mostly out of state corporate sources and Walker's own, mostly out-of-state fund raising totaled out at something close to $50 million. How much is a governorship worth? At least several times more than what it costs voters to select that governor, apparently.
WMC hilariously refers to the recalls as "an unpleasant chapter in our state's history," as if the democratic process and elections are in themselves a bad thing. But if that is so, what are we to make of this: Until 1970, the governors and lieutenant governors of Wisconsin were chosen not every four years in regular elections but every two years. That shorter term was seated in the state constitution, too, and was the norm in the state for most of its history. Note that Wisconsin lawmakers can now only be recalled once per term, so this latest recall if successful would have amounted to no more than returning the governorship temporarily to the state's shorter, historic reelection cycle.
Nor did WMC complain when earlier recalls were mounted, such as the Walker-supported effort to recall the Milwaukee County executive over a policy dispute, which led to Walker's own ascension to the job. Recalls, you see, are good except when they're organized by the rabble.
WMC proclaims that "the year-and-a-half long recall saga has created uncertainty, instability and -- worst of all -- incivility." WMC said the recalls "divided families, co-workers and neighbors" and, supposedly, cost the state jobs while damaging Wisconsin’s reputation. However, it's incredible that the mere exercise of constitutional rights could ever be construed as destabilizing the state. After all, it is those rights that fundamentally define our system of government.
Further, the recall campaign began thanks to Walker's hugely destabilizing moves (whether you supported them) to weaken environmental laws, gut collective bargaining for most (but not all) public employees, and massively de-fund the state's public education system, from primary schools on up to universities and technical colleges.
These policy decisions upset hundreds of thousands of voters and led to massive yet peaceful protests -- surely embarrassing for Walker and his GOP brethren. But to pretend Walker's actions weren't inherently destabilizing, especially given his imperious, draconian and secretive "drop the bomb" style, is to fantasize that it's simply not cost-effective to allow voters to express themselves via their First Amendment and other rights.
In WMC's evident view, meanwhile, Walker measures that have led to large teacher layoffs and retirements and greater class sizes will not cost the state in terms of prestige, income or jobs (it already, demonstrably has). Nor will it dilute an educated citizenry or the state's vital knowledge base. Nope, that's all the fault of citizen protests and recall campaigns.
WMC argues that, "Perpetual campaigning creates a toxic political environment that makes our state all but ungovernable." Actually, bad politicians who don't believe in government do that.
In the first place, despite the recalls, Walker is already proclaiming everything is back on track and GOP officials are celebrating the vulnerability of those supposedly rapacious, all-powerful and unstoppable "big labor bosses." Cognitively dissonant, to be sure.
In the second place, WMC overlooks the truth that the recall elections are designed to be very hard to mount and so cannot in the real world be run on a perpetual, recurring cycle. Nevertheless, Walker in his campaign warned that the latest recalls would lead to "recall ping pong," foreshadowing WMC's notion of a permanent series of ad hoc elections.
However, even assuming the recalls could become regular, they would in that case only be falling into line with the existing, overriding political modus operandi in this country -- a real permanent campaign where everything is politicized, all the time, by the likes of WMC's lobbying and PR arm, the rhetoric of Fox News and the activity of hundreds of other partisan organizations across the political spectrum.
WMC has re-purposed the idea of a "permanent campaign" to denounce recalls but permanent campaigning has long been a feature of American politics. The notion has existed in American political culture since at least the mid 1970s, when the phrase was coined by Patrick Caddell, a Democratic pollster. From Wikipedia:
"Strategies of this nature have been in active development and use since Lyndon Johnson, where priority is given to short-term tactical gain over long- term vision. The frenzied, headline-grabbing atmosphere of presidential campaigns is carried over into the office itself, thus creating a permanent campaign that limits the ability of policies to deviate from the perceived will of the people (hence, intensive polling)." See: http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Indeed, a former press secretary to George W. Bush wrote a book whose primary thesis was that the Bush White House completely blended politics with policy in service to its own "permanent campaign."
The truth is that private special interests like WMC and public officeholders of both major parties, including Scott Walker, have turned their public offices into functional permanent campaigns since the early 1960s. That is, in fact, why Walker's tenure as Milwaukee County executive is now the subject of a John Doe investigation looking into his public staff's campaigning on public time in secret. Several former Walker staffers already have been charged in that inquiry.
However, none of that sort of permanent campaign activity warrants any comment from WMC. Only when citizens and citizen groups seek an ad hoc, one of a kind recall election under Wisconsin law to address the failings of the actual permanent campaigners does WMC speak up, projecting onto those committed citizens the very system WMC and its kind regularly exploit.
Either WMC is simply being dishonest or massively self-unaware. WMC is in fact a highly visible part of Wisconsin's long-running permanent campaign. It's what WMC does, day in and day out.
Also nonsensical is WMC's complaint about recall elections possibly becoming too frequent. To see otherwise we need only examine parliamentary democracies commonplace in Europe. In the UK and other countries, governments can be driven to call new elections at any time, even within months, should it become apparent that their policies are unpopular or not working. Somehow, those countries have (despite the current international fiscal crisis) generally managed to retain quite robust private sectors -- in some cases more robust than our own.
The problem isn't, as WMC essentially contends, that we've got too much democracy in Anerica; it's that we've got too little, and what we have is concentrated in the hands of too few.
Indeed, elections are now such a well-understood mechanism in political science that campaign strategists frequently can calculate with great precision and efficiency how to obtain votes and from whom. That, according to some political scientists, is why the two major parties continue their hegemony, and why modern American elections are often so narrowly decided, as in the case of the 2000 presidential election.
Those precision campaign tools, however, also tend to debase and neutralize the electorate, which is chopped, diced, pressed and formed into the shapes that the major parties and their special interest benefactors most prefer at any given time.
Admittedly, recall elections may not the most efficient way to make political course corrections in mid flight. In Ohio, voters overturned that state's version of Walker's anti- collective bargaining law through a law that allows voters to force a roll-back referendum on any enacted state legislation.
But pretending we don't need one of these citizen-driven mechanisms or the other, or even both, is simply to favor less representative government. Thus WMC's call serves mainly to benefit entrenched parties and special private interests who are, like the Bolsheviks of the old USSR, striving in their own permanent campaigns to assert and maintain total political control.