Depths Update

In reference to my earlier post from today about the sleazy robo-call:

Wisconsin Republican Party Spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told our radio station: "I guess I wouldn't call it an attack. I think that it's a responsibility for John McCain and Govenor Palin as well as the Republican Party to put the questions out there. Let the voters decide. But they can't decide for themselves if they don't have the information, and it is our job to get the information to the voters."

Spoken more like Fox News than a thinking, rational human being. Note the two exclude each other completely.

Next up: Wisconsin Democratic Party Spokesman Alec Loftus, with a slam-dunk rebuttal that will finally get these mouthpieces to shut the hell up: "That's interesting. I don't think we have any comment at this time, but we'll call you if we do."

Loftus, get the hell off your lazy ass and shut these toolbags down. Obama ballsed it out and addressed the issue head-on in his debate last night, so you can too.

This is an opening. Use it.

Uncharted Depths

Republican National Committee?!? I know I don't hold high expectations for you, but WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?!? NO. BAD. INAPPROPRIATE. Do I have to rub your nose in this before you'll learn?

This is the latest robo-call going out to Wisconsin residents from the rightie camp. We got a couple of callers who told us about it before one intrepid listener called in with a recording off his answering machine. It first aired on (insert requisite plug) Sly's show on AM 1670 WTDY.

I'm tied up with a busy day at work. Hopefully I'll have time to post on this later. In the meantime, work this around the blogging community so somebody else can make the uproar it deserves.

Unacceptable.

***4:25 update, also posted above***

Wisconsin Republican Party Spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski told our radio station: "I guess I wouldn't call it an attack. I think that it's a responsibility for John McCain and Govenor Palin as well as the Republican Party to put the questions out there. Let the voters decide. But they can't decide for themselves if they don't have the information, and it is our job to get the information to the voters."

Spoken more like Fox News than a thinking, rational human being. Note the two exclude each other completely.

Next up: Wisconsin Democratic Party Spokesman Alec Loftus, with a slam-dunk rebuttal that will finally get these mouthpieces to shut the hell up: "That's interesting. I don't think we have any comment at this time, but we'll call you if we do."

Loftus, get the hell off your lazy ass and shut these toolbags down. Obama ballsed it out and addressed the issue head-on in his debate last night, so you can too.

This is an opening. Use it.

Falling Off the Wagon

Well, way to go Wisconsin, I hope you're happy. With the latest Quinnipiac University polls showing Wisconsin going to Barack Obama by a solid 17 point margin, and less than three weeks to go before election day, many of the pundits have officially taken Wisconsin out of the "undecided" category.

For shame. I thought you knew better.

You could have been more racist, like Missourri, West Virginia or North Carolina. You could have been more noncommital, like Ohio, Indiana or Nevada. You even could have been more clueless, like our neighbors in Minnesota, which is only leaning Blue. But no, you had to go and swing 17 points in Barack Obama's favor, slipping from battleground to conquered ground, and now you're just out of luck.

There's an old saying that holds particularly true in Wisco: why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Barack Obama knows he's got Wisconsin's dairy in his hip pocket, so now, we get backburnered.

I'm being completely facetious, of course. The fact is I'm actually so excited about the new numbers, I'm actually allowing myself to get a good feeling about November's election. While it is by no means in the bag for Obama (I doubt neither the Democrats' collective abilities to bollox it up, nor the Republicans' willingness to sink to as-of-yet uncharted lows in the final weeks of election season), I took an as of yet unprecedented step in my life this evening.

Following dinner, I cautiously hung a Barack Obama cling on my front window, then allowed myself a moment to bask in... well, the audacity of my hope.

What I find so damn disappointing about Wisconsin's swing to the Obama camp is that it does knock us down a little ways in the order of importance among other contested states. In 2004, Wisconsin went to John Kerry by a mere four-tenths of a percentage point. As a critical state tottering on the precipice of common sense and mass delusion, we were treated to a massive rally that packed West Washington Avenue for blocks, featuring John Kerry himself and 80,000 supporters from all walks of life.

This afternoon, as a critical state that has stepped back from the edge of madness, assessed the drop and built a house in the valley instead, we were treated to a rousing pep talk that packed the capitol steps, featuring... John Kerry... and some college kids...

And I had high hopes, too, for the late October rally I had pictured in my head for this year. I'm sorry, but after the 2004 let-down that followed the single most exciting event of my adult life to date, I was thrilled by the idea of replacing that memory with one of Barack Obama, his preacher's voice booming across city blocks, whipping the crowd into a delirious frenzy and shaking off the icicles of despair that have accumulated these past eight years.

So if you get a phone call from a pollster in the next couple of weeks, you tell them you're undecided. Because Obama's speech at the Kohl Center in February was fantastic -- it's the kind of thing that will keep you talking until the November 4th election. But a Barack Obama speech in the 2008 election home stretch could be something to tell your Grandkids about someday.

We still have a lot of work to do to bring Wisconsin in for Barack Obama -- like Kerry said at his rally today, vote early, and then TALK TO PEOPLE about who they're voting for, or whether they're voting at all -- but we've covered a lot of ground as well. And damnit, we deserve to be in on the celebration in the final days before what will hopefully be a long-sought turning point for our country.

Beginning of the End

So this is it. After a week in the Canadian northwoods girding my loins (it's a messy process, don't ask) for election season, we're off and sprinting here in Madison. I've got to say, I still get goosebumps whenever election time rolls around in Madison. This is a city that gets fired up about its politics, something I starved for growing up where I did.

In the next two months, I'll be working a LOT, especially if the race in Wisconsin is as close once again as they're saying it's going to be. Wisconsin went to Al Gore and John Kerry by 10,000 votes or less in 2000 and 2004, and John McCain has really closed the lead Barack Obama had going into the summer.

In 2004, Kerry supporters (myself, while hesitantly, among them) felt certain the race was in the bag. After all, the country was already halfway into the rut we're in now, so who in their right mind could justify another four years of the same?

Turns out, a lot of people. It's still easy to villify people who voted for George W. Bush that year, to say, "51 percent of America is idiots" and "the United States of Jesusland strikes again," but that could prove to be a dangerous mistake going into the final push of the 2008 election.

At his rally on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard today, Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean made an appeal to a small crowd of mostly UW students. Flanked by local celebu-ticians Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and County Executive Kathleen Falk, he told them his generation, the crowd's (and my) parents' generation, had a fine thing going in the late sixties and early seventies, until they got jobs and had kids.

"The mistake we made was we let ourselves get out of politics for a while," Dean said, and I think he has a point.

My mom was a hippie. She won't tell many stories about it anymore, but I've seen pictures. My dad was a rebel in his own way, and then served a term on the Monroe School Board back in the day. But from the narrow point-of-view I held of them as a kid living in their house, I never viewed either of them as political animals.

After all, I was the one listening to politically-charged punk rock and getting into shouting matches in the middle of high school classes over whether invading Iraq was a sensible decision. They were busy putting clothes on my back and food in my mouth, for some reason.

But since I graduated high school, my parents have become noticeably more active in politics. I'm certain that it has as much to do with the declining state of our country as it does with their decreasing parental responsibilities as their kids get older. The last four years it's been especially pronounced, particularly since last winter when the build-up to the Presidential election began.

My Mom made it to Barack Obama's speech at the Kohl Center in February, and it was a thrill to see her as excited as I was about it.

So I do think the sixties generation is more pissed off and paying more attention than they were four years ago, but that's only half the battle. The big purpose of Dean's visit to Madison today was to kick off Wisconsin's voter registration drive.

"It's not just about you going to vote," Dean told the crowd. "You need to go out and register other people to vote, and get them to the polls."

But I disagree, I think that's still not doing enough, and it all gets back to that 51% who voted for George Bush in 2004. I know that 51%. I've spoken with them when I was growing up in Monroe, or working for the newspaper in Portage. They're smart, hard-working people, they just haven't had the time to do their own research, and every source they've ever listened to is still telling them the same thing they've based their decisions on for years: "The Democrats are going to break you with taxes, rip the fetuses out of your women, sieze your guns and force you to get married to a gay partner."

What they hear on the news won't change their minds. Statistics won't change their minds. And if someone shows up at their door wearing an Obama '08 tee-shirt, they'll pull down the blinds and act like no one's home.

The only way to speak to these people, the REAL voters of the American heartland, is to do just that... speak to them. Not as a politician, not as a news man, not as a political activist, but as another person. From as non-confrontational a stance as possible, it is possible to explain the facts to these people: to tell them the policies of the past eight years have left them penniless and benfitted the top crux of American society; that in spite of what old men on fishing trips say, Canadians really are happier with their health care system than we are in America; and that the Republican Party has thrived by convincing blue-collar working people they're going to bat for them, while backing corporate interests.

But no one's figured out how to do that en masse yet, because it's a slow, face-to-face job, and it requires political activists to leave the safe confines of their peers and delve into age and class groups they wouldn't normally interact with. As a UW student, I was bombarded with people who were happy to show me the way to the polls and how to register, but how many of those volunteers ever set foot in a town like Monroe or Portage? Or Rio or Cambria or Juda or Brodhead or Argyle or Evansville or Lodi or Cross Plains or Jefferson or Fort Atkinson?

That's where there are people who stand to make a difference, if they hear the message from someone with the right intentions, someone who can break them out of the voting rut that was handed down to them from three generations ago. And Obama supporters need to figure out how to reach these people, and fast, because as Dean said today, we only get one shot at 2008.

"Don't blow it," he said, and he's right. This is the chance to get a real, respectable leader into the highest office in America, at a time when our nation sorely needs it. It's the kind of chance that comes along maybe twice in a lifetime, and the way things have been lately, it could be our last shot ever if we don't do it right this time.

Guy's Good

You. Barack Obama. You're very good, you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAhb06Z8N1c&e

The latest figures I saw say two-hundred thousand people turned out to see Obama speak in Berlin today. Well over a million Germans tuned in to watch it on television.

That settles it. Our European Union counterparts follow American politics better than our own citizens.

The sheer fact that Obama drew such a positive response from the German people tells me they're even more desperate for a change in American leadership than we are at home. Why wouldn't they be? The policy decisions of the Bush Administration have had just as much of an impact on them as they have anyone else in the world. Through the seventies, eighties and nineties, the United States worked its way up to be the pillar of the world economy, so now that we're in the process of quietly imploding, we stand to take a good chunk of the world with us.

Come election day, there are going to be just as many disillusioned Europeans perched in front of the TV, hoping, albeit against their better jaded judgement, that a majority of Americans have had their goddamn eyes opened. The economic and foreign policy judgements made over the past year have placed us all equally in the recession crapper.

Europe has been so affected by this country, one questions whether it might actually be fair just to dole out one electoral vote a piece to each member nation of the EU.

So George Bush goes to Berlin and makes Chancellor Angela Merkel increasingly uncomfortable each time. John McCain goes to Ohio and orders the schnitzel. Barack Obama makes the trip, gives an eloquent speech and fosters international goodwill toward America before he's even the party's official nominee.

If there's a reason for Americans NOT to vote for Barack Obama, that's it. He said it oh-so-articulately himself during today's speech.

"In America, there are voices that deride and deny the importance of Europe in our security and our future."

And you'd better believe those voices are terrified of black people, loathe an inspired leader who can speak a coherent sentence and don't think they have any use for health care... that is, until a lifetime of avoiding the doctor's office catches up to them and they're wards of the state.

God. Damnit. I know things look pretty good in this race, but I will NEVER, EVER underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers again.

The morning after that fateful election day in 2004, the cover of The Mirror, a paper in the UK, showed a picture of G W Bush making one of his infamous dumb monkey faces. The headline read, "How Could 59,054,087 Americans be so dumb?"

I only hope that this year, in 2008, we can prove there were plenty of Americans shaking their heads and asking themselves the same damn question.

Barack FTW!!!

Yesterday was the kind of day that gets you contemplating the business end of a razor blade here in southern Wisconsin. Whispers grew to rumors, rumors to cries of dismay. Those cries of dismay were answered by General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner yesterday morning, and he confirmed the worst: Janesville's General Motors assembly plant, in operation since 1919 and GM's oldest, will be boarded up and shut down by 2010.

It's terrible news. Janesville was the last working city between Chicago and Madison. Seriously, all one needs to do for a preview of what's ten years down the line for Janesville is scoot a little further south along I-90 to Beloit, or even a little further to Rockford. 2700 people are losing their livelihoods. In all likelihood, that number is closer to 10,000 when you factor in their family members that depended on those union jobs to get by.

Those people aren't going to hang around for the ambience. They'll go where the work is, if they can find it, and unless something fortunate happens, Janesville will round out a trifecta of ghost towns along the I-90 corridor.

So until Barack Obama's speech last night, I was feeling a little down and out. Watch it and judge for yourself. Can one man single-handedly prevent the closure of the Janesville plant? Not a chance. But is this a guy that working people, moderates and progressives can all get behind to end the economic policies that lead to this closure? An experience I had this weekend convinced me that's so.

As a reporter, one of the toughest skills I've had to master is the ability to withhold judgement on a person when they say something that strikes me as awful. Be it county board members or guys in the farm fields, I've heard some of the most hateful things I've ever heard on the job, and it IS my job to keep smiling, keep jotting notes and try and empathize.

So when Kyle and I sat down at the bar in Rio next to a guy in overhauls this weekend as part of the inaugural Dive Bar Project voyage, I was more prepared than Kyle when the conversation turned to politics. I was also able to keep my food down when the guy said, "Ya know, my Dad would be spinning in his grave if he knew I was going to be voting for a nigger this fall."

Maybe I've finally broken my brain, but I can't help but see through the racial epithet to something maybe just a little positive beneath it. This man, who I won't name, works days for an agriculture company and nights tending bar at a rural hole-in-the-wall. He meant everything he said, including "I'm no idiot. This John McCain's nothing more than a George Bush three, and I'm tired of being lied too."

Maybe it took the collapse of an institution like the Janesville plant, but people might finally be seeing through the rhetoric to the true effect the current administration's policies are having on our country.