Tommy Washbush / Freepik
Mockups of pins for the nonexistent 'Sensible Dane' party.
A few weeks ago, former journalist, local pol and current blogger-provacateur David Blaska invited me for a cup of coffee. He wanted to run an idea by me. His idea was to create a new local party in Dane County. I thought it was a good idea, until I didn’t.
Blaska, a Never Trump Republican who has paid a price for his heresy, is a gifted, edgy writer. What I like about him is that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. A lot of his stuff is intended to poke fun at the pretentiousness of liberals, the flat out idiocy of Trump, or Blaska himself.
A few years ago he had the guts to take on an incumbent on the Madison School Board. I supported him not because I agreed with everything he said, but because I think our schools are in real trouble and the long-time board majority is focused on the wrong things. We both knew he’d lose, but it was important that someone at least made the case for better test scores and good order and safety in our schools. I took some heat from friends and others for endorsing David, but I make no apologies.
But that candidacy pointed up a problem in local politics: There is little to no infrastructure to support a moderate, much less a conservative, candidate for school boards, the county board, or city councils, village boards or town boards.
When I was mayor from 2003 to 2011 there was a strong center-left. It was made up of the Dane County Democrats, the Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Madison Inc., and some of the unions. To the left was a very well organized Progressive Dane party and to the right there were some significant remnants of a Republican Party. Today, the Democrats have pretty much merged with P.D., the Chamber and DMI have checked out completely and most of the unions have gone further left. But I think it would be possible, under the right leadership, to recreate some of what once existed. The trouble is that nobody wants to go first. Nobody wants to risk hanging out there alone while the hard-left takes shots at them.
This is bad. Even if you’re a liberal, you should think this is bad. Actually, you should think this is bad especially if you’re a liberal. To me, being a liberal is about being open-minded, about wanting to have my ideas challenged. That’s the only way we can “sift and winnow” as our great liberal university instructs us to do. To the extent that this is at the core of being a liberal, I still very much am one, though I generally describe myself as a moderate these days.
And yet, Madison and most of Dane County have sunk to new lows of uni-thought. To so much as question liberal — I call it hard-left — orthodoxy is to invite accusations of racism or misogyny or transphobia or something else just as bad, probably described by a word you’ll have to research. Those accusations have been reliably proven to stop the miscreant in his tracks and end further debate. Liberals are absolutely terrified of the online mob.
My guess is that those of us who think of ourselves as center-left (me) through right-center (Blaska) make up maybe as much as a third of Madison’s and probably more like 40% or 45% of Dane County’s potential voters. And yet we’re all but invisible. I pretty much never have somebody to vote for who reflects my views. So, I pick the candidate who seems the most reasonable and moderate or I just don’t vote in that race.
In fact, I often don’t have a choice. Despite awful test scores, discipline problems, high absentee rates, a widening racial achievement gap, and bad fiscal management, the last several incumbent Madison school board members have run unopposed. There are two more up this spring and once again there seems to be a good chance that they’ll run without opposition.
All of which brings me back to Blaska’s idea for a new party, which he would have called Sensible Dane. He and I even traded ideas to the point of coming up with a platform. But I had two conditions for my involvement. I needed to have several more Democrats join me and I was not going to recruit them.
I would not recruit them because I am blissfully retired from politics. And I’ve always been a rotten organizer anyway. I don’t like asking people for anything. I have a hard time asking a dinner guest to pass the gravy.
Moreover, I’m out of this business. What I want to do in my remaining years on this earth is sit up in my cabin in the UP and read and write. I no longer have any stomach for politics.
Blaska did tentatively recruit a couple more Democrats, but they were on the fence about it and everybody else he had on board could be characterized as Republicans or conservatives. I took a hard look at it and decided it just wasn’t shaping up to be the kind of centrist organization I would feel at home in. It was looking too conservative and too in-your-face for my tastes. And, worst of all, I could see myself getting pulled into a higher-profile organizing role than I wanted at this point in my life.
So the whole thing caved in and David dropped it. Blaska was the wrong guy with the right idea.
But I give him credit for trying and I hope somebody else picks up the cause. If it’s the right kind of thing, I’ll lend my name, for all that’s worth, and toss in a small contribution. I’ll also offer a bottomless cup of advice about what other people should do. Any takers?
Dave Cieslewicz is a Madison- and Upper Peninsula-based writer who served as mayor of Madison from 2003 to 2011. You can read more of his work at Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos.
