Wisconsin
In reply to the discussion: Wisconsin aftermath: Voters in disbelief over Walker victory [View all]mojowork_n
(2,354 posts)The only thing I can think of is what Will Rogers once famously said.
"I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat."
I don't know why that is. When you ask Republicans what they need
to win, the answer is often some synonym for "ammunition." When you
ask Democrats, they say, "information." Republicans have so much less
difficulty staying on message because they're so often arguments by
assertion: "Bidness GOOD, Gubmint BAD;" or "that ***** in
the White House is what's screwin' up this country and our economy."
or any one of the other endless variations on that theme.
A parallel from military history would be undisciplined barbarians (Good
God, did Marcus Bachman have a lesson to teach us?) attacking a
Greek phalanx, or Roman "turtle."
But when the Huns came along, riding their tough little steppe ponies
in cohesive, flexible units, things changed. They had compound bows
that could shoot arrows through armor and it was all over for the
permanent Roman majority.
It's kind of gross comparing perception management/information warfare
with democracy but I'm just trying to say I think I follow your very
important point -- why isn't our side better organized?
In this election, specifically, I can give you just one answer. During the
time that there was no one stepping up against Walker, before the
primary (which had to be held, I think, to allow the Republicans to run
some fake-democrats in the legislative primaries), the focus on our
side was supposed to have been on making the case for the recall,
generally, regardless of who our candidate was going to be.
Procedurally, that could have been our time in "turtle" formation -- all
the arrows flying out from our side, against Walker's actual record as
governer of Wisconsin -- with no one for him to attack directly.
But that didn't really happen. That was also the time that, by law,
according to the rules that were written into the state constitution
by the original Progressives ("Fighting" Bob Lafollette and all the rest
of them) the party being challenged had a right to raise unlimited
funds for their own use, in the recall election. We saw that money
being spent right away, not just on TV ads, but on general perception
management. For example, the state's largest circulation daily, the
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel runs it's own variant on the "Politifact"
franchise. When congresswoman Gwen Moore asserted that Gov.
W. had "gutted" tax credits for the poor and elderly, the savants
who wrote the analysis of her credibility decided her choice of
adjectives was unnecessarily harsh. After a review of actual facts
that showed that, in truth, credits for the poor and elderly were
noticeably lower than they had been formerly, they asked....
"....does that amount to 'gutting' the credit?.... even staunch
advocates of the credit think Moore's 'gutting' description went
too far."
http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2012/may/10/gwen-moore/rep-gwen-moore-says-gov-scott-walker-gutted-tax-cr/
The fact that the credit continued to exist, in an admittedly
reduced form, was enough to discredit Congresswoman Moore's
main point. Which was true.
That same kind of stuff helped to distract from and obscure the
main message of the recall.
PS -- one other observation, sort of along the same lines. Early on,
when the recall was just getting started, I went up to the north
side JCC to listen to John Nichols lay out the message and get
people energized for the petition drives that were still to come.
John went all the way back to before the Civil War. It was a history
lesson on the abolitionists and the very proud tradition of Wisconsin
standing up to oppose injustice, during and after the Civil War and
the Robber Baron era that followed. That was what framed the
whole effort to have rules for recall written in to the state
constitution.
But people back then must have had much better attention spans.
The day before the election, I saw this younger dude crouching
over a copy of our local alternative weekly, "The Shepherd Express,"
which had an article summarizing the reasons for the recall, and why
people should be voting for Barret.
"There's too many words here," he said. "There should be bullet
points. Not so many long paragraphs."
The prose was too dense and I didn't have a word to interject or
a reply to make.
I was one lonely barbarian riding around with my compound bow,
but when I turned to look for an arrow, or another group of
horsemen riding around, or some other resource or ally, I didn't
know where to go.
...I found out later that dude did end up voting for Barret. I think a
whole lot of people made that same decision, privately. I'm just afraid
we'll never really know -- with 100% certainty or reliability -- how
many of them there really were.