Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chairman Mike Tate, perhaps one of the worst Democratic Party operatives in the entire country, has talked tough about implementing a "72-county strategy" for the November 2014 state executive and state legislative races in Wisconsin.
However, Jester Peggy, a Democratic activist from Northern Wisconsin, is fed up with Tate's failed leadership of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, and Peggy wrote this guest post on the Wisconsin progressive blog Blue Cheddar in which Peggy gave a vivid description of how Tate has failed Democratic activists in outstate Wisconsin under his leadership.
Here's part of Peggy's post:
You hung us out to dry the last election, and now we are stuck with Tiffany and Czaja and Duffy and a whole bunch of stupid puppets that are voting lock-step in line with Walker. If you would have at least given us some signs, some literature, some turf to canvas, or even a database we could use to help stay connected with one another after the fierce “boots on the ground” dedication from the recall, I know we could have done better. Up here, all people see are TV news (which even the court has declared is not news, but entertainment) and TV commercials. We need to be able to speak to people door-to-door and to have physical paper signs to put in our yards so people know where we stand and talk to one another about it.
Oh yeah, you sent us some OFA folks…you might as well have sent us a box of
rocks. The one we had sat on his (expletive) and put statistics in a computer every single time he came to Tomahawk. From what I understand, the others in Merrill and Rhinelander and Stevens Point and Minocqua were the same. After your cute little bus tour, the idiots didn’t even have the lists of folks who attended for us to contact! They wanted us to invite out friends to house parties and then turn the statistics over to them. We finally asked them not to come into our community because we did better without them.
Older people do not do FaceBook. Older people do not Twitter. In truth, outside of Tomahawk and north of us, people do not even have Broadband! (No thanks to Scotty who has probably planned it that way.) Have you tried to use the internet on dial-up lately? So, the idea that the computer is going to do it up here is false. And yes, we did make our own signs and we did steal lists from the resources we had from the recall, but really…you keep sending me requests for money. Really. I bought paper and paint and gas so I could go out in the country and talk to people. What the heck did you do for us?!!! Nothing.
So get out of your cushy office and take a look around. Wisconsin is headed to the bottom like a rock tossed into a lake. My Plan A is to fight. My Plan B is to leave this state. My plan C is to leave this country.
I'm sure there are a few Wisconsin Democrats who, after reading that post, are disappointed that Jester Peggy didn't run for Chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin earlier this year. Indeed, Mike Tate only faced token opposition, in the form of Joe Kallas, in this year's DPW chair election, after another declared challenger, Rowan Viva, didn't get enough signatures to get on the convention ballot.
Wisconsin is home to one of the worst state-level Democratic Party organizations in the country. To give you a general idea of how bad the DPW leadership is, they've floated Mary Burke, a member of the Madison School Board, as a potential challenger to Scott Walker. Burke would be an even worse opponent to Scott Walker than Tom Barrett was, for reasons I described here. Indeed, many Democrats in Wisconsin are fed up with their own party to the point that they've started bashing the DPW leadership, and Jester Peggy is only the latest Democratic activist in Wisconsin to do so.
Quite frankly, the only way Democrats are going to be able to defeat Scott Walker in 2014 is if the Democratic nominee runs his or her campaign without relying on the Democratic Party apparatus in Wisconsin in any way.