The best part of the WisPolitics luncheons is that they give us continued opportunity to review how clueless the Assembly Republicans are.
Beautiful. They still don't get it. The AssGOP made a stupid calculation in shoving the gay marriage amendment down everyone's throats on a general election ballot. They've been poorly led ever since Scott Jensen left. SE Wisconsin conservatives refuse to do anything that might help their outstate brethren win their reelection battles. Similarly, the outstate Republicans are now terrified to do absolutely anything lest it cost them a vote. They've run their campaigns with the political equivalent of the Bad News Bears, and instead of discarding the overpaid staffers who are dragging morale down, they give them last-minute discretionary raises and allow them to remain a cancer within the caucus.
You conservatives want an easy $150-200k a year in taxpayer savings? How about demanding that all the ex-leadership staffers in the Huebsch and Rhoades' offices get paid the same as their peers in other backbench offices? After all, they're doing the same work. Why should one person make $70k to answer letters and phone calls while the staffer next door makes $30k?
And Jeff Fitzgerald still wants to blame the woes of the Republican Party in Wisconsin on everyone but the people he leads. There's no fixing this problem until AssGOP leadership can look at the public and say "you know what? We screwed a lot of this up ourselves." But there's absolutely no sense of self-awareness coming from Fitzgerald. How can you fix the problems if you can't even admit that they exist?
Or perhaps Fitz's strategy is to simply sit there and hope that the Democrats screw up as badly as his caucus has in recent years. One would hope for more from a leader.
Assembly Minority Leader Jeff Fitzgerald says state Republicans have been hurt by the actions of national Republicans over the past two cycles.
"We kind of lost our way for a while at the national level," Fitzgerald, R-Horicon, told a WisPolitics.com luncheon last week. "That in turn fell on us."
Fitzgerald said Assembly Republicans have a record of fiscal conservatism but that national Republicans went astray.
"I'd be the first one to admit. I think Republicans in Congress ... and President Bush, there was a great ... amount of spending and earmarks," he said. "We did do different (at the state level). We voted different."
Beautiful. They still don't get it. The AssGOP made a stupid calculation in shoving the gay marriage amendment down everyone's throats on a general election ballot. They've been poorly led ever since Scott Jensen left. SE Wisconsin conservatives refuse to do anything that might help their outstate brethren win their reelection battles. Similarly, the outstate Republicans are now terrified to do absolutely anything lest it cost them a vote. They've run their campaigns with the political equivalent of the Bad News Bears, and instead of discarding the overpaid staffers who are dragging morale down, they give them last-minute discretionary raises and allow them to remain a cancer within the caucus.
You conservatives want an easy $150-200k a year in taxpayer savings? How about demanding that all the ex-leadership staffers in the Huebsch and Rhoades' offices get paid the same as their peers in other backbench offices? After all, they're doing the same work. Why should one person make $70k to answer letters and phone calls while the staffer next door makes $30k?
And Jeff Fitzgerald still wants to blame the woes of the Republican Party in Wisconsin on everyone but the people he leads. There's no fixing this problem until AssGOP leadership can look at the public and say "you know what? We screwed a lot of this up ourselves." But there's absolutely no sense of self-awareness coming from Fitzgerald. How can you fix the problems if you can't even admit that they exist?
Or perhaps Fitz's strategy is to simply sit there and hope that the Democrats screw up as badly as his caucus has in recent years. One would hope for more from a leader.
7 comments:
Ok let me get this straight. Your main objection to the AssGOP is the marriage amendment that passed with more than 60% of the vote?
How is that different than Doyle putting in the domestic partner benefit in his budget? I get that you opposed the marriage amendment - but I fail to see how it cost anyone their seat.
As for staffers - leadership has no say in who gets fired or stays - each rep makes that choice.
Jensen? The leader who rode a GOP wave to the majority counteracting decades of Democrat mistakes? He was a leader at a perfect time to be leader.
When national numbers show an overwhelming downturn in the generic GOP ballot, Fitzgerald does have a point that national politics have influenced state elections. Are they completely to blame? No. But Bush fatigue did play a role.
The dems...not sure they will overreach. But they have no qualms about raising taxes. I guess we'll see how that plays out in a recession.
Thanks for the comment. I'll try to clarify.
- The problem with the timing of the marriage amendment is that it did terrible things with turnout for vulnerable GOP moderates outstate, many of whom had UW campuses in their district. It drove anti-amendment turnout in places like Green Bay (Krawczyk), Platteville (Loeffelholz), Eau Claire (Kreibich), Oshkosh (Hintz), and didn't help us any on the Senate side either. Don't put that on the ballot and a lot of those college kids don't care enough about anything else on the '06 ballot to bother voting - especially when the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races were such walkovers. That thing belonged on a spring ballot and the GOP could've done that without any problem. But they chose not to.
- Doyle throwing domestic partner benefits in his budget isn't a separate ballot initiative that coincides with an election. Nobody gets to vote on it separately. He'd be dumb to put it on a ballot in the general, because of the margins you stated.
- In regard to staff, I don't recall any AssGOP member really hiring anyone that Jensen didn't approve of and having that work out well for them, politically or otherwise. There's a whole lot of de facto control there that leadership just doesn't know how to use anymore.
- Yeah, Jensen came along at the right time. But remember that even when the national party was losing seats in '96 and '98, for instance, Jensen was still winning seats. That was the brilliance of Jensen - he managed to gain seats even when national trends said that he should've been losing them.
- I'd never suggest that top of the ticket issues weren't a factor. But you hear people like the brothers Fitz and Huebsch talk and you'd think that they were all totally harmless in the affair. The fact is that because of their feckless leadership, a bad situation became much worse. There's no reason they should've lost 13 seats in two cycles. None. They picked bad issues, they ran bad candidates, and they had crappy staff running the show (some decent folks in the field but nobody talented near the levers of power).
- As long Doyle is just raising taxes on groups that people hate, most voters won't care. Combined reporting, oil franchise tax, smokers, 1% on Scott Newcomer and friends, those are political non-starters for Republicans. None of those will win them votes they don't already have. Now, if Doyle decides to try and pitch school revenue caps out the window, that could be problematic.
Scott Fitz had a pretty decent cycle by bucking the wave and almost picking up seat. And aren't they better situated this time running against freshman?
As for campaign staff on the Assembly side - won't there be new people running the show?
Somebody, open records request the Chief Clerk. I'm guessing some of these salaries would make the paltry legislator raises look like chump change.
So you think Jeff Fitz is clueless because he places the blame at Bush and the DC GOP? Did you honestly think he was going to say that AssGOP was misguided the last few years? I'm not debating whether they were or not, but why would he admit that at a WisPolitics luncheon? What purpose would that serve other than to alienate the base who thought what AssGOP did was good stuff?
I would concur that specifics aren't necessary, nor are they perhaps appropriate. But AssGOP leadership has consistently, both after '06 and '08, lacked any sort of contrition. Nobody is willing to admit that they were, in any way, shape, or form, at fault for their own condition.
I think he's perfectly capable of saying "you know, we've made some missteps in recent years. Our message hasn't always been clear. We haven't always worked together as a caucus as well as we should have. In hindsight, we probably should have done some things differently. But our job is to learn from our mistakes and move forward, and and I'm confident that we'll do that this session and come next year, voters will have a better idea about who the Assembly Republicans are and what we stand for."
I think that would help his own credibility immensely with nearly everyone, instead of his near-constant, "I didn't do it" buck-passing. Wouldn't you agree?
Scooter was quite a piece, sorta like Lena Taylor.
Taylor can't resist reminding whomever she's speaking with that she's an attorney. Scooter had to let you know he's a grad from the Kennedy School of Government.
As Danny D. might say: "Well, la-dee frickin' dah!" to both.
No doubt SJ was on top of his game, but the whole Pepsi/Coke fiasco, where the poor assembly page told a reporter that it was like she was dealing with Jesus Christ when she screwed up SJ's beverage order-Coke in the morning , Pepsi in the afternoon, (or was it vice versa) was spot on.
Jensen didn't think his stuff stank.
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