David Michael Miller
There’s a rule in politics: no good deed goes unpunished.
This rule is applied with special enthusiasm on the left toward its own politicians. So when certified liberals Dane County Executive Joe Parisi and Supv. Al Matano suggested naming the City County Building after President Barack Obama, you could sort of see it coming.
What seemed like an innocuous way to honor a president who was very popular in Dane County was met with immediate criticism, some of it valid. The main points were that the building is not exactly beloved because of its architecture and it houses a jail, bringing to mind racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
But the local NAACP went overboard when it issued a statement saying that the idea was an “affront” to Obama. No, it wasn’t. Here were two liberal politicians trying to find a way to honor a liberal president. They may have been pandering a little bit, but they weren’t trying to offend the former president or his supporters. Quite the opposite.
Rather than being “affronted,” couldn’t the NAACP just have said it was a good idea to name something after the first black president, that maybe the CCB wasn’t its top choice, and offer to work with Parisi and Matano to come up with something better? No, because taking offense is what the left does best — as opposed to something silly like, I don’t know, figuring out how to win elections.
After Ronald Reagan left office, Republicans set about naming everything they could after him. This included Washington’s National Airport. Talk about your affronts. Reagan had killed the air traffic controllers union. But the larger strategy was smart: embed Reagan in the public consciousness the way Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy had been. Create an enduring, iconic, conservative hero just as FDR and JFK had been molded into liberal icons.
So, the idea of naming a bunch of stuff after Obama is brilliant. Credit Parisi and Matano with taking the lead on a fundamentally fine idea and credit their detractors with being, well, typical lefties, punishing their own leaders for a well-intentioned proposal.
The City-County Liaison Committee eventually dropped the idea due to the opposition and will instead seek ideas from the community on a different public space to name after Obama. Still, Parisi and Matano can take solace in the fact that they raised an issue that will eventually be resolved with something being named after the 44th president — after, in true Madison fashion, many committee meetings and public hearings.
So, let me nominate my own new name for the poor, beleaguered, unloved City County Building: The Dick Wagner Building.
I’m sort of serious about this. Dick Wagner was a longtime county supervisor representing the near east side and so he has spent a lot of time in that building. I served with him when he was county board chair in the early 1990s and there are few people in politics I respect more. Gentlemanly, decent and yet politically astute, Wagner started building the progressive majority now firmly in place in county government.
Wagner still chairs the city’s Urban Design Commission, to which I sentenced him when I was mayor. I would have commuted his sentence for good behavior by now, but he voluntarily continues and is a consistent voice of calm reason.
As if that weren’t enough, Wagner came out as a gay man at a time when that was no minor thing, especially for a public official. It was people like Dick Wagner who made the recent public support for gay marriage possible. That happened because — by the early part of this century — everyone knew someone who was openly gay so it became harder to see why they were being discriminated against. Wagner was on the front lines of creating that environment and he did it 40 years ago, when being out was not common.
And here’s the kicker, Wagner is a man of taste and style and yet… he actually likes the City County Building. I guess he thinks it’s representative of high Khrushchev-era Soviet style or something.
The Wagner Building. I like it. Now the left can tell me why this is an affront to gay people, urban design principles and Nikita Khrushchev.
Dave Cieslewicz is the former mayor of Madison. He blogs as Citizen Dave at Isthmus.com.
