David Michael Miller
When Tim Cullen dropped out of the race for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in March it didn’t send shock waves through Wisconsin politics.
No, it was more like a low, groaning tremor that had been felt for weeks before and continued afterwards. Despite Scott Walker’s approval numbers that have hung around on the outskirts of dismal, Democrats are left wondering, is anybody going to take on this guy?
Before Cullen dropped out, state Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling, U.S. Rep. Ron Kind, Milwaukee businessman Mark Bakken and Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele had all taken a pass. And after Cullen said he wouldn’t do it, Dane County Executive Joe Parisi took his name out of contention.
Plenty of others are still allowing their names to be circulated and recently another Milwaukee business exec, Andy Gronik, has appeared to step closer to a race, commissioning a poll. Blue Jean Nation founder Mike McCabe says he is also considering a run, but can’t even identify what party he might adopt.
But Cullen’s early departure was especially significant since he seemed the most serious of the potential candidates. Cullen, a Janesville Democrat, is no neophyte. He served as Senate majority leader in the 1980s and took a job as secretary of human services under former Gov. Tommy Thompson. In 2010, after retiring from a career as a health care executive, he returned to his old Senate seat and was one of the “Wisconsin 14” senators who bolted to Illinois to slow down Walker’s push to all but destroy public employee unions in the state.
In testing the waters, Cullen had been travelling the state, meeting with Democratic operatives and influentials.
Cullen said his reason for giving up the fight was the revelation that he would have to spend about half a day, every day, begging for money. With Cullen’s long experience in politics that didn’t ring true with me.
So I sat down with Cullen over a cup of coffee and asked him about it.
“I wasn’t naïve,” he said. “But my desire to defeat Walker got ahead of my understanding of what it would take to raise $12 million.”
Times had changed in the two decades between Cullen’s Senate terms. Cullen said when he was Senate majority leader he had to raise only about $150,000 for the state Senate Democratic Committee to contribute to the campaigns of Senate Democrats, most of whom raised their own money. And much of that came from a few contributions from unions as opposed to a daily grind of cold calls to big donors. In the last cycle, the committee raised and spent 10 times as much.
But now, together with each side’s third party supporters, Cullen figured Walker and his allies would spend about $44 million while his Democratic opponent and supporting groups would have to try to raise at least half that. Cullen thought he would have to raise about $12 million of that by himself, making calls for at least four hours a day.
After making about 30 calls to friends and getting commitments for what he thought could have added up to a little over a million dollars, Cullen concluded, “I just don’t want to do this.”
He also found that, at 73 years old, he was not looking forward to a full-time campaign schedule. Still, Cullen is a fit, healthy septuagenarian. What it seemed to come down to was what politicians refer to as “fire in the belly.”
I left my conversation with Cullen wondering what might have been if the fire in his stomach had not been extinguished by the awful reality of modern politics and its emphasis on money over ideas.
Cullen said he would have committed to serving only one term and he would have tried to engineer a Democratic ticket with a progressive woman for lieutenant governor (he suggested dairy farmer and 2016 Congressional candidate Sarah Lloyd), who would pick up the mantle four years later. To make up for a funding disadvantage he was going to hit small towns, meeting folks in cafes and knocking on their doors. He would record those encounters and spread them on social media.
And he had a unique thought on how to approach Walker. “I was seriously considering just ignoring him,” Cullen said. “Look, only 4 percent of voters don’t have an opinion about the guy already. Nothing I could say about him would change people’s minds. I was going to present a positive alternative.”
I asked him if he regretted not making the race. “No,” he said. “The only thing I regret is that it might have contributed to the narrative that all these Democrats aren’t running because Walker is strong. I don’t believe it. Money is the only thing that can save Scott Walker.”
Maybe so, but there’s an old saying in politics that you can’t beat somebody with nobody. Tim Cullen was somebody. With his departure, Democrats continue the search for anybody.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at Isthmus.com.
