While all eyes are on the massive hosts arrayed in the U.S. Capitol, hope for any retaking of power on behalf of the typically powerless may still lie with the voters of Madison, Wisconsin.
It’s going on nine months since the war in Wisconsin began—since Republican Gov. Scott Walker and a newly elected Republican majority in the state senate crafted legislation deemed so extremely regressive and anti-labor that it saw every Democratic state senator flee to a secret location in Illinois to avoid voting on it.
Meanwhile, nearly 100,000 protesters took to the streets and even invaded the statehouse in Madison, camping out for months in support of workers’ rights. They sparked a national progressive movement that saw the strength in their numbers, and the opportunity to wage political warfare on a scale where it may well be winnable.
The spotlight has since shifted back to the tricky dealings in the nation’s capital, the mainstream media’s obsession with the debt ceiling talks and the national congressional impasse that, for all its chest-thumping cries of “integrity,” amounts to little more than political theater. But political scientists who take a longer view of American politics than the “just get us to the next election” myopia of sitting U.S. congressmen are watching Wisconsin intently to gauge whether some sort of tipping point is slowly lurching into view, one activist phone call or door knock at a time.
On June 3, 2011, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, served with petitions bearing the requisite amount of signatures, ordered recall elections to be held July 12 for six Republican state senators, Robert Cowles, Alberta Darling, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Randy Hopper and Dan Kapanke. Republicans, seeking to stall the recall election process, ran “fake” Democrats in the July 12 recall elections, forcing those elections to be reclassified as primaries and, at a cost to the taxpayers of around $400,000, rescheduling the general elections for Aug. 9.
Three Democratic state senators, Jim Holperin, Robert Wirch and Dave Hansen, have also been targeted for recall by Republicans, ostensibly because their fleeing the state has been described by opponents as a reckless and irresponsible obstruction of democracy.
All six “fake” Democrats lost in the July 12 primaries, and Senator Dave Hansen won his recall election 2 to 1 on July 19. The recall election for the other two Democrats will be held Aug. 16.
Millions of dollars have been spent on advertising by both sides in what has ballooned into a national ideological proxy war; the rhetoric is heating up fast and the dirty tricks are flying. Democrats are painting Republicans as the people who take away health care from your kids and your grandma, and the Tea Party Express is even rolling into Madison with—wait for it—Joe the Plumber!
Perhaps most deceptively, the conservative Citizens for a Strong America has been chided for running an ad against senate Democratic candidate Shelly Moore that has a fake Morgan Freeman voiceover (www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tOkEaIuGjE&feature=player_embedded), perhaps because, as noted by Huffington Post reporter Amanda Terkel, Forbes magazine has called Freeman “one of Hollywood’s most trusted celebrities.” (The real Freeman has expressed no support for state senator Sheila Hasdorf, Moore’s Republican opponent.)
So, though there may be fireworks in D.C. this week (and on Wall Street as well), the fight over real political power—over what little meat remains on the American bone for the common citizen—is boiling to a head in Wisconsin. For the already-on-the-ropes organized labor movement, it’s been characterized as a must-win, and progressives across the nation are emptying what little is left in their change jars to counter the monetary force wielded by groups like Karl Rove’s anonymously funded American Crossroads Super PAC.
Wisconsin is ground zero in an ideology war that will affect the lives of all Americans, and it is in this place, not in Washington, that power is under siege by real, organic forces.
