POLITICS

Scenes From a Foregone Conclusion

By Stump Connolly

Fri, Feb 22 2008

 

Old city editors never die. They just haunt you from a distance. I learned that the hard way when I picked up the phone and found at the other end Bob Wills, the former city editor of The Milwaukee Sentinel.

Wills, at 81, is supposed to be safely retired in Nevada. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t following this election.

“So what do you think? Obama has won eight in row. Does that mean it’s over?”

“Not until Wisconsin speaks,” I said.

“What about the Republicans?” he asked.

“I heard John McCain bought out the Fish Fry at Serb Hall. He’s the featured speaker at the Milwaukee Republicans’ Ronald Reagan Day.”

“What the heck is that?”

“It’s a chance to go after Reagan Democrats in a union hall with bowling alley,” I said.

“Can McCain bowl?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, get your butt up there and find out,” Wills said. “And stay away from the speeches. We need more human interest.”

Ronald Reagan Day at Serb Hall

Ronald Reagan Day is not an official national holiday. You cannot, for instance, buy furniture at a discount on it. But in a year when Republicans are hungry for some connection to the good old days, Reagan Day at Serb Hall is as close as John McCain was going to get to his party base in Wisconsin.

He did not want to be there.

He’d already spent an awkward week sucking up to party conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and uncomfortably accepting Mitt Romney’s grin-and -grip endorsement before Romney closed down his campaign headquarters in Boston.

The game was over. The prize was won. But Mike Huckabee refused to cry uncle.

So here he was, standing outside the Friday fish fry -- only 20 minutes away from a flight back to Arizona for a little rest and relaxation away from the campaign trail -- gazing at a portrait of Lance Sijan, a Serbian American pilot shot down like McCain flying a mission over North Vietnam in 1967.

For a few moments, the Republicans would have to wait. McCain read the inscription next to Sijan’s Congressional Medal of Honor citation. After being shot down, Sijan called in rescue helicopters for his crew then slipped into the jungle for 46 days to avoid enemy search teams. He was captured once, escaped, captured again, tortured, put in isolation and shipped to Hanoi, where he died in a North Vietnamese prison.

The plaque reminded him of a story, not his own, but the story of Mike Christian, a farm boy from outside Selma, Alabama, who was McCain’s cellmate in North Vietnam. It was a story he often used to close speeches. Looking ahead to the shifting political landscape and the arguments he would now have to make as the Republican nominee, he knew he wouldn’t have much occasion to tell it again soon. So this was the time and this was the place.

The 450 assembled Republicans, many of whom had been aligned with Romney or were Huckabee fans, waited to be won over. McCain knew he had to give them what they came for so he did: a promise to rein in federal spending, secure the border, appoint conservative judges and fight radical Islamic extremism.

On Iraq, he praised Gen. Petraeus and the surge promising, under a McCain regime, “I will never, ever, surrender. They will.”

And that brought him around to Sijan and Mike Christian.

“From scraps of red and white material with a bamboo needle,” McCain told the crowd, Christian sewed a small American flag inside his blue prison uniform. “And every evening, we would take out Mike’s shirt and say the pledge of allegiance.”

“One day the North Vietnamese came in to search the cell and they found Mike Christian’s flag and removed it. That evening, they came back and called him out of the cell and beat him for the next hour or so. We slept on a concrete slab in the center of the cell with four light bulbs in each corner. Before I fell asleep that night, I happened to look over and saw Mike Christian, still bleeding from the eyes, under the dim light with a piece of red cloth and a piece of white cloth sewing another flag.”

“ Now he wasn’t doing that because it made him feel better. He was doing it because he knew how important it was to us to pledge our allegiance to that flag,” McCain said.

“And I’m happy to tell you there are so many Mike Christians of that era and now that we will win this struggle with radical Islamic extremism, and they will help us make America what Ronald Reagan always envisioned, a shining city on a hill. Thank you very much.”

A moving moment. But is it enough this year to be elected president?

Depression in Wisconsin

Wisconsin is depressed. The people are dispirited. The Packers lost. And there’s another snowstorm coming in tomorrow.

Perfect weather for Wisconsin Democrats to decide who should lead their party into the fall elections.

I attended my first gathering of them Saturday morning at The Brat Stop in Kenosha where, 1500 strong, they turned out to welcome Hillary Clinton to the state.

They filled every inch of the space, the balconies and the dance floor, waiting in folding chairs, bundled in sweatshirts and parkas to ward off the cold drafts coming in from open doors. In the rafters hung banners for their favorite teams – The Cubs, The Bears and The Packers – symbols of their despair.

They were laid off factory workers, retirees whose pensions had been snatched out from under them, the infirm drawn by Clinton’s promise of universal health care, and students who dropped out of community college when their money ran out. And there were many more of them waiting outside the door that the fire marshal said couldn’t get in.

Clinton was bringing to Wisconsin her “Solutions for America” speech, a compendium of government programs she had sponsored or would sponsor to bring the American economy out of the doldrums of the Bush-Cheney years. Her message could not have been more timely.

In the New York Times that morning, it was reported that consumer confidence in America has dropped to its lowest point in sixteen years. Automobile sales are at their lowest point in ten years. American manufacturing, where some one in eight jobs are linked to the auto industry, is on the skids. The construction industry is in the tank. The cost of oil imports is up 67% from only a year ago, and food and health costs are on the rise.

For Wisconsin (and Ohio next week) Clinton has wrapped these dire statistics into a populist appeal to “the hard-working middle class” who struggle to make ends meet while the fat cats on Wall Street, the investment bankers and corporate CEO’s enjoy windfall profits and tax breaks.

Every line is red meat to this crowd. They cheer wildly and break into chants of “Hill-a-ree!” after every dig at their oppressors.

They even cheer New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine, who is traveling with Clinton, when he introduces her as “The First Lady of Solutions” –– apparently unaware that before his sojourn into politics Corzine made $300 million as chairman and CEO of the investment firm Goldman Sachs.

But this crowd wasn’t there just to cheer. Everyone there, it seemed, had come as a supplicant to find out what Clinton could do for them. There was an IT guy who lost his job to an Indian programmer and wanted to know how to keep “them” out of the country. A former Marine who wanted Clinton to look after his buddies in Iraq “then look out for me here.” And a student who wanted more money for colleges so she could pay lower tuition.

And then there was 11-year-old Jade Bailey, who ‘d waited two hours so she could thrust her hand up to ask a question.

“What are you going to do for people who don’t have a house or enough food?” she asked.

“Do you know someone who is losing her house?” Clinton responded.

“Yes, my mother is,” she said.

Say what you will about Clinton’s cold and calculating campaign, she has the right instincts. She asked Jade and her mother Donna Bailey, 42, to step up in front of the crowd and tell their story.

Donna said she was a hairdresser, but because of hard times, people weren’t asking for the perms and dye jobs that kept her going and she was having a difficult time finding a second job. They live in an $87,000 home Bailey bought on an adjustable rate mortgage that recently jumped from $600 to $1,000 a month, so the home is now in foreclosure.

The familiar story of the sub-prime mortgage crisis dominates the headlines – and, sure enough, Clinton has a proposal to freeze foreclosures and provide government-assisted workout plans. But she also had the good sense to give Bailey the business card of a local Democratic official, whom she asked to help solve Bailey’s problem.

Solutions are like that sometimes. They work best one problem at a time. And when you offer all the solutions in the world at the same time, you’re not solving problems; you’re giving a speech.

Meanwhile, Back in Milwaukee

I’m staying at my brother’s house in Milwaukee and the phone is strangely silent. Four years ago, it was ringing off the hook in the Wisconsin primary with robocalls from local officials endorsing their favorite presidential contender.

This year so far, nothing.

There is an occasional political commercial on TV: Obama complaining about corporate executives who make more in ten minutes than you make in a year. Clinton wondering why Obama won’t debate her. But it’s a light buy. (867 spots for Obama against 285 for Clinton in the Milwaukee market, according to the Journal Sentinel, versus the 4000 each ran in New Hampshire this year.)

In a conference call with reporters, Harold Ickes, a Clinton delegate strategist, explained why.

By his reckoning –– a post-Super Tuesday reckoning that contradicts his previous reckoning that Clinton would sweep it -- –– there is no way either Clinton or Obama will win the nomination at the end of the primary route.
Even after Wisconsin, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania (April 22) and Puerto Rico (June 3) check in, Ickes figures that Obama will be 340 delegates short of a majority at the Democratic convention in August in Denver -- and Clinton will be an even shorter 480.

That makes the contest from here on in a battle over the superdelegates.
Using their own crude (and varying) methods, the major media outlets have come to the same conclusion. So the smart political reporters this week are scrambling to find them, interview them and write about the battle to woo them.

The rest of us are in Wisconsin. But it’s so boring the Democratic Party’s Founder Day Dinner –– featuring back-to-back speeches by Clinton and Obama –– turns into a debate over who first coined the phrase “Just Words.

When the politics get boring, the bored go bowling.

Bowling with The Huckabees

Sleet and snow covered Wisconsin Sunday night when I pulled into the Olympic Lanes on Milwaukee’s south side. Bad weathered forced Hillary Clinton to cancel her upstate rally in Wausau. Barack Obama couldn’t make a meet and greet in Kaukana so he secretly flew off to North Carolina to break bread with John Edwards.

But all was warm and cozy at the Olympic Lanes, brightened, perhaps, by the tan on Mike Huckabee’s face fresh from a speech in the Grand Cayman Islands. (Hey, a guy’s got to make a living.) Now he was back in Wisconsin to resume his race for second place in the Republican nomination sweepstakes.

Huckabee and his wife Janet are here at the invitation of Don and Beth Minikel, a Racine machinist and his Sunday school teacher wife. Since December, the Minikels have been the Wisconsin coordinators of Huck’s Army, a loose-knit array of volunteers organized through meetup.com, and pretty much the entire Huckabee field organization in the state.

They spend their evenings making buttons and hand-lettered signs for Huckabee at their kitchen table and their weekends making phone calls to friends, canvassing their neighborhood and putting up Huckabee signs wherever people will let them. (If you are going south on I-94 to Chicago, look for the red barn at the state line curve to see their handiwork.)

They believe in Huckabee because he shares their values. “God in his wisdom has given him to us,” Beth says. “He’s the only candidate running this year on faith.”

The Minikels have gathered 100 friends and other Huckabee volunteers to greet him. More than a few have brought their own bowling pins, photos and mementos they hope Huckabee will autograph.

Huckabee will make no speeches. He doesn’t have to. All he has to do is step out on the alley with two fingers and a thumb in a ball to make the front page of newspaper the next day.

So tonight is all fun. A Huckabee Special. When Janet steps up for a practice round, the sound system is playing a country song –– “She’s a good hearted woman in love with a good timing man,” by Waylon Jennings. She knocks over four pins. Huckabee eats pepperoni pizza as he bowls and, at random, picks out reporters to bowl a frame against him. When one tries to beg off because he’s not wearing the right shoes, Huckabee chides him, “We’ll never tell. Just do badly. That’s all we ask.”

He points to an audio engineer to go next. He hands him the ball and puts the headset that the guy usually wears over his ears. Next he beckons over Joy Lin, a CBS embed reporter who has followed him around with her little camcorder since their earliest days together on the trail.

Exchanging places, he pushes the camcorder into her face. “Here, I’ll do you like you do me,” he says.

The whole evening lasts a little over an hour, and the Huckabees don’t leave until they’ve autographed every item presented to them.

History may soon record that Huckabee’s run for the presidency ended in a bowling alley in Milwaukee; but that is also where the Christian Coalition found a new leader. A fun one.

Anatomy of an Obama Rally

Barack Obama’s best day in Wisconsin was probably his first.

On the night of his triumph in the Potomac primaries of Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, he appeared before 18,000 students in Madison’s Kohl Arena to deliver his “Stand for Change” speech. He would give the speech again, many times, to packed auditoriums on campuses in Oshkosh, Eau Claire, Wausau, Waukesha and Milwaukee. I somehow missed them all so I drove up on Election Eve to Beloit for his last appearance at the college’s Flood Athletic Center.

Beloit is a small town (pop. 36,000) off the beaten path of the campaign trail. When I arrived three hours early, people were streaming onto the campus from half a mile away, and the story of how they came together is almost as remarkable as the speech.

It begins on the Internet last fall when a Beloit College sophomore named Tamara Fouche signed up to become student coordinator of the campus Obama supporters and started recruiting all her friends to the cause. It picks up the day after the Iowa caucuses when the Obama campaign quietly dispatched two field organizers to southeast Wisconsin at a time when most of the media believed the race would be over by Super Tuesday. Then it accelerated to light speed.

Ron Nief, the Beloit College public relations director, was getting ready to leave for the weekend when he got a call around 2 PM from the director of the Flood Center saying there was a woman there from the Obama campaign asking about renting the gym. The school had given Obama an invitation to speak months ago, but since there had been no word back, Nief assumed it was a dead issue.

Inside of a few hours, they agreed to try to hold the rally 72 hours later on Monday night. But it would take several rounds of conversations, phone calls IM’s and emails to firm up the logistics of closing off the hall, providing Secret Service protection, finding bomb detector dogs and making media arrangements. “They were easy to work with,” Nief said. “Everyone wanted to pitch in.”

The first text message to Obama supporters announcing the rally went out at 11 AM Saturday. One of those who received it was Robert Tomarow, a professor of music at the college. He’d been working on a song “It’s Our Time Now” for a film project that he thought might be a good introduction to the speech. He called Nief to ask whether it was worth finishing, and Nief told him to give it a shot. By Sunday afternoon, Tamarow was in the studio recording the background tracks with Nicole Waters, a local folk singer, who volunteered to sing the lyrics live on stage.

On Sunday night, the Secret Service came around to inspect the hall. An hour later, Obama’s staging crew arrived with speaker systems, stages, backdrops, crowd-control barriers and media camera platforms. Fouche meanwhile was emailing, facebooking and texting every list she had to get out the word – and find the 140 volunteers Obama’s people said would be needed to staff the event.

On Monday morning, Nief found himself pacing the hall wondering whether anyone would show up. The temperature was five degrees. The prediction that evening was snow flurries with a wind-chill factor of 15 below zero.

When they opened the doors to the public at 7 PM, there were 3,000 people waiting to get in. Many had been there since mid-afternoon, so many Nief ordered another field house opened to shield them from the cold.

As the hall filled, Obama’s field coordinators began selecting out audience members they wanted to stand behind Obama for “The Shot.” To create depth of field, the stage on which Obama would speak was set about 15 feet in front of a set of bleachers where supporters would hold up signs. In the camera’s eye, this was all the rest of America would see.

The first batch of backdrop included 66 people: 22 men, 44 women, 20 of them black and 10 of them children. Under the direction of an Obama advanceman, they were positioned and re-positioned in the frame –– and more were added to fill in the gaps.

White-haired people were especially prized and recruited to fill in the front rows. There were standards that had to be adhered to. A woman wearing a sweatshirt labeled FBI was asked to take it off. Handmade signs were replaced with the campaign’s blue Change We Can Believe in. But the selection process was remarkably ecumenical.

With the Beloit Memorial high school band playing a medley of their famous fight songs in the background, the gymnasium felt like a giant pep rally. Nicole Waters sang “ It’s Our Time Now” and, at 9:43, Obama strolled into the hall with no formal introduction – to thunderous applause.

There is a point in Obama’s speech where he promises to make college more affordable with a $4,000 tuition credit “but you’re going to have to give back something in return,” he says. “Work in community service. Work in a homeless shelter. Join the Peace Corps. Do something good. Give back to America and, together, we will move forward.”

The response started slowly in the silence after the applause died down. But it grew deafening. “Yes we can, Yes we can, Yes we can, Yes we can.”
After it was all over, Ryan Adam, Obama’s advanceman, slumped down in a chair just as his Blackberry began buzzing with a new message:

“Your travel instructions for tomorrow. Go to San Antonio . . . “

“That’s what I love about this job,” he told Nief. “You never know where you’re going next.”