Bowling for votes in Wisconsin

All the remaining 2008 contenders -- except Barack Obama -- indulge in an artery-busting blue-collar orgy of fried fish, bratwurst and cheese.

By Edward McClelland

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Politics, News, Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama, 2008 election

Feb. 19, 2008 | MILWAUKEE -- Wisconsinites have a colorful nickname for their neighbors to the south: FIBs. Short for Fucking Illinois Bastards, it's usually applied to Chicagoans who gun their luxury SUVs around Door County, the Wisconsin Dells and other summer resorts.

Evan Read, a Milwaukee defense lawyer, didn't think he'd ever be excited to see an Illinoisan -- "as long as the Illinois people stay south of the border, I'm OK with them" -- but last Friday morning, he skipped work to bring his wife and daughter to a Barack Obama rally.

"It's the typical irrational prejudice. You get to know someone, and they're not so bad." Read even bought a $10 T-shirt from a hawker outside the center. Now, he confessed, "I'm kind of a drooling fanboy."

Obama is favored to win the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday, but when it came to embracing the state's blue-collar Ya Hey culture, he finished dead last. John McCain spoke at a Friday night fish fry. Hillary Clinton held a town hall meeting in a bratwurst-and-beer joint. Mike Huckabee went bowling. Obama -- who is trying to attract Milwaukee professionals and Madison progressives who find those images hokey -- rallied his supporters at the Midwest Airlines Center, a convention hall that also hosted an auto parts trade show that morning.

The senator could at least have hired Dick Blaha, Milwaukee's Polka Ambassador, as his DJ. Instead, he took the stage to U2's "City of Blinding Lights." But he did call out a special Milwaukeean.

"Some of you may know I have a friend who has a talk show," he said. "She has a funny name: Oprah Winfrey. Her mom lives in Milwaukee, and she is here today."

That was Vernita Lee, who moved her family from Mississippi when Oprah was 6, and took a job in a hospital kitchen. Thanks to her daughter's success, Lee now lives in a high-rise condo. But in his speech, Obama addressed himself to those people who are still struggling.

Obama markets himself as the candidate of hope, but he made the deepest connection with his audience when he spoke to their fears -- fear of losing their jobs, of getting sick without healthcare, of failing to pay the mortgage. At a speech last week in Madison, Obama praised Wisconsin as the birthplace of the progressive movement. In Milwaukee, he pressed on with the message that government has a duty to help the needy. That's bound to be well received in a city that's elected three Socialist mayors, and a state that elected Russ Feingold, the current avatar of Upper Midwestern good-government liberalism. (Feingold, curiously, has not made an endorsement.)

"The American people are struggling right now," he boomed.

"A-men!" came a shout from in front of the bleachers.

"All across Milwaukee and all across the country, there are people who don't have enough to buy healthcare. They don't get it on the job, and they stop going to the doctor."

"That's right!" It was the same Sunday-morning voice.

"We can restore a sense of economic fairness in this country. I believe in capitalism, but when you've got CEOs making more in 10 minutes than ordinary Americans make in a year, that's not right. I want a $10 billion package to prevent foreclosures, and a mortgage deduction for those who don't itemize."

"Yyyesss!"

"We shouldn't raise the minimum wage every 10 years, we should raise it every year, to keep up with inflation. If you work in this country, you should not be poor."

"Amen!"

Responding to Obama's call was Marica Tipton, an administrator at Milwaukee Area Technical College. Tipton has a Ph.D., but her parents are struggling. Her mother was laid off by Master Lock when the company moved its assembly operations to Mexico. Shortly after losing her job, she was diagnosed with cancer. Obama had told a story about losing his mother to the disease at age 53 -- the same age as Tipton's mother.

"I can resonate with him because my mother's also battling cancer," Tipton told me. "She's doing really bad. She just had radiation. She's on Medicare, but that limits her ability to get quality care. The innovative treatments, they won't pay for."

Standing near the temporary fence was Jacqueline Callari, a nurse at Aurora Sinai Hospital. I'd always considered Laverne and Shirley a bogus portrayal of Milwaukee, because one of its characters was an Italian girl with a Brooklyn accent. But Callari fit that description to a T. She and her husband, an emergency room physician, moved here from jobs at Kings County Hospital.

"Healthcare is the most important issue for me," Callari said. "My husband and I, we're seeing the emergency room used as a clinic, because people are so desperate for care. They'll come in with colds, fevers, sore throats."

Callari's daughter, Alessandra Robinson, had passed her copy of "The Audacity of Hope" to an Obama staffer. She got it back with Obama's signature -- giant, loopy versions of the candidate's unfortunate initials. Robinson attends a private school, which means that, unlike most high school students, her Obamamania marks her as an outsider.

"I'm getting a lot of bad looks because on my blazer, I have an Obama button," she said. "A lot of my friends are for McCain."

---

The McCain dinner wouldn't start until 7, so in the afternoon, I had an ice cream at Leon's Frozen Custard, the 1942 drive-in that inspired Arnold's in the TV show "Happy Days." Dairy is only one cornerstone of the Wisconsin diet. For beer, I stopped at the Holler House, the south Milwaukee tavern with the oldest bowling lanes in the United States. Installed in 1909, they're challenging enough to take 20 pins off any score.

At opening time -- 4 o'clock -- I pushed through the door with the hand-lettered "No Public Restroom" sign, and found Marcy Skowronski alone behind the bar. Eighty-two, and barely tall enough to see over the beer bottles, she was wearing a red sweat shirt with the words "Holler House" above a giant Polish eagle. Skowronski has been into politics ever since Eleanor Roosevelt. In fact, her bar got its nickname because of a loud political debate.

"One day, this guy comes in and says, 'My wife's in California. You want to get bombed?'" Skowronski said. "So I says, 'Sure.' Anyway, the next time, he brings his wife in. It's during a political convention, everybody was talking politics, the jukebox was going. So the next week, the guy asks his wife where she wants to go. She said, 'Take me to that holler house!'"

Next page: "George H.W. Bush, the old man, was in the bowling alley and he fell down"