2009: My Year in Music

Avocations? I like to garden. I like to listen to music. Sometimes I write about my experiences. An expert I’m not. But I know something about growing tomatoes and appreciating music.  On the last count,  I’ve been summing up my concert experiences annually for the Isthmus website,The DailyPage.com. Here are my accounts of the previous three  years:

2008

2007

2006

The 2009 reports begins:

My life has a soundtrack. It has had one since my college days 40 years ago. An orchestra doesn’t shadow me, following my cues, but my iPods and car stereo are surrogates. In 2009, I sat in my home office writing stories to the mutating repetitions of Philip Glass and John Adams, to the stately cello suites of J.S. Bach and to the deep grooves of organ-guitar combos led by Grant Green, Joey DeFranceso, Dr. Lonnie Smith and others.

When I drove around town, I played Buddy and Julie Miller incessantly. I also revisited the short glorious legacy of grievous angel Gram Parsons, ending with his sublime duets with the young Emmylou Harris. I became fascinated with a Danish CD of Count Basie’s radio broadcasts from a New York club in 1941. What a great reminder that jazz was, first of all, popular dance music….

Go here to read more.

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The best and worst of the Legislature

I intended this site to be an aggregation of my recent writing, but never got around to posting my Milwaukee Magazine piece  on the best and worst state lawmakers. It’s a year old, but I don’t think it’s lost relevance.

My conclusion that the Legislature today with few exceptions is a bicameral house of mediocrity has been born out by the gubernatorial field for the 2010 election. Who would have thought that not a single lawmaker would be in the running?

Perhaps this isn’t a surprise.  We’re in an era when it’s all politics all the time. Governance is a secondary concern to the more important task of knee-capping the other party. As one veteran observer told me, in the old days the Legislature governed in the odd-numbered years and focused on politics in the even-numbered years. Now the campaign never ends.

The extreme partisanship has come at a cost to Wisconsin as well as to the nation. Gridlock is the normal state of affairs.

My Milwaukee Magazine story starts off the tale of two leaders whose political sensibilities didn’t stop them from striking effective compromises to deal with the pressing  problems of the day. Gov. Tommy Thompson and UW-Madison Chancellor Donna Shalala were ideological opposites, but they were also pragmatists. Read about them and the lackluster  Legislature here.

The Enigma in the East Wing

I’m puzzled by Jim Doyle. I’ve seen the governor speak  a couple of times, and his passion  for education, racial justice and environmental protection were palpable.  The guy fully embraced the liberal vision. Yet Doyle has  governed cautiously, almost defensively, and has even slammed the door on his political allies. It doesn’t make sense to me.

In this piece for Wisconsin Interest , I try to explain the consequences of Doyle’s governing style:

By Marc Eisen

It’s no surprise that conservatives have a long list of Doyle’s failures. Now we find that even liberals shake their heads over the missed opportunities.

Judy Wilcox is a stalwart Madison liberal. She did a stint in the Peace Corps, serving in Gambia; put in 12 years on the Dane County Board representing a district where anarchists probably outnumber Republicans; and she retired from state service in November 2008 after 20 years of working on programs first for the disabled and then the homeless.

Wilcox’s background makes it all the more surprising when she names the worst governor she worked for: Jim Doyle. A Democrat? “I found it much easier to work with Gov. Thompson,” she says. A Republican? Yup.

“I had several sessions personally with Gov. Thompson. He would call people into his office, sit them down and say, ‘Lets try to figure this out’,” she recalls. “I always got along with him very well.”

In contrast, she says she couldnt get the time of day from Doyle’s office when she needed its imprimatur on a housing issue for the feds. “It took repeated phone calls and me harassing them to appoint the study committee,” she says. The whole experience – the governor accepted the committee report but didn’t approve it – left her “mystified” as to where the governor stood.

Judy Wilcox isn’t alone. During the Doyle years I’ve had seven or eight lengthy conversations with veteran state workers: all serious Democrats, all people who see their job as a calling, and all expressing profound disappointment with Gov. Jim Doyle. They worked in agencies and departments as varied as Transportation, Housing, Administration, Corrections, and Family Services.

Wilcox speaks for these good liberals when she says, “I just expected more from him.”
Of course, it’s no surprise that Republicans and elements of the business community disapprove of Doyle’s performance. Or, for that matter, that polls show that the recession-battered public has turned against the governor.

But state employees too? Liberals and loyal Democrats in state service? In some ways their disapproval is even more telling because they saw the Doyle administration up close on a daily basis. And didn’t like it.

Read more here.

Federal spending: Wisconsin needs more

Wisconsin has been clobbered by the recession, 153,600 jobs vaporized since December 2007. That’s a stunning 5.3% loss of all state jobs, according to the Center On Wisconsin Strategy.

How bad are things? COWS says the economic downtown is  even worse than  the early ’80s recession that devastated the state’s manufacturing base in southeastern Wisconsin.

All the more impressive, then, is the performance of  the Oshkosh Corp. The manufacturer of military all-terrain trucks  recently  secured federal contracts  worth more than $3.2 billion. While competitors have challenged the awards, the Fox River Valley manufacturer is gearing up to build 1,000 of the heavily armored trucks by this month.  Press reports say the company has already  hired several hundred factory workers at the Oshkosh plant.

I don’t think you could find more graphic evidence of how important federal spending can be to the hard-pressed Wisconsin economy. I recently examined the state’s dreadful record in securing federal dollars in pieces written for Milwaukee Magazine and Isthmus, my old paper in Madison.

Here is the  start of the Milwaukee Magazine column:

Too Pure for Pork

Our politicians do a wretched job of attracting federal spending to Wisconsin. Why do we let them get away with it? by Marc Eisen

Tuesday 9/1/2009

Here’s a story that tells you something about politics in Wisconsin: In January, Madison utility executive Gary Wolter was named the head of Gov. Jim Doyle’s stimulus office to work on securing federal funding. Within 24 hours, he was dubbed Wisconsin’s “pork czar” in repeated blog postings.

As Charlie Sykes pointed out, what could be weirder than fierce partisan antagonists like Democrat and liberal Ed Garvey and conservative blogger Deb Jordahl both sniffing their noses at Wolter’s appointment? Then again, even the whiff of “pork” gets proper Wisconsinites red-faced and indignant.

Take Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker. His initial response to federal stimulus funding made it sound as if the dollars were secretly dosed with smallpox, like those horse blankets the Army supposedly gave Indians in the 19th century. He’d have none of it! (Not, at least, until the County Board said otherwise.)

There’s something deep in the Wisconsin character, a Badger thriftiness and sense of political rectitude, that seems to recoil at the notion that politicians should bring home the bacon. No one understood that better than the puritan Bill Proxmire, whose long senatorial run was marked by his temperance crusade against government waste. Ever since then, Democrats and Republicans alike (take a bow, Jim Sensenbrenner, Paul Ryan, Russ Feingold, John Norquist, et al.) have anointed themselves with magical oils to protect the state from the corrupting influence of federal dollars.

They’ve been wildly successful. And that’s a problem. Wisconsin, as you no doubt know from first-hand experience, is mired in an economic slump. In per capita income and new jobs created, we badly trail some of our neighboring states. Ditto for economic growth. Meanwhile, we pay way more in federal taxes than is returned to us via federal jobs, research grants, aid to state and local government, and other programs.

The gap in fiscal 2007 was a staggering $5.6 billion, according to the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance. That’s right: We sent $5.6 billion more to Washington than we got back in federal spending. Read more here.

Here is the start of the much-longer  Isthmus story:

State of chumps
Wisconsin has only itself to blame for losing out on its fair share of federal aid
Marc Eisen on Friday 10/09/2009

Todd Berry blames it on our genes. The president of the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance suggests the state’s chronic indifference to federal help is buried deep within our political DNA.

The Yankees who first settled Wisconsin, he says, “were suspicious of large, autocratic central government.” The Germans and Scandinavians who followed weren’t much different: They were “independent, hardworking, self-reliant…and suspicious again of a distant central government.”

I think the late Sen. Bill Proxmire — not genetics — is mostly to blame. But however you apportion responsibility, the legacy is the same: Wisconsin does wretchedly as a recipient of federal spending.

There are lots of bad measures to point out, but the key one is this: We rank 48th among the 50 states in federal aid, saved from last place only by Nevada and Utah.

This dreadful performance has a real-life impact on Wisconsin’s economic well-being. It means fewer jobs, poorer public services and a heavier state and local tax burden.

Federal spending in Wisconsin came to $7,132 per person in fiscal 2008, according to federal data newly analyzed by the Northeast-Midwest Institute. The national average was $8,904 per person — a $1,772 difference.

Do the math. Wisconsin’s population numbered about 5.6 million in 2008. Multiply each person by that shortfall and you come to $9.9 billion. That’s how much more money would have sloshed around the state economy if we had just hit the average for federal spending in fiscal 2008. Perish the thought we should score high, like Alaskans and Virginians. Read more here.

What Madison and Milwaukee could learn from Denver

One measure of the stagnant political culture in Wisconsin has been the failure to sort out a 21st century transportation strategy, especially in southeastern Wisconsin but also in greater Dane County. Reality is that economic markets and job-sheds transcend Wisconsin’s 19th century political boundaries. Yet our communities are locked in endless turf battles as if those regional facts of life don’t exist.

I was curious to hear what city planner Peter Park had to say about his experiences in Denver. As you’ll see from this story for WisBusiness.com, Denver is far ahead of any Wisconsin community, and Park is one of those really bright guys you seek out for his insight.

Park: Milwaukee’s former planner embraces rail as key to urban development
11/16/2009

By Marc Eisen
For WisBusiness.com

Peter Park, the star urban planner behind Milwaukee’s downtown revival, returned to Wisconsin Friday to discuss the lessons he’s learned in his new work as Denver’s planning chief.

“We need to look at transportation and development together. They’re not separate,” he told a gathering of several hundred environmentalists at the Promega Corporation’s Biopharmaceutical Technology Center in Fitchburg.

Park, 46, is working the land-use side of the most ambitious transportation project underway in the United States — the $4.7 billion FasTracks program. It promises 119 miles of light-rail and commuter-rail tracks by 2017, including 70 train stops that are expected to be the focal point of new residential and commercial development in the Denver area.

“Doing all this at once is crazy and scary,” Park admitted. “But if we’re going to grow [the transit system], now’s a great time for it.” Metropolitan Denver’s population of about 2.7 million, he noted, is expected to hit 4.3 million by 2035.

Park’s talk to the “Bringing Bioneers to Wisconsin” conference was a stark reminder that Wisconsin’s marquee cities, Milwaukee and Madison, are laggards in sorting out their 21st century transportation systems. Read more here.

Doubts About The Edgewater Subsidy

I don’t cover City Hall much anymore, so most of what I knew about the proposed Edgewater Hotel expansion I read either online or in what remains of Madison’s newspapers. Frankly, I was puzzled why the mayor was prepared to offer a $16 million subsidy in the form of tax-increment financing.

Madison’s TIF policy is notoriously tough…as in a Dick Cheney kind of way. First, city staff waterboards the developer-applicants until they confess all their financial details and then the Common Council and city committees subject them to months of hostile interrogations. Often blood is spilled, and projects die.

A classic example involved Gary Gorman, one of the state’s premier builders of affordable housing, killing his $84 million mixed-used project on East Washington Avenue in 2006 when the penny-tight, pound-foolish city offered him $2.2 million in TIF for first-phase construction when he asked for $4.2 million.

So I was puzzled why the Edgewater developer would seemingly be showered in subsidy. To learn more, I attended one of the project’s public presentations and talked to ten or so City Hall insiders and business leaders. I basically ran down my concerns and asked them to agree or disagree.

No one gave me what I consider a convincing case for such a deep-pocketed public investment in the Edgewater expansion. This is what I wrote for a guest opinion column in Isthmus.

Madison’s lakefront dreams

Funny how long some stories gestate. This Madison Magazine piece on the city’s  long-sought connection of the Capitol Square to Lake Monona goes back more than 25 years. Back then, while I was at Isthmus,  I edited several insightful cover pieces on downtown planning by a fine writer named Bruce Webendorfer who tied together the visionary plans of John Nolen, Wesley Peters and others to improve  the city’s lake access. That history stuck with me over the years.

The drafting of an updated downtown plan seemed like an excellent time to point out how lakefront access has bedeviled the city for 100 years. Time and again, Madison has fumbled historic opportunities to capitalize on its extraordinary assets as a lake city.  This story for Madison Magazine allowed me to highlight the new plans to make Law Park a destination for visitors, downtown residents and boaters.

As you’ll read,  there’s a lot of history here. But curiously enough, the real objectlies 110 miles to the east at  Chicago’s Millennium Park.

Walker vs. Neumann

The new issue of Wisconsin Interest magazine is out. Charlie Sykes and I interviewed the two leading GOP candidates for governor, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker and former Congressman Mark Neumann.

We didn’t bill it as a debate but as a discussion of the issues. You’ll see though that differences emerged.

Check it out for yourself.

Those Troubled Republicans

I wrote an Endgame column for Milwaukee Magazine’s April issue . Out of necessity, the piece was trimmed by a third to fit the allocated space. Editor Bruce Murphy did a masterful job of chopping off the words.  But here’s the full piece, which I think provides more explanation of why the Republican Party is in a world of hurt.

By Marc Eisen

Wisconsin Republicans are like the querulous uncle nobody wants to sit next to at a big family gathering. He’s the old bitter guy. The cranky one who expounds loud and sketchy opinions. The scold who picks a fight with his wife and his daughter’s girlfriend. The hothead who shouts at them: Go! Leave the table!

That’s your Republican uncle in 2009.

How he got that way represent a political cautionary tale. Because for almost 20 years, beginning with the rise of Tommy Thompson to preeminence, Republicans were the dominant voice in Wisconsin politics. They set the agenda. They drove the discussion. They attracted the best young political minds. That is, until the party began sliding into self-caricature and jihadism after Thompson left for Washington in 2001.

Last November Wisconsin Republicans hit rock bottom with the Democratic capture of the Assembly. This completed the rare state house trifecta of single-party control of the governor’s office, the state Senate and the Assembly. (And while we’re counting: Democrats occupy both U.S. senate seats and five of eight congressional offices.)

The party’s transformation from powerhouse to also-run is closely connected to its increasing preoccupation with ideological purity. The broad-based party of the early President Reagan—his celebrated “big tent” Republicanism–was essentially conservative but still had enough hooks for an awful lot of people to hang their hats, including disaffected Democrats.

Avowed Republican moderates like Scott Klug and Steve Gunderson held congressional seats in Wisconsin districts with pronounced Democratic sentiments. The unconventional Lee Dreyfus and his lieutenants briefly revived the party’s historic connection to La Follette progressivism. Thompson proved an unabashed big government activist who remade a failed welfare system and moved boldly to reform public education in Milwaukee.

But the Republican glory days have passed as the party has gravitated to social conservatism, revanchism (Sam Tanenhaus’ fine word to describe the hard right’s endless desire to roll back all social welfare programs) and an obsessive belief in tax cuts as the solution to, well, just about any problem in America.

None of this, of course, had much to do with how Tommy Thompson ran Wisconsin and became an immensely popular four-term Republican governor.

Despite coming out of the revanchist wing of the GOP in the Assembly (as minority leader, Thompson was known as “Dr. No” for opposing  pretty much anything the Democrats wanted to do), as governor he combined what Irving Kristol once described as “the reforming spirit with the conservative idea.”

“It was a total transformation,” marvels Mordecai Lee, a UW-Milwaukee political scientist who happened to be a Democratic lawmaker at the time. “I didn’t recognize Tommy as governor as the guy he was in the Assembly.”

As with Reagan, smart young conservatives flocked to Thompson’s side. Things were sooo different then.

In the age of Obama when even the sons and daughters of rock-ribbed Republicans joined his cause, it’s hard to believe that in 1984 President Reagan, in his re-election bid against Walter Mondale, carried two student wards on the perennially liberal UW-Madison campus.

But as Charles Franklin, the co-founder of Pollster.com and a UW-Madison political scientist explained, young people are inevitably “moved more by the current political winds” than older voters because they have no experience of earlier political events.

In 1984, it was the Democrats who they saw as tired, uninspired and mired in the past, while Republicans seemed like the party of change, optimism and achievement. That young people have largely abandoned the Republicans has to be one of the most telling signs of the party’s decline.

The 2006 election demonstrated just how dramatically the political gyre had spun in Wisconsin. The GOP brain trust, taking a page from the well-thumbed playbook of Newt Gingrich and then Karl Rove, chose to flog issues that would maximize the turnout of their conservative base. Scheduling a constitutional referendum to ban gay marriage on the November 2006 ballot seemed like a stroke of genius.

What better way to bring cultural conservatives to the polls for the Republican ticket? Not to mention to have a gubernatorial candidate, Mark Green, who embraced Wisconsin Right to Life’s fervent opposition to embryonic stem cell research at the UW-Madison campus.

But then something unexpected (by Republicans at least) happened. The referendum cruised to victory by a 59-41 margin, breaking the hearts of gays across Wisconsin. But Gov. Jim Doyle, an earnest but decidedly uncharismatic candidate, easily won re-election, while the Democrats picked up eight seats in the Assembly.

This was a sea change. Led by maestro Scott Jensen, Assembly Republicans had gained seats in the seven preceding elections, climbing from 41 to 60 members in the 99-member chamber. Tellingly, five of those newly Democratic seats were in college towns like Oshkosh and Platteville, where young people turned out to oppose the referendum and vote Democratic. Exit polling caught the sharp generational split–20-something voters opposed the gay-marriage ban 60%-40%.

Doyle, meanwhile, was untouched by the referendum’s passage and capitalized on the public’s overwhelming support of embryonic stem cell research. Surveys showed that seven of ten Wisconsin residents favored the research made famous by the UW’s James Thomson because of its potential for life-saving medical breakthroughs. Republicans, it seemed clear, had played the social-conservative card one too many times.

The problem: Wisconsin Republicans are increasingly defined by what they don’t like—gay people, illegal Hispanic immigrants, college professors, public employees, stem cell researchers, teachers, liberal-minded technology entrepreneurs, even trains—than what they stand for.

The constant carping and whining gets so old so quickly. No wonder no one wants to sit next to them at the family gathering. It’s hardly a recipe to attract young people to their side. Nor does groaning about a cigarette tax hike hold the least interest for a high-tech business owner worried about finding venture capital and the right code writers.

“I think the Republicans have locked themselves into a narrow box of what they think conservative means, and they haven’t done an especially good job of even defining that,” UW-Madison political scientist John Coleman told me.

“The more insular they are and the more they think they have all the answers, the worse off they’ll be,” he said.

Coleman thinks the Republican can turn things around if they wrap their core principles-–individual responsibility, limited but smart government, economic opportunity — into creative proposals for education and health care.

But like it or not, he said, Republicans also need to recognize that when the economy tanks and the public is gripped by insecurity they expect their elected officials to “do something.”

One certainly can imagine Tommy Thompson rising to the challenge, cheerleading the state and pulling in the best minds of business and the university to stake out a plan.

Thompson, in fact, would be a perfect example of what Tanenhaus described in a recent New Republic essay as a Burkean conservative -–a conservative so vested in maintaining societal stability a that he or she believe “governments were obligated to use their powers to ameliorate intolerable conditions.”

But the Thompson era is long gone, and so is his pragmatic approach to governing. As one of his former aides told me: Republican candidates confound the voters with an utterly paradoxical pitch: Elect me and I’ll oppose the government that works on your behalf.

It’s the revanchists who rule the Republican Party and who chase everyone else from the dinner table.