Last week former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz wrote an editorial in the Isthmus that bears mentioning. Here’s a snippet.
What the Democrats need to be thinking about right now is how to navigate the post-Walker era. He’ll either resign before his term ends in order to cash out at Fox News and on the speaker circuit or he just won’t run for a third term in 2018. He has left so much damage in his wake — with the lowest job growth in the Midwest, we are among the top 10 states people are moving out of — that it shouldn’t be hard for a Democrat to win back the governor’s office then. But it will be.
Back in the late 1960s, Democrats joined Republicans in deciding to place the gubernatorial election in between presidential years. They did it for a noble reason — they wanted the public to focus on Wisconsin, not who the next national leader would be. But that has proved a fatefully bad deal for the Democrats. Liberal voters just vanish in the off-years, leaving the election to an older, whiter and more conservative electorate. That’s how a blue state votes twice for Barack Obama and yet elects Scott Walker and an overwhelmingly conservative Legislature.
So the great project for the Democratic Party is not so much winning the presidency. That will happen and her name will be Hillary Clinton. No, the big task for Democrats is to figure out how to get their voters to the polls in every election and how to win back some white male voters whose economic interests align with the party’s policies.
I have no doubt that God has a wonderful plan for Walker, but it involves getting rich on the lecture circuit, not leading the free world. The more interesting question is if the Democrats can find a way to win his office back and start rebuilding the state he has all but destroyed.
He will be on ticket and we will beat Hillary.
Mayor Dave is more than a bit confused as the Democratic Party, in order to be effective, and get left leaning voters out to the polls is going to have to CHANGE their actual issues to align with the economic issues of labor and with underpaid women in the work force, and not the other way around, i.e. getting voters to align with the DNC corporate largess as he professes.
Cleaning house in the administrative committee might be a good place to start. None listed yet at DPW, that’ll help.
I am more interested in what Dave can tell us about how well biking fared in the budget.