If the 2010 election pans out as expected, we will see the greatest turnover in Washington since 1994, when Republicans picked up 54 seats from an unpopular Democratic Party. Pollster Sean Trende argues the turnover could be bigger than 1994, with Democratic losses in the 80 to 90-seat range, as Americans grow more disgusted with Washington politicians, rising debt, and economic stagnation. Business leaders and proponents of term limits are again in vogue, as in 1994, and “career politician” is again a bad word.
But if Washington faces a tidal wave, Wisconsin will experience a political earthquake if Mark Neumann defeats Scott Walker in Tuesday’s Republican primary vote for governor.
Neumann, a business and real estate developer, was part of that Republican “class of 1994” who came to Washington promising term limits and balanced budgets. Like many of those freshmen, Neumann was met in Washington with a heavy dose of establishment reality – and when he refused to vote for a pork-laden bill he was kicked off the prestigious Appropriations Committee at the behest of none other than Newt Gingrich. Only after Neumann’s freshmen allies rallied around him and took power in the GOP (fellow freshman and now-political pundit Joe Scarborough calls Neumann a “rock star” for the stand) was Neumann’s position restored.
Neumann again finds himself running against a stiff GOP-establishment headwind. GOP power brokers Jim Klauser, Bill McCoshen, and Terry Kohler conspired in June to take action through the party against Neumann’s candidacy. And a long list of GOP insiders have come out swinging against Neumann, including the granddaddy of them all, 32-year career politician Jim Sensenbrenner.
Sensenbrenner’s Sept. 9 e-mail blasted Neumann for supporting a transportation bill which, incidentally, Scott Walker supported at the time. The 1998 bill, which was supported by Dick Armey – now a leader of the national Tea Party movement – was large, yes. But unlike most of the legislation Jim Sensenbrenner voted for between 2001 and 2007, when his GOP ran Washington, it was paid for (the 1998 federal budget was the first balanced budget in generations).
When I debated Jim Sensenbrenner in the 2008 Republican primary, I confronted him on the roughly $90 billion in unfunded pork-barrel spending he had voted for over the preceding eight years, and the $8.7 trillion unfunded Medicare Prescription Drug program – for which he cast the deciding vote in 2005. His answer? Don’t criticize him for his vote in favor of pork-barrel spending and the largest new entitlement in generations because you can’t “make the perfect the enemy of the good.”
So it’s choice, if unsurprising, to find Sensenbrenner, who took office when I was ten years old, criticizing Neumann, one of the few people in America who can lay claim to having actually helped balance a federal budget.
When a candidate wins the governorship he or she becomes de facto head of the state party. So if Mark Neumann wins Tuesday’s primary vote and goes on to win the November election, it’s going to be housecleaning time in the state GOP. The state party, which has increasingly (and problematically) in recent years taken sides in primary campaigns, will find a new sheriff in town – and what a welcome development it would be.
Scott Walker, like Sensenbrenner a career politician, ran a campaign by locking up the establishment. Neumann, like many in the Tea Party wave sweeping the country, has run against it.
Across the country – from Florida to Alaska – Tea Party candidates are defeating establishment Republican candidates. And guess what we’re hearing again for the first time since 1994? Term limits. Balanced budgets. Constitutionalism. The stuff too many of today’s crop of GOP kingmakers like Sensenbrenner either forgot, or never embraced to begin with.
Republicans will likely sweep to power in November. But they shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that their victory will be more a statement of disgust toward Democrats than trust in Republicans: Republican approval ratings are still hovering near the 20 percent range.
If Republicans want to earn the trust voters are likely to give them in November, they’ll have to start by doing what they did in 1994, electing a crop of outsiders, and kicking out the bums – in this case, the career politicians.
Jim Burkee, an associate professor of history at Concordia University Wisconsin, ran against Jim Sensenbrenner in the 5th Congressional District Republican primary in 2008.
