David Michael Miller
Rebecca Dallet won a decisive victory for the Wisconsin Supreme Court last week, the first time the liberal candidate has prevailed in more than two decades. Here are some lessons that I took from that victory.
Anger is energizing. On election night Gov. Scott Walker tweeted that a blue wave might be coming in November, motivated by “anger and hatred” on the left. For a guy who ultimately supported a president who openly exploits and fuels anger and hatred of the ugliest kind, that was a remarkable statement. But he’s correct, unfortunately, that in politics anger is a stronger motivating force than hope. Barack Obama won in 2008 at least as much because of anger directed at George W. Bush over his wars and handling of the economy as he did because of his message of a bright future for America.
With apologies to Dallet, who ran a good campaign and may wind up being a fine justice, nobody voted for her. They voted against Donald Trump and, to some extent, Scott Walker. Right now all the energy is on the left and all the energy is negative. That may sound depressing, but anger — when it’s justified and God knows it is right now — is a legitimate and sometimes necessary human emotion. A career politician like Walker understands this better than anybody, since he’s exploited it for so many years, and so he has every reason to worry.
Clinton was terrible. Can we just close the book on this now? Hillary Clinton did not lose because she is a woman. She lost because she was an awful candidate and exactly the wrong person for the year. Dallet took 24 counties that Clinton lost in 2016. As Republican strategist Brandon Scholz observed about those two dozen swing counties, many of which went for Obama in previous elections, “There was nothing there for them (in 2016) and the Dallet campaign successfully reached them and made those people want to vote.”
Clinton could never shake her sense of privileged rich kid entitlement and it showed. She dripped with condescension. Her comment about Trump voters being a “basket of deplorables,” was a fair read on her worldview. Of course she was highly qualified, but she ran in a year where her qualifications worked against her and she didn’t have the common touch, as Joe Biden would have had, to compensate for the liability of actually being ready to do the job.
And while we’re closing the book on Hillary, can we just shut it entirely on the Clintons altogether? In an era when Al Franken went down over a mildly offensive photograph taken years earlier, can any of us continue to make excuses for Bill Clinton’s behavior? I believe the women. I don’t know if he was a rapist, but his behavior toward women is something Democrats would never tolerate these days and Hillary enabled it to preserve her own political career. Let’s just seal these people off in their splendid exile in Chappaqua and never speak their names again.
Objectivity is lost. Court races used to be wonderfully boring. Candidates lived by norms in which they refused to talk about the specifics of cases and fought every attempt to smoke out their political leanings. To some extent there was dishonesty in that because of course they had political preferences. But there was also value in the charade. The expectation was that a justice would fight their personal politics and strive for objectivity and fairness. When that striving was sincere it was a very good thing.
But as my Isthmus colleague Bill Lueders has pointed out, Dallet’s opponent, Sauk County Circuit Court Judge Michael Screnock, like conservative court candidates before him, followed a formula of sham objectivity. He railed against judicial activism while showing every sign of intending to be a staunch activist for the hard right once he joined the court. Dallet responded reasonably for a candidate trying to win an election: She signaled her own intention to rule for the liberal point of view.
But when Dallet takes her seat in August I hope she will put that political expediency behind her. I hope she will find solid legal grounds to disappoint me and my fellow liberals to show that she really is striving to be fair and objective. I still believe not so much in the possibility of objectivity, but in the value of trying to be objective.
Boring is good. As I noted above, all the political energy is on the left and all of it is negative. Democrats will show up to vote against Scott Walker and Donald Trump even more strongly in November when Walker’s name is actually on the ballot. The only way Democrats can screw this up is for them to nominate someone who excites equally strong negative emotions among conservatives. That argues for the dullest Democratic nominee possible. Just as actual qualifications for office were a net negative for Hillary Clinton, an actual personality would be a net negative for the Democrat this November. Democrats should ask themselves which candidate makes them yawn the most. That’s the one.
