Wisconsin

Those pizzas, of course, were heading for the Wisconsin state capitol, an elegant domed structure at the heart of this Midwestern college town. For nearly two weeks, tens of thousands of raucous, sleepless, grizzled, energized protesters have called the stately capitol building their home. As the police moved in to clear it out on Sunday afternoon, it was still the pulsing heart of the largest labor protest in my lifetime, the focal point of rallies and concerts against a politically-charged piece of legislation proposed by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a hard-right Republican. That bill, officially known as the Special Session Senate Bill 11, would, among other things, eliminate collective bargaining rights for most of the state’s public-sector unions, in effect eviscerating the unions themselves.

“Kill the bill!” the protesters chant en masse, day after day, while the drums pound and cowbells clang. “What’s disgusting? Union busting!”

One World, One Pain

The spark for Wisconsin’s protests came on February 11th. That was the day the Associated Press published a brief story quoting Walker as saying he would call in the National Guard to crack down on unruly workers upset that their bargaining rights were being stripped away. Labor and other left-leaning groups seized on Walker’s incendiary threat, and within a week there were close to 70,000 protesters filling the streets of Madison.

Six thousand miles away, February 11th was an even more momentous day. Weary but jubilant protesters on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, and other Egyptian cities celebrated the toppling of Hosni Mubarak, the autocrat who had ruled over them for more than 30 years and amassed billions in wealth at their expense. “We have brought down the regime,” cheered the protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the center of the Egyptian uprising. In calendar terms, the demonstrations in Wisconsin, you could say, picked up right where the Egyptians left off.

I arrived in Madison several days into the protests. I’ve watched the crowds swell, nearly all of those arriving — and some just not leaving — united against Governor Walker’s “budget repair bill.” I’ve interviewed protesters young and old, union members and grassroots organizers, students and teachers, children and retirees. I’ve huddled with labor leaders in their Madison “war rooms,” and sat through the governor’s press conferences. I’ve slept on the cold, stone floor of the Wisconsin state capitol (twice). Believe me, the spirit of Cairo is here. The air is charged with it.

It was strongest inside the Capitol. A previously seldom-visited building had been miraculously transformed into a genuine living, breathing community. There was a medic station, child day care, a food court, sleeping quarters, hundreds of signs and banners, live music, and a sense of camaraderie and purpose you’d struggle to find in most American cities, possibly anywhere else in this country. Like Cairo’s Tahrir Square in the weeks of the Egyptian uprising, most of what happens inside the Capitol’s walls is protest.

Egypt is a presence here in all sorts of obvious ways, as well as ways harder to put your finger on. The walls of the capital, to take one example, offer regular reminders of Egypt’s feat. I saw, for instance, multiple copies of that famous photo on Facebook of an Egyptian man, his face half-obscured, holding a sign that reads: “EGYPT Supports Wisconsin Workers: One World, One Pain.” The picture is all the more striking for what’s going on around the man with the sign: a sea of cheering demonstrators are waving Egyptian flags, hands held aloft. The man, however, faces in the opposite direction, as if showing support for brethren halfway around the world was important enough to break away from the historic celebrations erupting around him.

Similarly, I’ve seen multiple copies of a statement by Kamal Abbas, the general coordinator for Egypt’s Center for Trade Unions and Workers Services, taped to the walls of the state capitol. Not long after Egypt’s January Revolution triumphed and Wisconsin’s protests began, Abbas announced his group’s support for the Wisconsin labor protesters in a page-long declaration that said in part: “We want you to know that we stand on your side. Stand firm and don’t waiver. Don’t give up on your rights. Victory always belongs to the people who stand firm and demand their just rights.”

Then there’s the role of organized labor more generally. After all, widespread strikes coordinated by labor unions shut down Egyptian government agencies and increased the pressure on Mubarak to relinquish power. While we haven’t seen similar strikes yet here in Madison — though there’s talk of a general strike if Walker’s bill somehow passes — there’s no underestimating the role of labor unions like the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and the American Federation of Teachers in organizing the events of the past two weeks.

Faced with a bill that could all but wipe out unions in historically labor-friendly states across the Midwest, labor leaders knew they had to act — and quickly. “Our very labor movement is at stake,” Stephanie Bloomingdale, secretary-treasurer of Wisconsin’s AFL-CIO branch, told me. “And when that’s at stake, the economic security of Americans is at stake.”

“The Mubarak of the Midwest”

On the Sunday after I arrived, I was wandering the halls of the Capitol when I met Scott Graham, a third-grade teacher who lives in Lacrosse, Wisconsin. Over the cheers of the crowd, I asked Graham whether he saw a connection between the events in Egypt and those here in Wisconsin. His response caught the mood of the moment. “Watching Egypt’s story for a week or two very intently, I was inspired by the Egyptian people, you know, striving for their own self-determination and democracy in their country,” Graham told me. “I was very inspired by that. And when I got here I sensed that everyone’s in it together. The sense of solidarity is just amazing.”

A few days later, I stood outside the capitol building in the frigid cold and talked about Egypt with two local teachers. The most obvious connection between Egypt and Wisconsin was the role and power of young people, said Ann Wachter, a federal employee who joined our conversation when she overheard me mention Egypt. There, it was tech-savvy young people who helped keep the protests alive and the same, she said, applied in Madison. “You go in there everyday and it’s the youth that carries it throughout hours that we’re working, or we’re running our errands, whatever we do. They do whatever they do as young people to keep it alive. After all, I’m at the end of my working career; it’s their future.”

And of course, let’s not forget those almost omnipresent signs that link the young governor of Wisconsin to the aging Hosni Mubarak. They typically label Walker the “Mubarak of the Midwest” or “Mini-Mubarak,” or demand the recall of “Scott ‘Mubarak.’” In a public talk on Thursday night, journalist Amy Goodman quipped, “Walker would be wise to negotiate. It’s not a good season for tyrants.”

One protester I saw on Thursday hoisted aloft a “No Union Busting!” sign with a black shoe perched atop it, the heel facing forward — a severe sign of disrespect that Egyptian protesters directed at Mubarak and a symbol that, before the recent American TV blitz of “rage and revolution” in the Middle East, would have had little meaning here.

Which isn’t to say that the Egypt-Wisconsin comparison is a perfect one. Hardly. After all, the Egyptian demonstrators massed in hopes of a new and quite different world; the American ones, no matter the celebratory and energized air in Madison, are essentially negotiating loss (of pensions and health-care benefits, if not collective bargaining rights). The historic demonstrations in Madison have been nothing if not peaceful. On Saturday, when as many as 100,000 people descended on Madison to protest Walker’s bill, the largest turnout so far, not a single arrest was made. In Egypt, by contrast, the protests were plenty bloody, with more than 300 deaths during the 29-day uprising.

Not that some observers didn’t see the need for violence in Madison. Last Saturday, Jeff Cox, a deputy attorney general in Indiana, suggested on his Twitter account that police “use live ammunition” on the protesters occupying the state Capitol. That sentiment, discovered by a colleague of mine, led to an outcry. The story broke on Wednesday morning; by Wednesday afternoon Cox had been fired.

New York Times columnist David Brooks was typical of mainstream coverage and punditry in quickly dismissing any connection between Egypt (or Tunisia) and Wisconsin. On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart spoofed and rejected the notion that the Wisconsin protests had any meaningful connection to Egypt. He called the people gathered here “the bizarro Tea Party.” Stewart’s crew even brought in a camel as a prop. Those of us in Madison watched as Stewart’s skit went horribly wrong when the camel got entangled in a barricade and fell to the ground.

As far as I know, neither Brooks nor Stewart spent time here. Still, you can count on one thing: if the demonstrators in Tahrir Square had been enthusiastically citing Americans as models for their protest, nobody here would have been in such a dismissive or mocking mood. In other parts of this country, perhaps it still feels less than comfortable to credit Egyptians or Arabs with inspiring an American movement for justice. If you had been here in Madison, this last week, you might have felt differently.

Pizza Town Protest

Obviously, the outcomes in Egypt and Wisconsin won’t be comparable. Egypt toppled a dictator; Wisconsin has a democratically elected governor who, at the very earliest, can’t be recalled until 2012. And so the protests in Wisconsin are unlikely to transform the world around us. Still, there can be no question, as they spread elsewhere in the Midwest, that they have reenergized the country’s stagnant labor movement, a once-powerful player in American politics and business that’s now a shell of its former self. “There’s such energy right now,” one SEIU staffer told me a few nights ago. “This is a magic moment.”

Not long after talking with her, I trudged back to Ian’s Pizza, the icy snow crunching under my feet. At the door stood an employee with tired eyes, a distinct five o’clock shadow, and a beanie on his head.

I wanted to ask him, I said, about that reported call from Cairo. “You know,” he responded, “I really don’t remember it.” I waited while he politely rebuffed several approaching customers, telling them how Ian’s had run out of dough and how, in any case, all the store’s existing orders were bound for the capitol. When he finally had a free moment, he returned to the Cairo order. There had, he said, been questions about whether it was authentic or not, and then he added, “I’m pretty sure it was from Cairo, but it’s not like I can guarantee it.” By then, another wave of soon-to-be disappointed customers was upon us, and so I headed back to the capitol and another semi-sleepless night.

The building, as I approached in the darkness, was brightly lit, reaching high over the city. Protestors were still filing inside with all the usual signs. In the rotunda, drums pounded and people chanted and the sound swirled into a massive roar. For this brief moment at least, people here in Madison are bound together by a single cause, as other protesters were not so long ago, and may be again, in the ancient cities of Egypt.

Right then, the distance separating Cairo and Wisconsin couldn’t have felt smaller. But maybe you had to be there.

Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and an associate editor at TomDispatch.com. He will never again sleep on the frigid stone floor of a state capitol.

Haw slipped outside. It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this, she thought. Progressives had mobilized damn near every possible supporter they could, phone banking and door knocking and Facebooking and tweeting, and in the end, it still wasn’t enough. She thought of all the energy poured into the recall effort, and of her 2-year-old daughter running around the house shouting, “Recall Walker! Recall Walker!” Standing on the sidewalk, she burst into tears.

I met Haw and her mother later that night at Hawk’s. We sat around chewing over the election results till the bar emptied. Haw, who was wearing a red T-shirt with “Solidarity” emblazoned on the front, said simply, “I feel terrible that we lost.” I reminded her what the Democrats had been up against: With one exception, the six districts in play leaned to the right, and all six of those Republicans had won in 2008 despite the Obama frenzy that gripped the state. (He won it by nearly 14 percentage points.) She nodded along with me and then summed her feelings up this way: “I guess it’s the best of times and the worst of times.”

That ambivalence seemed to carry through Wisconsin’s historic summer of recalls, which ended on Aug. 16 when a pair of Democratic state senators easily defended their seats from a Republican recall effort. Which is to say, when the dust settled in the Badger State, there was no clear winner.

Wisconsin Democrats took five out of the summer’s nine recalls, and also won the overall vote count by 50.7 percent to 49.3 percent. They failed, however, in their chief goal: winning enough seats to wrest control of the state Senate majority and so shift the balance of power away from Gov. Walker and his allies in the legislature.

That didn’t stop Mike Tate, chairman of the state Democratic Party, from crowing that Democrats had clinched the “overall victory.” Republicans, meanwhile, cast the results as a vindication of Walker and his Republican game plan. “Wisconsin now emerges from this recall election season with a united Republican majority,” Wisconsin GOP chairman Brad Courtney bragged. “[We've] beaten off an attack from national unions and special interests and emerged steadfastly committed to carrying forward a bold job creation agenda.”

Liberal and conservative media similarly claimed victory. The Nation’s John Nichols, the most vocal cheerleader for the Democrats, wrote that their recall wins dealt “a serious blow to [Republican] authority inside the state Capitol.” Conservative blogger Owen Robinson was typical when he opined in the West Bend Daily News, “The people decided that they were pretty happy with the direction the Republicans are moving the state and let them retain power in Madison.”

Can it be both? If not, then who really won in Wisconsin? And what does that portend for the fledgling movement sparked by the labor uprising in February and March?

The Union Manpower Machine

The night before the Aug. 9 recalls, people clutching stacks of paper and cradling cellphones to their ears spilled out of the Laborers’ Local 464 union hall on the north side of Madison. The Democratic Party had moved its phone-banking operation to the union hall to accommodate the waves of volunteers who had turned out to help the six Democrats in the next day’s election. The hall itself buzzed with the din of a few dozen conversations, and with volunteer trainers getting the next crop of callers ready for their upcoming three-hour shift.

I logged 1,200 miles driving around Wisconsin before the GOP recall elections, and saw the same enthusiasm nearly everywhere I went. It was something to behold, the staggering get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort mounted by the labor unions and the Democratic Party — at a time of year when many Wisconsinites are normally more preoccupied with last night’s Brewers game and heading out to the lake for the weekend.

One Sunday afternoon, I tagged along with a savvy, relentless community organizer named Austin Thompson in a mostly black, low- and middle-income neighborhood that locals call “Far North” Milwaukee. At door after door, Thompson stressed the importance of voting in the recalls; by the time I met him, he’d visited some houses five or six times, determined to mobilize a pocket of the city that, he reminded me, barely turned out the vote in the 2010 election.

That energy carried right up until the polls closed. Tom Bird, a whip-smart grad student I’d befriended during Madison’s labor protests back in February, texted me at 6 p.m. on Election Day from a local union meeting place, “I can’t even phone bank because the labor temple is full.” Democrats and the unions had thrown everything in the ring.

All that GOTV effort paid off — but for both parties. Forty-four percent of eligible voters in the six state Senate districts cast a ballot on Aug. 9, just shy of the combined turnout for the 2010 governor’s race. The GOP’s biggest fear — that a small but motivated base of opponents would come out while their supporters stayed home — did not happen. “Everybody voted. Ultimately, that probably hurt,” Democratic pollster Paul Maslin told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We didn’t have that kind of aggrieved-party advantage [we needed].”

Nor did Democrats have a big money advantage. Mike McCabe, director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan outfit that tracks money in Badger State politics, said upwards of $40 million was spent on the nine recall races, with both left- and right-leaning groups spending roughly the same amount. By contrast, $3.75 million went into the entire slate of legislative races in 2010. The key difference, McCabe explained, was the wave of “dark money” spent by right-leaning groups, who, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010, didn’t have to disclose their donors. (Left-leaning groups almost entirely disclosed their funders.) Such staggering recall spending, he said, “is so out of whack from everything we’ve ever seen.”

Make no mistake: The Democrats and labor unions won the overall GOTV fight. In the nine Senate districts in play this summer, more ballots were cast for Democrats than for Tom Barrett, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, in last November’s general election. Sure, Republican turnout was higher than expected, but a majority of the districts at stake were colored red on the political map anyway. “Union money is being matched or outmatched by money from conservative organizations,” wrote Slate’s Dave Weigel, “but union turnout operations are outmuscling conservatives and the Tea Party.”

Putting the Cart before the Donkey

A week before the Aug. 9 recalls, Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chairman Mike Tate held a national conference call with reporters to deliver some rosy news. Internal polling (always to be taken with a hefty pinch of salt) showed Democrats leading in three races and tied in the remaining three. Tate didn’t say so outright, but the swagger in his voice sent a message: We’re gonna win this thing. Next stop, Senate majority.

When I arrived in Wisconsin four days before the vote, many of the activists, operatives and candidates with whom I talked brimmed with confidence. Polling data from the liberal Daily Kos website showed Democrats ahead in three races, albeit by the narrowest of margins in two of them. “In my mind we get all six,” Jessica King, one of the six Democratic challengers, told me on the steps of the Waupun City Hall. (And she would, in fact, unseat the Republican she was facing.)

Then, on the eve of the elections, I sensed a subtle shift. A succession of union and Democratic staffers pulled me aside to remind me about what an uphill fight their candidates faced, and how difficult it was going to be to win on GOP turf in the dead of summer. You could feel then that, by trumpeting their chances of ousting three or more senators, left-leaning groups feared that they had put the cart before the donkey (if you will). Suddenly, the bluster was gone, and they were racing to manage expectations.

It was too late. When Democrats fell one seat short of winning back the Senate majority, their opponents promptly portrayed what was certainly a victory as an embarrassing loss, a waste of money and manpower, a sign of the left’s waning clout. “They came, they spent, they lost,” was how one conservative blogger put it. “Unions made Wisconsin a great battleground to send a message to other states that politicians who challenge union power will pay a price,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board opined. “The real price was paid by the unions themselves, in the national demonstration of their diminishing power.” Never mind that the Republicans had fired the first shot in the summer’s recall battle, and that the Democrats had launched their own recall efforts only in response to Republican threats — a point, it should be added, that Democrats failed to hammer home.

And so even though left-leaning groups turned out more voters, won more races, and left Gov. Walker with a razor-thin majority — and one Republican senator who voted against Walker’s anti-union bill and might be willing to work with the Democrats on key issues — they found themselves losing the messaging war. They had pinned their hopes on instant and total victory, on flipping the Senate, when they just as easily could have kept expectations in check. Such lofty ambitions in the face of very long odds and unfriendly demographics gave Republicans an opening to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Further to the Left — and Right

Matt Thompson leaned back in his chair at the Argus pub just off Capitol Square in Madison, and thought about what came next. (Heavy political discussion in Wisconsin, you might have noticed, is often accompanied by even heavier ales.) Thompson had taken to the streets during the winter labor uprising to protest Walker’s anti-union actions, and since then has been a voice in the debate over the future of Wisconsin’s re-energized progressive movement, a discussion cultivated on the Twitter hashtag #wiunion. “I just don’t want this movement, whatever you want to call it, to fade,” he told me. “But if we don’t get three seats, I feel like that’s gonna hurt our momentum.”

Thompson was right to worry. With no obvious winner in Wisconsin’s summer recalls, it’s unclear what comes next for progressives. Many of the Wisconsinites I met told me that they were tired of the attack ads and political fisticuffs; they couldn’t wait for the Senate recalls to end so they could get on with their lives. Yet left-leaning groups insist that the nine races were mere previews for the biggest recall of all: Gov. Walker’s.

There are plenty of reasons why a Walker recall would be a long shot. For starters, only two governors have been recalled in this country’s history: North Dakota’s Lynn Frazier in 1921 and California’s Gray Davis in 2003. Walker’s opponents will need to collect upward of 600,000 signatures in 60 days to trigger a recall. And they will have to decide whether to begin collecting signatures in January, the moment Walker is eligible for recall — he has to have been in office for a full year — or plan their effort to coincide with the November presidential election.

Collecting 600,000 signatures, activists told me, isn’t that daunting; 1 million Wisconsinites voted for Walker’s opponent in 2010 in an election featuring a mediocre turnout and before anyone knew that Walker wanted to kneecap public-sector unions. But winning a recall election remains a very tall order.

If the Senate recalls succeeded at anything, experts say, it was in further polarizing the voters of Wisconsin, widening the chasm between left and right in a state previously known for compromise. (Remember, it was Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson who ushered in BadgerCare, the state’s renowned health insurance program for low-income parents and children.)

Then there’s the recall fatigue felt by many. After weeks of nasty attack ads blanketing the airwaves, some of them peddling outright lies, there was a general feeling that people wanted to get on with their lives. A recent survey by left-leaning Public Policy Polling captured that wariness, with 50 percent of respondents opposing a Walker recall while 47 percent supported it. Any such recall effort would also fall within the shadow of the 2012 presidential race, if not on Election Day itself, raising an important question: Would the Democratic Party and liberal outside groups that spent tens of millions of dollars in Wisconsin this summer siphon money away from defending President Obama or preserving their U.S. Senate majority in a difficult effort to defeat Walker?

When you play the angles, a Walker recall looks increasingly unlikely, says Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist. “I think it could happen,” he told me, “but between the letdown of not having succeeded fully this time and the competition in 2012, I think it’s going to wither away.”

Progressives at the Crossroads

Not if the unions can help it. After returning from Wisconsin, I interviewed Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), at her organization’s headquarters just off Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. Henry’s spacious office was splashed with colorful maps depicting SEIU membership around the country or various states’ positions on issues like anti-gay and right-to-work legislation.

She was, Henry said, “incredibly proud of the heroic efforts” of the unions in pushing back against Walker and Wisconsin Republicans, but also “disappointed with the outcome.” Most of all, she went on, the big challenge for SEIU and other unions was transforming the Wisconsin uprising into something larger. “I have waited all my life to see what I saw in February,” she told me. “And I think the question for us is how do we add oxygen to that?”

Henry acknowledged the possibility that a Walker recall election might go forward, but insisted that the key for Wisconsin’s progressives was “not to limit [the movement] or narrow it into electoral politics.” Instead, she considered it crucial to make sure “it’s expanded into a demand for jobs from the private sector in the state, and getting people back to work.” She summed things up this way: “I just think we need to expand the fight.”

Even activists on the ground in Wisconsin don’t yet know if that will happen. For the rest of us, their decision either to press on or pack it in will speak volumes about where progressive organizing stands in America, a nation where too many protesters believe it’s enough to turn up for a few rallies and then go home, even though the foundations for real mass movements (like Egypt’s democracy uprising) are laid years before lasting change occurs.

Americans need such a movement, built on economic populism and the dream of shared prosperity. The question is: Are Wisconsin’s progressives the first spark in that movement? Or is theirs a flare that is already flickering out?

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