Bit of a miscellany this time as they didn't really go with any of the other boxes I have planned so far.
Green Revolution on the Golden Gate
- Thread starter wilcoxchar
- Start date
Man, at what point is this going to result in Ranked Choice voting? 4 candidates winning counties in one race is exceptionally chaoticNew week new boxes. Montana's getting pretty fun.
Also, how'd you determine the county maps?
The county maps were mostly skimming through a bunch of the OTL data and where candidates were from and then using rough calculations and eyeballing to get something that looked reasonable and interesting. For instance, with the Idaho race I gave Rammell the number of votes he got in the OTL primary against Otter and then looked at how that distribution would affect the county results in the general. Benewah County was then close enough in raw votes that it felt reasonable to have Rammell win the county (Rammell had a higher % in Idaho County, but there were a lot more total votes). And in Montana, western Montana has generally been much more receptive to third party candidates so it made sense to have them do better there, and in particular Ravalli County was a big focus area of Libertarians in the 2000s while Sales represented much of Broadwater County in the state house so his personal pull for the Constitution Party would be bigger there. I also adjust the R and D win percents in their counties roughly accordingly since a lot of third party votes tend to be at least somewhat spread out throughout a state.
The problem with electoral reform is (in addition to general institutional inertia) that the people who benefit the least from it and are more likely to be harmed by it tend to be the current winners. Like, John Morrison is only the current representative from Montana-at-Large because of ticket splitting amongst the right. Why would he vote for RVC, if it would make his re-election chances far lower?
I will say, I think whoever looses worse in 2012 will blame the spoiler candidates from their own wing (IE, the democrats blaming the Greens or the Republicans blaming the Constitutionalists) and would try to make electoral reform a bigger part of their party plank going forward. But that’s just wild speculation.
Sounds good. I'm enjoying this series immensely thus far. Looking forward to more updates.
This week, some Ohio and Illinois.
Also I'm still on track for starting regular updates again in April.
Also I'm still on track for starting regular updates again in April.
This week I remembered I haven't done any boxes of lower New York elections yet where I've been having some fun with fusion ballots. That's fixed now, with a bonus 2008 box that I had been meaning to do but completely forgot about.
With updates resuming next month, time for me to being the rounds of California boxes from 2010!
Now we move from the statewide races to some notable California congressional elections.
Last set of 2010 wikiboxes before the updates continue in a few weeks. Drilling down deeper, we have the California state assembly races. Where the Greens start turning once safe districts into three-way tossups, and there's plenty of spoilers for everyone.
It' my birthday, and as a reverse birthday present I'm happy to say that Green Revolution on the Golden Gate is resuming regular updates.
Recall Effort Against Issa Already Underway Weeks After Governor Is Sworn In
January 18, 2011
SACRAMENTO, CA - It has only been two weeks since Darrell Issa was sworn in as governor of California. So far, most of Issa’s time in government has been spent on minor appointments and the odd listening tour and opening around the state. What little substantive action Issa has been able to take during his first two weeks in office have been predictably talking about the need to cut spending in order to end the state's deficit Issa can't do much about it directly though without first action being taken by the state legislature. The governor has had so little time he probably hasn’t even finished redecorating the governor's office in Sacramento yet. But organizers who are upset with the Republican’s victory in November are already preparing to try and end his time in office early.
In fact, his detractors have been planning for this for two months now, since before he even took the oath of office. Governor Issa, a Republican, was elected in November with less than 45 percent of the vote, while his Democratic and Green opponents Dianne Feinsten and Gil Cedillo combined won over 52 percent of the vote. Almost as soon as the votes had been counted, organizers and politicians on the left, in the midst of lamenting the election of another Republican after seven years of Schwarzenegger, started working on a recall effort. A group of citizens founded the political action committee Restore Californian Dignity in December and launched a web site to promote the recall effort the day after Issa was inaugurated. The PAC has reportedly already received over $100,000 in contributions toward the effort. Now that governor Issa is barely settled in Sacramento, they are going ahead with officially filing a recall petition against him.
The recall petition will be filed with the California Secretary of State by immigration lawyer Hector Villagra this week according to a statement by organizers. The petition by Villagra reportedly has been cosigned by 112 others, well over the 50 signatures required to petition for a recall of a state executive officer. The grievances against governor Issa listed in the notice of intent include Issa’s declaration in his inaugural address that he will slash education and other social service spending with Villagra's statement highlighting Issa's emphasis on cutting programs for undocumented immigrants. Villagra's recall petition statement also mentions Issa’s noticeably low vote percentage in his election as part of the reason for recalling the governor so soon into his term. Issa now has two weeks to give an answer to the notice of intent, and after that period, Secretary of State Debra Bowen is expected to give the go ahead if it has enough signatures, and then the recall petition process would begin. Once Bowen has given her approval, the recall petition will have 160 days to gather a total of at least 12% of the total votes cast in the previous election, or just over 1.2 million signatures based on the vote total from the 2010 gubernatorial race[1]. If the effort can achieve that, then it would go to a statewide ballot as the recall of Gray Davis did in 2003.
While many Californians will have distinct (or perhaps traumatic) memories of the 2003 recall that elected Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, successful recalls are a rarity in California, though many have tried. Since the introduction of recall elections in 1913, just nine attempts have even made it as far as a ballot, and only five have been successful. Recall efforts are typically are aimed at recalling members of the state legislature, but governors throughout California’s history have been far from immune. Governor Culbert Olson had five recall attempts filed against him in 1939 and 1940, all of which failed to gain enough traction for a recall election[2]. Gray Davis had two previous recall attempts filed in 1999 and even another one in 2003 before the ultimately successful recall. Schwarzenegger had seven attempts to recall him filed with the Secretary of State during his seven years as governor. None of them made it to a ballot. So it is not surprising that governor Issa has had a recall effort started against him. That it started this early and with the contentious nature of Issa’s victory, however, does not bode well for the stability of his tenure as governor.
***
In Wake of Gonzalez Announcement, Mayor Race Fills Up Fast
January 19, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO - A leading question on the minds of local and even some national political strategists has been whether San Francisco’s Green mayor Matt Gonzalez would run for a third term. Gonzalez’s rise to mayor of the city in 2003 is often cited as the beginning of the rise of the Green Party in the years since. As soon as Gonzalez successfully won reelection in 2007, pundits started to wonder what would happen in San Francisco after Gonzalez was gone. Was the success of the Greens in the city riding on the back of its young, charismatic Green Mayor, or had the Greens established themselves enough to continue without him. As Gonzalez continued to deny seeking higher offices when opportunities arose, attention turned to 2011 with the upcoming mayoral election and whether Gonzalez would seek a third term as mayor. The city learned the answer to that question two weeks ago when Gonzalez announced he would not be running for mayor again. In the days since, the field has quickly ballooned as nearly a dozen candidates have practically leapt into the race with many more on the fence. With the incumbent bowing out and Democrats itching to take back the city from the upstart Greens, it’s already shaping up to be a bitter campaign no matter who wins.
The strongest Green candidate to follow Gonzalez so far appears to be County Supervisor Jane Kim. Kim, the daughter of Korean immigrants, is a graduate of Stanford and the UC Berkeley School of Law and began her activist work in San Francisco with the Greenlining Institute. Kim has also been a community organizer working with advocacy groups in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where she excelled despite not being of Chinese descent or speaking Chinese. She became active in the Green Party in 2003 campaigning for Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign, and won election to the Board of Education in 2004 and to her current seat on the Board of Supervisors in 2006. Kim represents the 6th district including the SoMa, Mission Bay, Civic Center, Tenderloin, and Treasure Island neighborhoods.
Several other candidates, mostly Democrats, have jumped into the nonpartisan contest already. These include Michela Alioto-Pier, sheriff Michael Hennessey, former supervisor Bevan Duffy, former state assemblyman Chris Daly, and state senator Leland Yee. Two other Greens besides Kim have also considered entering, City Administrator Christina Olague and supervisor John Avalos. Jeff Adachi, director of San Francisco’s public defender office, has also discussed a potential run for mayor since Gonzalez’s announcement. Of these challengers, the most prominent are likely to be Sheriff Hennssey, legislators Daly and Yee, and Adachi if he runs. Hennessey has been sheriff of San Francisco for over thirty years, and has consistently been an advocate for shifting the purpose of prisons toward redemption and rehabilitative justice. Some of the programs Hennessey first implemented in San Francisco have since spread to prison systems around the country. With this in mind, Hennessey could be a strong Democrat for challenging the Greens in terms of party if not ideology. The sheriff is widely popular and has worked with mayor Gonzalez on a number of issues around the city’s jails and policing practices. The same could be said for former assemblyman Chris Daly, who supported Gonzalez in his original run for mayor in 2003. However, Hennessey does not describe himself as a politician and says he had to think long about whether he wanted to run for mayor before he finally threw his hat in. Leland Yee on the other hand would represent a more Newsom-like campaign for mayor, someone aligned with the Democratic Party solidly against the Greens rather than seeking to work with what their growth has meant for San Francisco.
Amid the buzz around the quickly crowded field to replace Gonzalez as mayor of San Francisco, there has also been some speculation around the next steps in Gonzalez’s political career. The 45 year old mayor is still quite young for a politician. After passing up running for governor or any state office last year in order to finish out his mayoral term, the current indication is that Gonzalez may be preparing for a run for state legislature or challenging former Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her seat in Congress. Both would be logical steps up the political ladder for a San Francisco mayor, and both would be high on the Green Party's target list for 2012 with Gonzalez a near ideal candidate for the party for either. Another possibility is that Gonzalez might run for the Green nomination for president next year. The mayor is one of the most well known Green elected officials at the moment. However, the San Francisco bubble might not play well with the rest of the country and particularly in areas of the country such as Arkansas where the Greens have made surprising gains, and a Gonzalez run for president at this stage could jeopardize the smaller footholds the party has spent the last decade building up across the nation. Additionally with Ralph Nader back in political form after his Senate run, the three time Green candidate might want another go at the presidency and would be a sure favorite for the Green Party nomination if he were to run again. There is also the possibility of a gubernatorial recall. With an effort to recall governor Issa already underway, an opportunity for Gonzalez to governor may open up as early as this year. Gonzalez turned down the chance to run in 2010, but with the mayor already declining to run for another term, he may be more inclined to consider it.
***
Why Are Some Greens Endorsing a Republican Plan in Texas?
January 28, 2011
AUSTIN, TX - It is no secret that the Green Party and the Republican Party are at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. Greens, when they get elected, may sometimes side with their Democratic colleagues on some issues where they are aligned, but it is rare to see Green politicians voicing approval or endorsing a proposal put forth by Republicans. This seems doubly true when it comes to issues of environment and energy policy. After all, Republicans have very often been the major party that most supports and protects oil companies, opposes stricter environmental regulations, and believes most in the idea that humans are not the ones causing global warming. However, there have been the odd occasion where Green Party members have joined forces with Republicans. In California under governor Schwarzenegger, some Greens were pragmatic in dealing with Schwarzenegger’s environmental policy while the party was first finding their footing in the state. Some in the California party saw it as at least a step in the right direction. But while that might sound like something that could happen in California, it is much more surprising for it to be happening in Texas.
So what has Texas done to receive the appreciation of many Green Party members? The legislature this month has adopted and governor Kay Bailey Hutchison has signed as part of the two-year state budget a landmark commitment by the state of Texas toward a renewable energy plan. The plan passed by the state is a slimmed down version of a national plan proposed three years ago by Texas oilman and finance magnate T. Boone Pickens. The Pickens Plan as it became known was a proposal first put forth by the Texas billionaire in 2008 and called for whoever was elected president to reduce American dependence on foreign oil imports through a trillion dollar investment in wind farms and natural gas production in the United States. The plan was intended to create a massive shift in how American energy is sourced, moving much of America’s power plant energy production from from natural gas to wind turbines thus freeing up gas production to be used in vehicles, which would reduce the amount of oil the United States used for gasoline. According to Pickens, his original plan would have reduced American spending on foreign oil by nearly half and saved the country $300 billion[3].
The original national scale plan ultimately failed due to a number of reasons. First, the spike in oil prices in 2008 had already begun its collapse with the global recession. While oil prices reached over $130 a barrel by the fall of 2008, they dropped to a low point of under $25 a barrel by the middle of 2009. While oil prices have since risen to around $65 a barrel, Pickens has stated that the numbers in his plan were based on an assumption of oil prices remaining above $80 a barrel[4]. Additionally, the proposal was supposed to be taken up by the winner of the 2008 election, but president Clinton had other pressing priorities with the negotiations around the American Access to Health Insurance Act, and the major economic stimulus to recover from the recession had already been passed in the Omnibus Economic Recovery Act by the time Clinton entered office. Pickens also drew substantial criticism for the proposal in that it would incentivize private industry to build the infrastructure and the proposed wind turbines would be mainly centered around the wind corridor in the Great Plains where Pickens was already building wind farms and where he holds plenty of land for oil and gas drilling.
However, while the national plan failed, Pickens and others have continued to pursue a reduction of American dependence on foreign oil through shifting its energy production at a lower level. In 2010 after the final efforts to push the plan through Congress failed, Texas governor Carole Keeton Strayhorn and members of the Texas legislature started talks to rework the basics of the Pickens Plan toward a smaller, Texas-sized scale. Due to Texas’s legislature only meeting every two years, Strayhorn was unable to pass the scaled down Pickens Plan through the legislature during her term in office, and the bill was only passed this month and signed by governor Hutchison. However, much of the work with legislators, private companies, and energy and finance experts were done during the last year of her time in office. The bill's construction in 2010 also created a rare opportunity of bipartisan input on the bill as Democrats controlled the state house at the time and had the possibility of retaining the chamber after the elections. When it passed earlier this month it had support of some Democrats in the legislature as well.
Not only does the new, smaller Texas Pickens Plan have support of Democrats, but many Greens are supporting it as well. The Green Party of Virginia as well as Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club until last year, endorsed the original Pickens Plan for its environmental efforts[5]. The Green Party of Texas also gave its support, though not a formal party endorsement, last year of the version of the plan that ultimately arrived at Hutchison's desk. It has also received support from at least one sitting Green officeholder outside of Texas. California state senator Jerry McNerney, an energy consultant and wind turbine company CEO before being elected to the California legislature, expressed his support for Texas adopting a modified version of the plan. Most of the support from environmentalists is naturally for the wind portion, as many experts have cited that the Texas Panhandle and the Gulf Coast have already proven the capability of wind power even with existing turbine technology and its effectiveness at shifting energy prices. In some locations in western and northern Texas, wind energy production has actually been so effective that during the past two years local energy prices occasionally dipped into negative rates. However, the Pickens Plan has received a very mixed reception across the wider Green Party and many remain highly cautious. It is understandable, with the plan being proposed by a Republican oilman and passed through a Republican legislature and signed by a Republican governor in Texas. However, to some Greens, the investment is still a worthwhile effort for moving environmental policy forward, and those endorsements still come as a surprising backing of the plan for the future.
***
Is President Clinton Vulnerable to a Primary Challenge?
February 1, 2011
WASHINGTON, DC - After Democrats suffered losses in the 2010 midterm elections including losing the most seats in the House of Representatives in nearly a century, a number of political insiders have begun asking the question of whether the Clinton administration is truly up to the task of winning reelection in 2012. People familiar with conversations going on at upper levels of the Cabinet have discussed a growing amount of discord in the administration with disagreements between members of Clinton’s cabinet and the president occurring over a number of issues. With the troubles both foreign and domestic facing President Clinton in the second half of her first term, some have speculated that the President could be vulnerable to a primary from her own side in her bid for reelection.
At least one Democrat has already voiced a desire to see a primary challenger for President Clinton. Former Democratic Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich said last week that he would like to see someone prominent run against Clinton in the 2012 primaries[6]. Kucinich stated that “there are issues that are not currently being talked about in the Democratic Party that need to be talked about. A primary challenger would be in a good position to raise those issues.” When asked if he would be the one to take up the mantle of that challenge, Kucinich declined. He said he wishes to take a break from politics and discuss his next steps with his family, and a run for president would be too soon. The congressman, while he remains a member of the Democratic Party, declined to run for reelection last year and instead ran in a campaign for governor as the Green Party nominee. Kucinich received over 12 percent of the vote for governor, a significant achievement for the Greens in Ohio. We also asked Kucinich if he felt a better challenge to the president could be made from outside the party with the Green Party. Kucinich replied that “wherever the challenge comes from, it is up to the current administration to meet it on the issues.”
The talk of a potential primary challenge may have been spurred on this week by a recent poll from Public Policy Polling regarding how President Clinton would fare against a number of possible challengers. PPP asked a field of 482 Democratic voters about how they would vote in a face off between Clinton and each of five challenger candidates. The President polled at over 50 percent against all five, but her worst performance was 59 percent to 30 percent against Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Former vice president Al Gore and businesswoman Oprah Winfrey both polled at 23 percent or about a quarter of Americans against President Clinton, though Clinton polled measurably better against Winfrey with 71 percent, six points above her polling against Gore. The last two potential challengers in the poll were both from Vermont. Clinton polled at 73 percent against former governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean who polled at 14 percent, and stood at her best of 80 percent against Senator Bernie Sanders at 12 percent.
Incumbent presidents facing strong primary challenges are rare, but are not too uncommon. President George Bush Sr. faced a challenge from Pat Buchanan in 1992 that did not win any states, but Buchanan won nearly a quarter of the popular primary vote. In 1980, president Jimmy Carter was challenged by Ted Kennedy, who won 12 states and over a thousand delegates at the convention. Four years earlier, president Gerald Ford was nearly defeated in the Republican primary by Ronald Reagan. A strong primary challenge is not a good sign for a president if they receive one. Bush, Carter, and Ford all lost their reelection despite winning their primaries. It is such a notable indicator of whether a president will win reelection that not having a contested primary is included as one of the “keys to the White House” by political science professor Allan Lichtman. None of the candidates included in the PPP poll have indicated that they are interested in launching a primary challenge yet. However, sources familiar with conversations among the staff of at least one person polled have told us that a primary candidacy is something under consideration.
[1] Source for the procedure on the recall of statewide officers in California: https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/recalls/recall-procedures-guide.pdf
[2] The California Secretary of State's office helpfully has a full list of attempted recall petitions on its site: https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/recalls/complete-list-recall-attempts
[3] A commonly cited statistic from Pickens in 2008 when pitching his plan, for example here: https://www.savannahnow.com/story/opinion/2008/07/29/pickens-plan-worth-consideration/13768177007/
[4] Another statistic from Pickens, f.e. here: https://www.forbes.com/2009/10/16/p...lligent-investing-forbes.html?sh=163f86125f57
[5] Both Pope and the Virginia Green Party supported the Pickens Plan in OTL.
[6] Kucinich also said this about Obama in OTL. https://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/kucinich-wants-challenger-for-obama-049269
Recall Effort Against Issa Already Underway Weeks After Governor Is Sworn In
January 18, 2011
SACRAMENTO, CA - It has only been two weeks since Darrell Issa was sworn in as governor of California. So far, most of Issa’s time in government has been spent on minor appointments and the odd listening tour and opening around the state. What little substantive action Issa has been able to take during his first two weeks in office have been predictably talking about the need to cut spending in order to end the state's deficit Issa can't do much about it directly though without first action being taken by the state legislature. The governor has had so little time he probably hasn’t even finished redecorating the governor's office in Sacramento yet. But organizers who are upset with the Republican’s victory in November are already preparing to try and end his time in office early.
In fact, his detractors have been planning for this for two months now, since before he even took the oath of office. Governor Issa, a Republican, was elected in November with less than 45 percent of the vote, while his Democratic and Green opponents Dianne Feinsten and Gil Cedillo combined won over 52 percent of the vote. Almost as soon as the votes had been counted, organizers and politicians on the left, in the midst of lamenting the election of another Republican after seven years of Schwarzenegger, started working on a recall effort. A group of citizens founded the political action committee Restore Californian Dignity in December and launched a web site to promote the recall effort the day after Issa was inaugurated. The PAC has reportedly already received over $100,000 in contributions toward the effort. Now that governor Issa is barely settled in Sacramento, they are going ahead with officially filing a recall petition against him.
The recall petition will be filed with the California Secretary of State by immigration lawyer Hector Villagra this week according to a statement by organizers. The petition by Villagra reportedly has been cosigned by 112 others, well over the 50 signatures required to petition for a recall of a state executive officer. The grievances against governor Issa listed in the notice of intent include Issa’s declaration in his inaugural address that he will slash education and other social service spending with Villagra's statement highlighting Issa's emphasis on cutting programs for undocumented immigrants. Villagra's recall petition statement also mentions Issa’s noticeably low vote percentage in his election as part of the reason for recalling the governor so soon into his term. Issa now has two weeks to give an answer to the notice of intent, and after that period, Secretary of State Debra Bowen is expected to give the go ahead if it has enough signatures, and then the recall petition process would begin. Once Bowen has given her approval, the recall petition will have 160 days to gather a total of at least 12% of the total votes cast in the previous election, or just over 1.2 million signatures based on the vote total from the 2010 gubernatorial race[1]. If the effort can achieve that, then it would go to a statewide ballot as the recall of Gray Davis did in 2003.
While many Californians will have distinct (or perhaps traumatic) memories of the 2003 recall that elected Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor, successful recalls are a rarity in California, though many have tried. Since the introduction of recall elections in 1913, just nine attempts have even made it as far as a ballot, and only five have been successful. Recall efforts are typically are aimed at recalling members of the state legislature, but governors throughout California’s history have been far from immune. Governor Culbert Olson had five recall attempts filed against him in 1939 and 1940, all of which failed to gain enough traction for a recall election[2]. Gray Davis had two previous recall attempts filed in 1999 and even another one in 2003 before the ultimately successful recall. Schwarzenegger had seven attempts to recall him filed with the Secretary of State during his seven years as governor. None of them made it to a ballot. So it is not surprising that governor Issa has had a recall effort started against him. That it started this early and with the contentious nature of Issa’s victory, however, does not bode well for the stability of his tenure as governor.
***
In Wake of Gonzalez Announcement, Mayor Race Fills Up Fast
January 19, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO - A leading question on the minds of local and even some national political strategists has been whether San Francisco’s Green mayor Matt Gonzalez would run for a third term. Gonzalez’s rise to mayor of the city in 2003 is often cited as the beginning of the rise of the Green Party in the years since. As soon as Gonzalez successfully won reelection in 2007, pundits started to wonder what would happen in San Francisco after Gonzalez was gone. Was the success of the Greens in the city riding on the back of its young, charismatic Green Mayor, or had the Greens established themselves enough to continue without him. As Gonzalez continued to deny seeking higher offices when opportunities arose, attention turned to 2011 with the upcoming mayoral election and whether Gonzalez would seek a third term as mayor. The city learned the answer to that question two weeks ago when Gonzalez announced he would not be running for mayor again. In the days since, the field has quickly ballooned as nearly a dozen candidates have practically leapt into the race with many more on the fence. With the incumbent bowing out and Democrats itching to take back the city from the upstart Greens, it’s already shaping up to be a bitter campaign no matter who wins.
The strongest Green candidate to follow Gonzalez so far appears to be County Supervisor Jane Kim. Kim, the daughter of Korean immigrants, is a graduate of Stanford and the UC Berkeley School of Law and began her activist work in San Francisco with the Greenlining Institute. Kim has also been a community organizer working with advocacy groups in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where she excelled despite not being of Chinese descent or speaking Chinese. She became active in the Green Party in 2003 campaigning for Gonzalez’s mayoral campaign, and won election to the Board of Education in 2004 and to her current seat on the Board of Supervisors in 2006. Kim represents the 6th district including the SoMa, Mission Bay, Civic Center, Tenderloin, and Treasure Island neighborhoods.
Several other candidates, mostly Democrats, have jumped into the nonpartisan contest already. These include Michela Alioto-Pier, sheriff Michael Hennessey, former supervisor Bevan Duffy, former state assemblyman Chris Daly, and state senator Leland Yee. Two other Greens besides Kim have also considered entering, City Administrator Christina Olague and supervisor John Avalos. Jeff Adachi, director of San Francisco’s public defender office, has also discussed a potential run for mayor since Gonzalez’s announcement. Of these challengers, the most prominent are likely to be Sheriff Hennssey, legislators Daly and Yee, and Adachi if he runs. Hennessey has been sheriff of San Francisco for over thirty years, and has consistently been an advocate for shifting the purpose of prisons toward redemption and rehabilitative justice. Some of the programs Hennessey first implemented in San Francisco have since spread to prison systems around the country. With this in mind, Hennessey could be a strong Democrat for challenging the Greens in terms of party if not ideology. The sheriff is widely popular and has worked with mayor Gonzalez on a number of issues around the city’s jails and policing practices. The same could be said for former assemblyman Chris Daly, who supported Gonzalez in his original run for mayor in 2003. However, Hennessey does not describe himself as a politician and says he had to think long about whether he wanted to run for mayor before he finally threw his hat in. Leland Yee on the other hand would represent a more Newsom-like campaign for mayor, someone aligned with the Democratic Party solidly against the Greens rather than seeking to work with what their growth has meant for San Francisco.
Amid the buzz around the quickly crowded field to replace Gonzalez as mayor of San Francisco, there has also been some speculation around the next steps in Gonzalez’s political career. The 45 year old mayor is still quite young for a politician. After passing up running for governor or any state office last year in order to finish out his mayoral term, the current indication is that Gonzalez may be preparing for a run for state legislature or challenging former Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her seat in Congress. Both would be logical steps up the political ladder for a San Francisco mayor, and both would be high on the Green Party's target list for 2012 with Gonzalez a near ideal candidate for the party for either. Another possibility is that Gonzalez might run for the Green nomination for president next year. The mayor is one of the most well known Green elected officials at the moment. However, the San Francisco bubble might not play well with the rest of the country and particularly in areas of the country such as Arkansas where the Greens have made surprising gains, and a Gonzalez run for president at this stage could jeopardize the smaller footholds the party has spent the last decade building up across the nation. Additionally with Ralph Nader back in political form after his Senate run, the three time Green candidate might want another go at the presidency and would be a sure favorite for the Green Party nomination if he were to run again. There is also the possibility of a gubernatorial recall. With an effort to recall governor Issa already underway, an opportunity for Gonzalez to governor may open up as early as this year. Gonzalez turned down the chance to run in 2010, but with the mayor already declining to run for another term, he may be more inclined to consider it.
***
Why Are Some Greens Endorsing a Republican Plan in Texas?
January 28, 2011
AUSTIN, TX - It is no secret that the Green Party and the Republican Party are at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. Greens, when they get elected, may sometimes side with their Democratic colleagues on some issues where they are aligned, but it is rare to see Green politicians voicing approval or endorsing a proposal put forth by Republicans. This seems doubly true when it comes to issues of environment and energy policy. After all, Republicans have very often been the major party that most supports and protects oil companies, opposes stricter environmental regulations, and believes most in the idea that humans are not the ones causing global warming. However, there have been the odd occasion where Green Party members have joined forces with Republicans. In California under governor Schwarzenegger, some Greens were pragmatic in dealing with Schwarzenegger’s environmental policy while the party was first finding their footing in the state. Some in the California party saw it as at least a step in the right direction. But while that might sound like something that could happen in California, it is much more surprising for it to be happening in Texas.
So what has Texas done to receive the appreciation of many Green Party members? The legislature this month has adopted and governor Kay Bailey Hutchison has signed as part of the two-year state budget a landmark commitment by the state of Texas toward a renewable energy plan. The plan passed by the state is a slimmed down version of a national plan proposed three years ago by Texas oilman and finance magnate T. Boone Pickens. The Pickens Plan as it became known was a proposal first put forth by the Texas billionaire in 2008 and called for whoever was elected president to reduce American dependence on foreign oil imports through a trillion dollar investment in wind farms and natural gas production in the United States. The plan was intended to create a massive shift in how American energy is sourced, moving much of America’s power plant energy production from from natural gas to wind turbines thus freeing up gas production to be used in vehicles, which would reduce the amount of oil the United States used for gasoline. According to Pickens, his original plan would have reduced American spending on foreign oil by nearly half and saved the country $300 billion[3].
The original national scale plan ultimately failed due to a number of reasons. First, the spike in oil prices in 2008 had already begun its collapse with the global recession. While oil prices reached over $130 a barrel by the fall of 2008, they dropped to a low point of under $25 a barrel by the middle of 2009. While oil prices have since risen to around $65 a barrel, Pickens has stated that the numbers in his plan were based on an assumption of oil prices remaining above $80 a barrel[4]. Additionally, the proposal was supposed to be taken up by the winner of the 2008 election, but president Clinton had other pressing priorities with the negotiations around the American Access to Health Insurance Act, and the major economic stimulus to recover from the recession had already been passed in the Omnibus Economic Recovery Act by the time Clinton entered office. Pickens also drew substantial criticism for the proposal in that it would incentivize private industry to build the infrastructure and the proposed wind turbines would be mainly centered around the wind corridor in the Great Plains where Pickens was already building wind farms and where he holds plenty of land for oil and gas drilling.
However, while the national plan failed, Pickens and others have continued to pursue a reduction of American dependence on foreign oil through shifting its energy production at a lower level. In 2010 after the final efforts to push the plan through Congress failed, Texas governor Carole Keeton Strayhorn and members of the Texas legislature started talks to rework the basics of the Pickens Plan toward a smaller, Texas-sized scale. Due to Texas’s legislature only meeting every two years, Strayhorn was unable to pass the scaled down Pickens Plan through the legislature during her term in office, and the bill was only passed this month and signed by governor Hutchison. However, much of the work with legislators, private companies, and energy and finance experts were done during the last year of her time in office. The bill's construction in 2010 also created a rare opportunity of bipartisan input on the bill as Democrats controlled the state house at the time and had the possibility of retaining the chamber after the elections. When it passed earlier this month it had support of some Democrats in the legislature as well.
Not only does the new, smaller Texas Pickens Plan have support of Democrats, but many Greens are supporting it as well. The Green Party of Virginia as well as Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club until last year, endorsed the original Pickens Plan for its environmental efforts[5]. The Green Party of Texas also gave its support, though not a formal party endorsement, last year of the version of the plan that ultimately arrived at Hutchison's desk. It has also received support from at least one sitting Green officeholder outside of Texas. California state senator Jerry McNerney, an energy consultant and wind turbine company CEO before being elected to the California legislature, expressed his support for Texas adopting a modified version of the plan. Most of the support from environmentalists is naturally for the wind portion, as many experts have cited that the Texas Panhandle and the Gulf Coast have already proven the capability of wind power even with existing turbine technology and its effectiveness at shifting energy prices. In some locations in western and northern Texas, wind energy production has actually been so effective that during the past two years local energy prices occasionally dipped into negative rates. However, the Pickens Plan has received a very mixed reception across the wider Green Party and many remain highly cautious. It is understandable, with the plan being proposed by a Republican oilman and passed through a Republican legislature and signed by a Republican governor in Texas. However, to some Greens, the investment is still a worthwhile effort for moving environmental policy forward, and those endorsements still come as a surprising backing of the plan for the future.
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Is President Clinton Vulnerable to a Primary Challenge?
February 1, 2011
WASHINGTON, DC - After Democrats suffered losses in the 2010 midterm elections including losing the most seats in the House of Representatives in nearly a century, a number of political insiders have begun asking the question of whether the Clinton administration is truly up to the task of winning reelection in 2012. People familiar with conversations going on at upper levels of the Cabinet have discussed a growing amount of discord in the administration with disagreements between members of Clinton’s cabinet and the president occurring over a number of issues. With the troubles both foreign and domestic facing President Clinton in the second half of her first term, some have speculated that the President could be vulnerable to a primary from her own side in her bid for reelection.
At least one Democrat has already voiced a desire to see a primary challenger for President Clinton. Former Democratic Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich said last week that he would like to see someone prominent run against Clinton in the 2012 primaries[6]. Kucinich stated that “there are issues that are not currently being talked about in the Democratic Party that need to be talked about. A primary challenger would be in a good position to raise those issues.” When asked if he would be the one to take up the mantle of that challenge, Kucinich declined. He said he wishes to take a break from politics and discuss his next steps with his family, and a run for president would be too soon. The congressman, while he remains a member of the Democratic Party, declined to run for reelection last year and instead ran in a campaign for governor as the Green Party nominee. Kucinich received over 12 percent of the vote for governor, a significant achievement for the Greens in Ohio. We also asked Kucinich if he felt a better challenge to the president could be made from outside the party with the Green Party. Kucinich replied that “wherever the challenge comes from, it is up to the current administration to meet it on the issues.”
The talk of a potential primary challenge may have been spurred on this week by a recent poll from Public Policy Polling regarding how President Clinton would fare against a number of possible challengers. PPP asked a field of 482 Democratic voters about how they would vote in a face off between Clinton and each of five challenger candidates. The President polled at over 50 percent against all five, but her worst performance was 59 percent to 30 percent against Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Former vice president Al Gore and businesswoman Oprah Winfrey both polled at 23 percent or about a quarter of Americans against President Clinton, though Clinton polled measurably better against Winfrey with 71 percent, six points above her polling against Gore. The last two potential challengers in the poll were both from Vermont. Clinton polled at 73 percent against former governor and presidential candidate Howard Dean who polled at 14 percent, and stood at her best of 80 percent against Senator Bernie Sanders at 12 percent.
Incumbent presidents facing strong primary challenges are rare, but are not too uncommon. President George Bush Sr. faced a challenge from Pat Buchanan in 1992 that did not win any states, but Buchanan won nearly a quarter of the popular primary vote. In 1980, president Jimmy Carter was challenged by Ted Kennedy, who won 12 states and over a thousand delegates at the convention. Four years earlier, president Gerald Ford was nearly defeated in the Republican primary by Ronald Reagan. A strong primary challenge is not a good sign for a president if they receive one. Bush, Carter, and Ford all lost their reelection despite winning their primaries. It is such a notable indicator of whether a president will win reelection that not having a contested primary is included as one of the “keys to the White House” by political science professor Allan Lichtman. None of the candidates included in the PPP poll have indicated that they are interested in launching a primary challenge yet. However, sources familiar with conversations among the staff of at least one person polled have told us that a primary candidacy is something under consideration.
[1] Source for the procedure on the recall of statewide officers in California: https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/recalls/recall-procedures-guide.pdf
[2] The California Secretary of State's office helpfully has a full list of attempted recall petitions on its site: https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/recalls/complete-list-recall-attempts
[3] A commonly cited statistic from Pickens in 2008 when pitching his plan, for example here: https://www.savannahnow.com/story/opinion/2008/07/29/pickens-plan-worth-consideration/13768177007/
[4] Another statistic from Pickens, f.e. here: https://www.forbes.com/2009/10/16/p...lligent-investing-forbes.html?sh=163f86125f57
[5] Both Pope and the Virginia Green Party supported the Pickens Plan in OTL.
[6] Kucinich also said this about Obama in OTL. https://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/kucinich-wants-challenger-for-obama-049269
In some ways yes, in some ways no. To both parts of the question.
I know this is kind of a non-answer, but it's a pretty wide reaching question with a lot of stuff going on, and some of those things it depends on reader interpretation and how you look at it whether it's going better or worse.
Harkin Moves to HHS in Preparation For Public Option
February 11, 2011
WASHINGTON, DC - It has been over a year since the Clinton administration and a Democratic congress passed the American Access to Health Insurance Act, known as the AAHIA or HillaryCare 2.0. As part of the AAHIA’s passage, it promised Americans a public option for health insurance coverage that would be provided by the federal government as an alternative to a private or employer-provided health insurance. Since the law was passed, the Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Donna Shalala has been working to prepare the necessary organizational and administrative structure within HHS to begin offering the public option to Americans. With the public option expected to become available in the coming months, President Clinton made an announcement today that she will be replacing Shalala as HHS Secretary with current Secretary of Agriculture Tom Harkin in preparation for the rollout of the healthcare option to the country.
The replacement of Shalala with Harkin at HHS is part of a wider planned moving around of Cabinet members following the 2010 midterm elections as the Clinton administration deals with a newly Republican House of Representatives. While replacing multiple Cabinet members at once is somewhat uncommon in the United States and more common in parliamentary governments in countries such as Canada or the United Kingdom, when a shuffle like this occurs in the U.S. it usually is done at times such as this after midterm elections. Harkin is moving from Agriculture to HHS and replacing Shalala, while former Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius has been tapped to replace Harkin at Agriculture. The replacement of Donna Shalala at HHS prior to the official launch of the public option does not come as too much of a surprise to political insiders, as it was expected after Democrats retained the Senate last November. However, the movement of Harkin from Agriculture was unexpected. Often when a Cabinet member is moved to another post, it’s involving one of the more minor Cabinet level positions, such as Rob Portman’s move from Trade Representative to Director of the Office of Management and Budget, not a move between two executive departments. The most recent moves between two executive departments were Norman Mineta’s move from Commerce to Transportation in 2001 when George W. Bush entered office, and Federico Peña’s move from Transportation to Energy in 1997 during the Bill Clinton administration.
The choice of Harkin also was an outside bet in terms of speculation for who might replace Shalala at Health and Human Services. Sebelius, who is replacing Harkin at Agriculture, was expected to be under more consideration for the HHS post, as were former Senators Barbara Mikulski and Patty Murray. For both Mikulski and Murray, the two Senators’ announcements last year that they would not run for reelection in the midterms led to a high expectation that they would be receiving Cabinet postings. However, the two have since taken other jobs elsewhere. Mikulski has since been selected to replace William Brody as president of Johns Hopkins University[1]. Murray, meanwhile, was chosen by President Clinton to replace Tim Kaine as chair of the Democratic National Committee. While Harkin is a more unusual choice, he has been a proponent of the AAHIA even while at Agriculture, working heavily on ensuring rural access to the public option, promoting education on the public option through USDA programs, and coordinating the portions of the act that will impact those receiving SNAP benefits. He has also proven to be an effective administrator while at Agriculture, and the statement by President Clinton welcomed his steady hand at HHS for the launch of the public option and the implementation of the bulk of the AAHIA.
While most of the Cabinet department shifts were related to Harkin’s move from Agriculture to HHS, another change in executive leadership that president Clinton announced this past week was the departure of Barbara Lee as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Lee, a former congresswoman from California before Clinton appointed her to the Cabinet, has been one of the more outspoken members of the Cabinet since Clinton became president and sometimes has found herself at odds with the president. Lee will be replaced by Deputy Secretary Ron Sims.
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Colorado Republicans Are No Longer a Major Party. What Does That Mean?
February 23, 2011
DENVER, CO - Colorado Republicans did badly in last year’s gubernatorial election. Really badly. Starting with a heated primary race between Scott McInnis and Dan Maes, the party continually went from stumble to stumble in the governor’s race as McInnis fell to a scandal involving a feud with another state office nominee and then Maes ran into trouble with his own scandals. Things went from worse to worst when former congressman Tom Tancredo threw his hat in with the Constitution Party and ran for governor, and Maes continued to sink in the polls as scandal and controversial statements piled on top of each other. In November, Tancredo took the lion’s share of the conservative vote in a Colorado that is slowly but surely trending to the left. Maes and Republicans came out of the governor’s race carrying just a single county, Dolores County in the southwest, and with a paltry 9.7% of the vote.
In fact, Dan Maes did so badly in the gubernatorial election last year that he has cost Colorado Republicans more than just the governorship. Thanks to Maes, the GOP has now lost its major party status in Colorado. Under state law, there are three types of parties: major parties, minor parties, and qualified political organizations. To qualify as a major party, that party must have had a candidate as their official nominee on the ballot in the preceding gubernatorial election, and that candidate must have received at least 10% of the vote. By receiving just under that threshold, Maes has cost Colorado Republicans their status as a major party and relegated them to minor party status for the next four years. Additionally, Tancredo’s performance has elevated the Constitution Party (officially called the American Constitution Party in Colorado) to a major party in the state for the next four years. But while the relegation to minor party status for one of the two big national parties is a nightmare for optics, it also brings up a practical question. What does the loss of major party status actually mean for the Colorado GOP?
Under Colorado law, there appear to be two main consequences of losing the position of a major party. The first is a noticeable but ultimately small change. Being a minor party means that Colorado Republicans, despite holding a Senate seat, multiple state executive offices, and dozens of congressional and state legislative seats, would lose their prime position at the top section of the ballot. The way candidates for an office are listed on Colorado ballots are that major party candidates are listed in a random order at the top of the column, then minor party candidates, then other qualified candidates. So for the 2012 and 2014 election cycles, Republican candidates including the likes of Attorney General John Suthers and congressman Doug Lamborn would always be listed below the Democratic and Constitutionalist candidates and be mixed in on the section of the ballot with the Green and Libertarian candidates. However, the biggest impact on the Colorado Republican Party may be a quirk of ballot access that could drastically affect the party’s capacity for campaign fundraising. Currently, Democratic and Republican candidates are allowed to effectively reach campaign financing limits twice during an election, once when raising money for the primary and once for the general election. However, unlike major parties, minor parties do not always participate in primaries. In Colorado, if there is only one candidate for a minor party who qualifies for the nomination through a state assembly or signature gathering, then a primary is simply not held. For the GOP, this would mean in uncontested primaries or where only one candidate meets the qualifications for the primary ballot, that candidate would not be able to raise money for the primary when they otherwise would[2]. This means some Republican candidates could see their capacity for campaign fundraising slashed in half and could greatly affect the ability of the state GOP to compete with Democrats in campaign financing. Colorado GOP chair Dick Wadhams says that the party intends on introducing a bill to the legislature soon to try and change this section of the Colorado statute but with Democrats controlling a trifecta in the state, it seems unlikely it will pass.
On the flip side, the American Constitution Party of Colorado has now gained major party status, which will likely be a bigger change for that party than the GOP losing it. Moving up from a minor party to a major party brings many more administrative hurdles for the Constitutionalists. Thanks to Tancredo, the party will now have to hold precinct caucuses and primaries, create county committees and elect county party officers, and regularly file campaign financing reports. All of this could bring a difficult burden to the party which, while growing in the past couple years thanks to Alan Keyes’ 2008 presidential campaign and the Tea Party movement, is still a rather small party in Colorado with just over 5,000 members. Even the Green Party, which is still small but had until last year been the most successful third party in the state, only has about 22,000 total members in Colorado[3]. The shift in party status by the Republican and Constitution Party brings into sharp focus some of the difficulties that third parties face not just in becoming successful in a state, but in maintaining that success alongside the Democrats and Republicans.
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Connecticut Greens Sue State Over Restrictive Ballot Access
March 10, 2011
HARTFORD, CT - One of the greatest challenges the Green Party and other third parties have faced in gaining office is the simple act of getting on the ballot. Despite the strides that the Green Party has made, in most states the party still struggles to meet the requirements to receive automatic ballot access. Achieving and maintaining automatic ballot access is one of the most important things a third party seeking to gain a foothold can do. Without automatic ballot access, a party has to spend time, money, and manpower petitioning for signatures for each and every candidate in order to get them on the ballot, something that stretches their already disadvantaged resources thin when the Democrats and Republicans, already at a heavy advantage in resources, do not have to petition for signatures and are guaranteed spots on the ballot. While the Green Party has been able to maintain ballot access in states like California and Maine due to the broader success in those states at all electoral levels, the struggle by the party to gain access and stay on the ballot has been difficult even in states where one would think a strong candidate performance has earned them a spot.
This is particularly the case for the Greens in Connecticut. The Green Party won an election to the state house in 2008. While they lost the seat in 2010, the election for United States Senate that year went much better. Green candidate Ralph Nader took home 19.4% in the Senate race against Democrat incumbent Chris Dodd and Republican victor Linda McMahon. However, despite Nader receiving the highest percentage of votes of any Green candidate for Senate last year, the party has not won the right to automatic ballot access for the upcoming election cycle as the Democrats and Republicans have. Connecticut grants automatic ballot access to major parties for all partisan offices, but for minor parties guaranteed ballot access is determined by office and requires at least 1% of the vote for a candidate in the previous election held for that office. So Nader’s extremely good performance in the Senate race last year will give the Green Party automatic ballot access for the Senate race in 2012, but will have no effect on their qualification for the ballot for president, congressional races, or any other elections in the state. The Greens do have ballot access for the presidential race in 2012, but that is because Pete McCloskey received 1.5% in Connecticut in the 2008 presidential election, not because of Nader’s Senate performance.
The Green Party of Connecticut has not taken the issue around ballot access lightly. The party has now filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of State’s office in the case of Green Party of Connecticut v. Merrill over what the party calls overly restrictive requirements for achieving major party status and gaining automatic ballot access across the state. The requirements for major party status are that a party receives at least 20% or one fifth of the vote in the gubernatorial election, which qualifies it as a major party for the next four years. In particular, the Green Party is citing the limitation to only using the previous gubernatorial election result as the measure for whether a party qualifies to be a major party and thus gain automatic ballot access. This is a sticking point right now with the Connecticut Green Party as Nader nearly reached the 20% threshold, but for Senate and not for governor. Even if he had done slightly better and surpassed 20%, or even if Nader had pulled off the unthinkable and won the Senate election for the Greens, it still would not have qualified the party for statewide automatic ballot access. Party co-chair Mike DeRosa also claims the 1% vote threshold for retaining ballot access applying only to each individual office is unnecessarily burdensome, as it forces third parties who already face a heavy financial disadvantage to spread their meager resources thin and run candidates in unwinnable races just to maintain a wide enough profile on the ballot each year.
Of the two parts of the Connecticut Green Party’s filing, it seems likely that the complaint about the individual office requirement will be less of a catch with the state court than the major party qualification. Even so, any court challenge by a minor party trying to loosen ballot access restrictions is a difficult road for third parties to go down. Lawsuits are expensive and take a lot of time, and just as a third party might not have the financial resources to spread its candidates over a number of offices on a ballot each year, a party is also taking a risk on a major investment in legal fees and organizational resources in a court challenge. They also are far from guaranteed success in making any change to the law. Some, like the suit filed in 2009 by the Moderate Party in Rhode Island, were able to get courts to make getting on the ballot easier, but even the Moderates’ case was a limited success of just expanding the time period that parties had to gather signatures in the state. Other attempts have been failures, and failures can prove costly. The Green Party of Illinois tried in 2005 to convince a court to strike down Illinois’s “full-slate law” for smaller parties, which requires smaller parties to run candidates for every office of a political subdivision or none at all. The case, Green Party v. Henrichs, concerned two Green candidates for county office in 2004 who were removed from the ballot because the Greens had not fielded candidates for the other 13 county board seats up for election that year. The court decided against the Green Party, but since then the Greens have reached the 5% gubernatorial election threshold in both 2006 and 2010 to become an “established party” in the state that exempts a party from the full-slate law. The Libertarian Party of Illinois is now filing a similar challenge to the law after it had candidates removed from the ballot in the 2010 election on similar grounds. Back in Connecticut, the Green Party does have one silver lining if they don’t win the current suit and get the ballot laws changed.. Their candidate for governor, Jean de Smet, did get over 3% of the vote in last year’s election, so the Greens will at least be on the ballot to try again at major party status in 2014.
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Issa Pulls Controversial Crane UC Regent Appointment, But His Replacement Is Worse
March 14, 2011
SACRAMENTO, CA - Public sector unions have been in an increasing spotlight in the past months as newly elected Republican governors in multiple states have attempted to curtail the rights of those unions and particularly teachers unions to bargain with their states. Mike Cox in Michigan, Terry Branstad in Iowa, and Chris Dudley in Oregon have all used the Republican gains of legislative chambers to push their agendas to push what are known as "right to work" laws to reduce or abolish the power public sector unions have in collective bargaining. Even in Minnesota, Democratic governor Mike Hatch has made some indications that he may not be as friendly to state employee unions as he seemed in his first campaign for governor in 2006, as the new Republican legislature gears up to pass legislation restricting some union efforts as they consider broad public spending cuts. While California may be insulated from any similar intentions by governor Issa thanks to Democratic majorities in both chambers of the legislature, the debate has spilled over into California through the nomination of a candidate for the University of California Board of Regents.
Last December, governor Schwarzenegger nominated David Crane, a financial investor and close economic adviser of the former governor, to be a UC regent. Crane, a Democrat, has gained a reputation among state government circles as raising the ire of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, partially for the power he gained as an adviser and friend of Schwarzenegger. However, since his appointment as a prospective California regent, Crane has caused a stir from an op-ed he published last month entitled “Should public employees have collective bargaining”[4], where Crane sided with Republicans like Dudley, Branstad, and Cox on the issue. Crane heavily criticized public sector unions and particularly called out the California Teachers’ Union. Crane’s opinion piece was soon criticized by a number of fellow Democrats and education organizations in the state including state senator Leland Yee, who is running for mayor of San Francisco, and the UC Student Association[5]. As the backlash against Crane’s nomination has grown and Yee has been lobbying in the state senate against Crane, it has become increasingly unlikely that the senate would confirm Crane’s appointment to the board of regents. Over the weekend, governor Issa apparently deliberated with advisers on the possibility of Crane being confirmed and today announced that he would pull Crane’s name from nomination and instead nominate someone else.
However, if education and union advocates thought they could take the rescinding of Crane’s nomination as a win, those hopes have quickly been dashed. Governor Issa announced that his replacement nomination would be corporate attorney David Harmer. Harmer is a former Heritage Foundation columnist and is now a school choice activist with close ties to the Tea Party movement. Harmer is also the son of John Harmer, who served as lieutenant governor under Ronald Reagan for three months in 1974. As part of his advocacy for school choice, Harmer has even gone so far as to call for the outright abolishment of public education and education funding, stating in 2000 that “government should exit the business of running and funding schools.”[6] Harmer is also not the first controversial pick Issa has made for the UC board. In November, regent Charlene Zettel was elected to congress from the 50th district after defeating Democratic congresswoman Francine Busby. To replace Zettel as regent, Issa has nominated billionaire and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper. Draper, who it noted for his early investments in technology companies such as Hotmail and Skype, has in the past spoken in support of both school vouchers and the privatization of higher education, and has recently begun talking about the need for increased entrepreneurial opportunities for college students and the potential of virtual classrooms for expanding education beyond the college campus.
While governor Issa has made both of his first nominations for the UC Board of Regents, the state senate confirmation of the appointments could still present an obstacle. However, the nominations also come at an important juncture for the state. With the new legislature in session, California’s budget crisis is looming over the political atmosphere once again, and it might overshadow other issues as the Democratic legislature looks at where it wants to pick its battles with governor Issa. The budget issues have also led even some Democrats in the legislature to start considering that cuts to state spending on public employees and education funding may be a tough but necessary cut to solve the budget shortfall. The nominations also come as two potential shake ups are looking to be placed on the ballot later this year. The first is the ongoing effort to recall governor Issa, which has recently been given a strong boost as the Restore Californian Dignity committee behind the recall effort received over $500,000 from Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman, and both Harman and fellow congresswoman Jackie Speier have officially come out in support of the recall. While a recall of governor Issa would change who is appointing new regents, there is also an initiative currently being petitioned that would change how regents are appointed entirely. Currently, of the 26 members of the UC Board of Regents, eight are either state officers such as the governor and superintendent of public education, alumni association leaders, and one student representative, while the other 18 are appointed by the governor for twelve year terms. After the recent protests over the University of California raising tuition systemwide and the revelation last year of regent Richard Blum’s involvement in Wall Street investments by the university that lost money during the 2008 financial collapse, there has been an undercurrent of feeling from students, faculty, and some politicians that the UC regents do not have enough accountability due to how long their terms are and from being gubernatorial appointments. Earlier this year, a petition began gathering signatures to place a measure on the ballot to change the selection of the 18 regents from appointment by the governor to direct election. Currently only four states - Nevada, Colorado, Nebraska, and Michigan - elect some or all board members of public universities. If the measure gets on the ballot and passes, then the whole issue of the appointments of Crane or Harmer or Draper could become irrelevant in the future as voters could hold regents accountable for their decisions.
[1] In OTL, Brody resigned as president of Johns Hopkins in 2008, succeeded by provost Ronald J. Daniels who has been president ever since. I figured the timing was close enough to have Brody stay for a few more years. It's also just an interesting career path for Mikulski, since she focused a lot on healthcare policy, gets to stay in Maryland, and since in OTL after retiring later she has had an association with Johns Hopkins as a professor and adviser to Daniels.
[2] These were as far as I could find the biggest effects of a major party becoming a minor party in Colorado. It was talked about a bit when Maes came close to getting under 10% in 2010, but there was never much mention of the practical effect of it since it didn't.
[3] Around this time in OTL, the Constitution Party had about 3,700 total active and inactive members in Colorado, while the Greens had 7,700 members.
[4] Source: https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Should-public-employees-have-collective-2473273.php
[5] Crane got this backlash in OTL as well, which led to him failing confirmation by the senate later in 2011. https://ucsdguardian.org/2011/05/23/students-senator-oppose-regent-appointed-by-gov-schwarzenegger/
[6] Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/david-harmer-abolish-public-schools/
February 11, 2011
WASHINGTON, DC - It has been over a year since the Clinton administration and a Democratic congress passed the American Access to Health Insurance Act, known as the AAHIA or HillaryCare 2.0. As part of the AAHIA’s passage, it promised Americans a public option for health insurance coverage that would be provided by the federal government as an alternative to a private or employer-provided health insurance. Since the law was passed, the Department of Health and Human Services under Secretary Donna Shalala has been working to prepare the necessary organizational and administrative structure within HHS to begin offering the public option to Americans. With the public option expected to become available in the coming months, President Clinton made an announcement today that she will be replacing Shalala as HHS Secretary with current Secretary of Agriculture Tom Harkin in preparation for the rollout of the healthcare option to the country.
The replacement of Shalala with Harkin at HHS is part of a wider planned moving around of Cabinet members following the 2010 midterm elections as the Clinton administration deals with a newly Republican House of Representatives. While replacing multiple Cabinet members at once is somewhat uncommon in the United States and more common in parliamentary governments in countries such as Canada or the United Kingdom, when a shuffle like this occurs in the U.S. it usually is done at times such as this after midterm elections. Harkin is moving from Agriculture to HHS and replacing Shalala, while former Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius has been tapped to replace Harkin at Agriculture. The replacement of Donna Shalala at HHS prior to the official launch of the public option does not come as too much of a surprise to political insiders, as it was expected after Democrats retained the Senate last November. However, the movement of Harkin from Agriculture was unexpected. Often when a Cabinet member is moved to another post, it’s involving one of the more minor Cabinet level positions, such as Rob Portman’s move from Trade Representative to Director of the Office of Management and Budget, not a move between two executive departments. The most recent moves between two executive departments were Norman Mineta’s move from Commerce to Transportation in 2001 when George W. Bush entered office, and Federico Peña’s move from Transportation to Energy in 1997 during the Bill Clinton administration.
The choice of Harkin also was an outside bet in terms of speculation for who might replace Shalala at Health and Human Services. Sebelius, who is replacing Harkin at Agriculture, was expected to be under more consideration for the HHS post, as were former Senators Barbara Mikulski and Patty Murray. For both Mikulski and Murray, the two Senators’ announcements last year that they would not run for reelection in the midterms led to a high expectation that they would be receiving Cabinet postings. However, the two have since taken other jobs elsewhere. Mikulski has since been selected to replace William Brody as president of Johns Hopkins University[1]. Murray, meanwhile, was chosen by President Clinton to replace Tim Kaine as chair of the Democratic National Committee. While Harkin is a more unusual choice, he has been a proponent of the AAHIA even while at Agriculture, working heavily on ensuring rural access to the public option, promoting education on the public option through USDA programs, and coordinating the portions of the act that will impact those receiving SNAP benefits. He has also proven to be an effective administrator while at Agriculture, and the statement by President Clinton welcomed his steady hand at HHS for the launch of the public option and the implementation of the bulk of the AAHIA.
While most of the Cabinet department shifts were related to Harkin’s move from Agriculture to HHS, another change in executive leadership that president Clinton announced this past week was the departure of Barbara Lee as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Lee, a former congresswoman from California before Clinton appointed her to the Cabinet, has been one of the more outspoken members of the Cabinet since Clinton became president and sometimes has found herself at odds with the president. Lee will be replaced by Deputy Secretary Ron Sims.
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Colorado Republicans Are No Longer a Major Party. What Does That Mean?
February 23, 2011
DENVER, CO - Colorado Republicans did badly in last year’s gubernatorial election. Really badly. Starting with a heated primary race between Scott McInnis and Dan Maes, the party continually went from stumble to stumble in the governor’s race as McInnis fell to a scandal involving a feud with another state office nominee and then Maes ran into trouble with his own scandals. Things went from worse to worst when former congressman Tom Tancredo threw his hat in with the Constitution Party and ran for governor, and Maes continued to sink in the polls as scandal and controversial statements piled on top of each other. In November, Tancredo took the lion’s share of the conservative vote in a Colorado that is slowly but surely trending to the left. Maes and Republicans came out of the governor’s race carrying just a single county, Dolores County in the southwest, and with a paltry 9.7% of the vote.
In fact, Dan Maes did so badly in the gubernatorial election last year that he has cost Colorado Republicans more than just the governorship. Thanks to Maes, the GOP has now lost its major party status in Colorado. Under state law, there are three types of parties: major parties, minor parties, and qualified political organizations. To qualify as a major party, that party must have had a candidate as their official nominee on the ballot in the preceding gubernatorial election, and that candidate must have received at least 10% of the vote. By receiving just under that threshold, Maes has cost Colorado Republicans their status as a major party and relegated them to minor party status for the next four years. Additionally, Tancredo’s performance has elevated the Constitution Party (officially called the American Constitution Party in Colorado) to a major party in the state for the next four years. But while the relegation to minor party status for one of the two big national parties is a nightmare for optics, it also brings up a practical question. What does the loss of major party status actually mean for the Colorado GOP?
Under Colorado law, there appear to be two main consequences of losing the position of a major party. The first is a noticeable but ultimately small change. Being a minor party means that Colorado Republicans, despite holding a Senate seat, multiple state executive offices, and dozens of congressional and state legislative seats, would lose their prime position at the top section of the ballot. The way candidates for an office are listed on Colorado ballots are that major party candidates are listed in a random order at the top of the column, then minor party candidates, then other qualified candidates. So for the 2012 and 2014 election cycles, Republican candidates including the likes of Attorney General John Suthers and congressman Doug Lamborn would always be listed below the Democratic and Constitutionalist candidates and be mixed in on the section of the ballot with the Green and Libertarian candidates. However, the biggest impact on the Colorado Republican Party may be a quirk of ballot access that could drastically affect the party’s capacity for campaign fundraising. Currently, Democratic and Republican candidates are allowed to effectively reach campaign financing limits twice during an election, once when raising money for the primary and once for the general election. However, unlike major parties, minor parties do not always participate in primaries. In Colorado, if there is only one candidate for a minor party who qualifies for the nomination through a state assembly or signature gathering, then a primary is simply not held. For the GOP, this would mean in uncontested primaries or where only one candidate meets the qualifications for the primary ballot, that candidate would not be able to raise money for the primary when they otherwise would[2]. This means some Republican candidates could see their capacity for campaign fundraising slashed in half and could greatly affect the ability of the state GOP to compete with Democrats in campaign financing. Colorado GOP chair Dick Wadhams says that the party intends on introducing a bill to the legislature soon to try and change this section of the Colorado statute but with Democrats controlling a trifecta in the state, it seems unlikely it will pass.
On the flip side, the American Constitution Party of Colorado has now gained major party status, which will likely be a bigger change for that party than the GOP losing it. Moving up from a minor party to a major party brings many more administrative hurdles for the Constitutionalists. Thanks to Tancredo, the party will now have to hold precinct caucuses and primaries, create county committees and elect county party officers, and regularly file campaign financing reports. All of this could bring a difficult burden to the party which, while growing in the past couple years thanks to Alan Keyes’ 2008 presidential campaign and the Tea Party movement, is still a rather small party in Colorado with just over 5,000 members. Even the Green Party, which is still small but had until last year been the most successful third party in the state, only has about 22,000 total members in Colorado[3]. The shift in party status by the Republican and Constitution Party brings into sharp focus some of the difficulties that third parties face not just in becoming successful in a state, but in maintaining that success alongside the Democrats and Republicans.
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Connecticut Greens Sue State Over Restrictive Ballot Access
March 10, 2011
HARTFORD, CT - One of the greatest challenges the Green Party and other third parties have faced in gaining office is the simple act of getting on the ballot. Despite the strides that the Green Party has made, in most states the party still struggles to meet the requirements to receive automatic ballot access. Achieving and maintaining automatic ballot access is one of the most important things a third party seeking to gain a foothold can do. Without automatic ballot access, a party has to spend time, money, and manpower petitioning for signatures for each and every candidate in order to get them on the ballot, something that stretches their already disadvantaged resources thin when the Democrats and Republicans, already at a heavy advantage in resources, do not have to petition for signatures and are guaranteed spots on the ballot. While the Green Party has been able to maintain ballot access in states like California and Maine due to the broader success in those states at all electoral levels, the struggle by the party to gain access and stay on the ballot has been difficult even in states where one would think a strong candidate performance has earned them a spot.
This is particularly the case for the Greens in Connecticut. The Green Party won an election to the state house in 2008. While they lost the seat in 2010, the election for United States Senate that year went much better. Green candidate Ralph Nader took home 19.4% in the Senate race against Democrat incumbent Chris Dodd and Republican victor Linda McMahon. However, despite Nader receiving the highest percentage of votes of any Green candidate for Senate last year, the party has not won the right to automatic ballot access for the upcoming election cycle as the Democrats and Republicans have. Connecticut grants automatic ballot access to major parties for all partisan offices, but for minor parties guaranteed ballot access is determined by office and requires at least 1% of the vote for a candidate in the previous election held for that office. So Nader’s extremely good performance in the Senate race last year will give the Green Party automatic ballot access for the Senate race in 2012, but will have no effect on their qualification for the ballot for president, congressional races, or any other elections in the state. The Greens do have ballot access for the presidential race in 2012, but that is because Pete McCloskey received 1.5% in Connecticut in the 2008 presidential election, not because of Nader’s Senate performance.
The Green Party of Connecticut has not taken the issue around ballot access lightly. The party has now filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of State’s office in the case of Green Party of Connecticut v. Merrill over what the party calls overly restrictive requirements for achieving major party status and gaining automatic ballot access across the state. The requirements for major party status are that a party receives at least 20% or one fifth of the vote in the gubernatorial election, which qualifies it as a major party for the next four years. In particular, the Green Party is citing the limitation to only using the previous gubernatorial election result as the measure for whether a party qualifies to be a major party and thus gain automatic ballot access. This is a sticking point right now with the Connecticut Green Party as Nader nearly reached the 20% threshold, but for Senate and not for governor. Even if he had done slightly better and surpassed 20%, or even if Nader had pulled off the unthinkable and won the Senate election for the Greens, it still would not have qualified the party for statewide automatic ballot access. Party co-chair Mike DeRosa also claims the 1% vote threshold for retaining ballot access applying only to each individual office is unnecessarily burdensome, as it forces third parties who already face a heavy financial disadvantage to spread their meager resources thin and run candidates in unwinnable races just to maintain a wide enough profile on the ballot each year.
Of the two parts of the Connecticut Green Party’s filing, it seems likely that the complaint about the individual office requirement will be less of a catch with the state court than the major party qualification. Even so, any court challenge by a minor party trying to loosen ballot access restrictions is a difficult road for third parties to go down. Lawsuits are expensive and take a lot of time, and just as a third party might not have the financial resources to spread its candidates over a number of offices on a ballot each year, a party is also taking a risk on a major investment in legal fees and organizational resources in a court challenge. They also are far from guaranteed success in making any change to the law. Some, like the suit filed in 2009 by the Moderate Party in Rhode Island, were able to get courts to make getting on the ballot easier, but even the Moderates’ case was a limited success of just expanding the time period that parties had to gather signatures in the state. Other attempts have been failures, and failures can prove costly. The Green Party of Illinois tried in 2005 to convince a court to strike down Illinois’s “full-slate law” for smaller parties, which requires smaller parties to run candidates for every office of a political subdivision or none at all. The case, Green Party v. Henrichs, concerned two Green candidates for county office in 2004 who were removed from the ballot because the Greens had not fielded candidates for the other 13 county board seats up for election that year. The court decided against the Green Party, but since then the Greens have reached the 5% gubernatorial election threshold in both 2006 and 2010 to become an “established party” in the state that exempts a party from the full-slate law. The Libertarian Party of Illinois is now filing a similar challenge to the law after it had candidates removed from the ballot in the 2010 election on similar grounds. Back in Connecticut, the Green Party does have one silver lining if they don’t win the current suit and get the ballot laws changed.. Their candidate for governor, Jean de Smet, did get over 3% of the vote in last year’s election, so the Greens will at least be on the ballot to try again at major party status in 2014.
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Issa Pulls Controversial Crane UC Regent Appointment, But His Replacement Is Worse
March 14, 2011
SACRAMENTO, CA - Public sector unions have been in an increasing spotlight in the past months as newly elected Republican governors in multiple states have attempted to curtail the rights of those unions and particularly teachers unions to bargain with their states. Mike Cox in Michigan, Terry Branstad in Iowa, and Chris Dudley in Oregon have all used the Republican gains of legislative chambers to push their agendas to push what are known as "right to work" laws to reduce or abolish the power public sector unions have in collective bargaining. Even in Minnesota, Democratic governor Mike Hatch has made some indications that he may not be as friendly to state employee unions as he seemed in his first campaign for governor in 2006, as the new Republican legislature gears up to pass legislation restricting some union efforts as they consider broad public spending cuts. While California may be insulated from any similar intentions by governor Issa thanks to Democratic majorities in both chambers of the legislature, the debate has spilled over into California through the nomination of a candidate for the University of California Board of Regents.
Last December, governor Schwarzenegger nominated David Crane, a financial investor and close economic adviser of the former governor, to be a UC regent. Crane, a Democrat, has gained a reputation among state government circles as raising the ire of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, partially for the power he gained as an adviser and friend of Schwarzenegger. However, since his appointment as a prospective California regent, Crane has caused a stir from an op-ed he published last month entitled “Should public employees have collective bargaining”[4], where Crane sided with Republicans like Dudley, Branstad, and Cox on the issue. Crane heavily criticized public sector unions and particularly called out the California Teachers’ Union. Crane’s opinion piece was soon criticized by a number of fellow Democrats and education organizations in the state including state senator Leland Yee, who is running for mayor of San Francisco, and the UC Student Association[5]. As the backlash against Crane’s nomination has grown and Yee has been lobbying in the state senate against Crane, it has become increasingly unlikely that the senate would confirm Crane’s appointment to the board of regents. Over the weekend, governor Issa apparently deliberated with advisers on the possibility of Crane being confirmed and today announced that he would pull Crane’s name from nomination and instead nominate someone else.
However, if education and union advocates thought they could take the rescinding of Crane’s nomination as a win, those hopes have quickly been dashed. Governor Issa announced that his replacement nomination would be corporate attorney David Harmer. Harmer is a former Heritage Foundation columnist and is now a school choice activist with close ties to the Tea Party movement. Harmer is also the son of John Harmer, who served as lieutenant governor under Ronald Reagan for three months in 1974. As part of his advocacy for school choice, Harmer has even gone so far as to call for the outright abolishment of public education and education funding, stating in 2000 that “government should exit the business of running and funding schools.”[6] Harmer is also not the first controversial pick Issa has made for the UC board. In November, regent Charlene Zettel was elected to congress from the 50th district after defeating Democratic congresswoman Francine Busby. To replace Zettel as regent, Issa has nominated billionaire and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper. Draper, who it noted for his early investments in technology companies such as Hotmail and Skype, has in the past spoken in support of both school vouchers and the privatization of higher education, and has recently begun talking about the need for increased entrepreneurial opportunities for college students and the potential of virtual classrooms for expanding education beyond the college campus.
While governor Issa has made both of his first nominations for the UC Board of Regents, the state senate confirmation of the appointments could still present an obstacle. However, the nominations also come at an important juncture for the state. With the new legislature in session, California’s budget crisis is looming over the political atmosphere once again, and it might overshadow other issues as the Democratic legislature looks at where it wants to pick its battles with governor Issa. The budget issues have also led even some Democrats in the legislature to start considering that cuts to state spending on public employees and education funding may be a tough but necessary cut to solve the budget shortfall. The nominations also come as two potential shake ups are looking to be placed on the ballot later this year. The first is the ongoing effort to recall governor Issa, which has recently been given a strong boost as the Restore Californian Dignity committee behind the recall effort received over $500,000 from Democratic congresswoman Jane Harman, and both Harman and fellow congresswoman Jackie Speier have officially come out in support of the recall. While a recall of governor Issa would change who is appointing new regents, there is also an initiative currently being petitioned that would change how regents are appointed entirely. Currently, of the 26 members of the UC Board of Regents, eight are either state officers such as the governor and superintendent of public education, alumni association leaders, and one student representative, while the other 18 are appointed by the governor for twelve year terms. After the recent protests over the University of California raising tuition systemwide and the revelation last year of regent Richard Blum’s involvement in Wall Street investments by the university that lost money during the 2008 financial collapse, there has been an undercurrent of feeling from students, faculty, and some politicians that the UC regents do not have enough accountability due to how long their terms are and from being gubernatorial appointments. Earlier this year, a petition began gathering signatures to place a measure on the ballot to change the selection of the 18 regents from appointment by the governor to direct election. Currently only four states - Nevada, Colorado, Nebraska, and Michigan - elect some or all board members of public universities. If the measure gets on the ballot and passes, then the whole issue of the appointments of Crane or Harmer or Draper could become irrelevant in the future as voters could hold regents accountable for their decisions.
[1] In OTL, Brody resigned as president of Johns Hopkins in 2008, succeeded by provost Ronald J. Daniels who has been president ever since. I figured the timing was close enough to have Brody stay for a few more years. It's also just an interesting career path for Mikulski, since she focused a lot on healthcare policy, gets to stay in Maryland, and since in OTL after retiring later she has had an association with Johns Hopkins as a professor and adviser to Daniels.
[2] These were as far as I could find the biggest effects of a major party becoming a minor party in Colorado. It was talked about a bit when Maes came close to getting under 10% in 2010, but there was never much mention of the practical effect of it since it didn't.
[3] Around this time in OTL, the Constitution Party had about 3,700 total active and inactive members in Colorado, while the Greens had 7,700 members.
[4] Source: https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Should-public-employees-have-collective-2473273.php
[5] Crane got this backlash in OTL as well, which led to him failing confirmation by the senate later in 2011. https://ucsdguardian.org/2011/05/23/students-senator-oppose-regent-appointed-by-gov-schwarzenegger/
[6] Source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/david-harmer-abolish-public-schools/
Very interesting situation in Colorado, curious to see if this starts happening in other states after 2012/2014
“March Down Montgomery” Protest Disrupts San Francisco’s Financial District
March 21, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO - The normal daily business of downtown San Francisco was disrupted today as over a thousand protesters descended upon the city’s financial district. Protesters gathered early in the morning around the Vallejo Steps a few blocks south of Telegraph HIll. As the number of protesters swelled into the hundreds, the group began to make its way down Montgomery Street reaching close to Market Street by noon. After the walking protest, hundreds of demonstrators moved to set up a camp at A. P. Giannini Plaza off of Montgomery and California streets, two blocks north of where the so-called “March Down Montgomery” ended. The march, which is said to have been inspired by the African Spring and is in part an escalation of the university tuition protests that took place throughout California last year, is aimed at calling attention to the role banks have played in the current financial crisis and the alleged lack of accountability that financial institutions have faced for their role in the 2008 global economic crash.
The demonstration today started after months of planning and circulation on the internet and social media websites. While many demonstrators claim that the protest is leaderless, the promotion of the march and occupation of Giannini Plaza began in January by activist media organization Adbusters. Kalle Lasn, editor in chief of Adbusters, said that much of the grievances by the editors at the organization comes from the idea that leaders of the financial sector “had not been brought to justice” following the 2008 stock market crash. Senior editor Micah White has served as one of the major on the ground sources for media organizations looking into the origins of the current protest[1]. White, who is based in nearby Berkeley, was at the march and is currently part of the camp at Giannini Plaza. He was one of the early promoters of the "March Down Montgomery" and the "Occupy The Bankers Heart" slogans that spread on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
From conversations with White and others throughout the day, it became clear that the decision of Montgomery Street in San Francisco and Giannini Plaza as the sites for the march and ongoing demonstration as well as the timing of the protest are rooted in the causes for the protest. Montgomery Street, which runs north-south through downtown San Francisco from Telegraph Hill to Market Street, is known as the “Wall Street of the West” for being the home of many corporate or regional headquarters of the country’s largest financial institutions. The march on its way through the financial district passed the famous Transamerica Pyramid, former home to Transamerica Corporation, as well as the corporate headquarters of both Wells Fargo and Bank of the West. The protest also passed by the headquarters of Blum Capital, an investment firm owned by Richard Blum, a finance investor and University of California Regent. Last year, University of California students launched protests and building occupations at a number of campuses across the state after the board of regents raised tuition significantly and the revelation that part of the university’s budget shortfall was caused by the collapse of a number of real estate investments in the 2008 financial crash. Blum, who sits in the university system's investment committee, oversaw many of the university's investments over the past decade which failed in the crash[2]. The choice of this weekend as the timing of the protest is also likely connected to the student protests, as this weekend was the start of Spring Break for the University of California system. Reporters from the protest on the ground have talked to a number of college students from around both California and the rest of the country who have come here for the march.
The ending point of the ongoing demonstration is also significant. After moving south along Montgomery Street, the protest split at California Street with one group continuing down Montgomery to its end point at Sutter Street, while another group spilled off into California Street to begin gathering in A. P. Giannini Plaza. Giannini Plaza sits in front of the building that was the former headquarters of Bank of America before its merger with NationsBank and move to Charlotte, North Carolina in 1998. The plaza is also the site of a 200 ton black granite sculpture by Japanese artist Masayuki Nagare. The official name of the abstract block of granite is “Transcendence”, but thanks to seminal San Francisco journalist Herb Caen, the sculpture acquired a new nickname; The Banker’s Heart[3]. That appellation apparently inspired the loosely defined organizers of today’s protest to center the static protest in Giannini Plaza with a symbolic camp set up around the Banker’s Heart. Protesters at the plaza say they plan on continuing the camp in front of the former Bank of America headquarters as long as they are able to physically remain. The shortest concrete time commitment we’ve heard from some protesters at the camp has been to stay there at least a week - until Spring Break is over.
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Milwaukee Will Have Self-Described Socialist Mayor For First Time in 50 Years
April 5, 2011
MILWAUKEE - The city of Milwaukee hasn’t elected a new mayor very often. In fact, aside from two acting mayors who only served a few months each, Milwaukee has only had four mayors in the past 63 years since 1948[4]. So a new mayor entering office is a momentous occasion of its own for the city. However, yesterday’s election has given citizens of Milwaukee witness to another rare moment in the history of the city. For the first time in half a century, the city of Milwaukee will have a mayor who openly describes themselves as a socialist. With the votes from yesterday’s election fully counted, the Green Party affiliated Angela Walker has defeated David Clarke to become the next mayor of Milwaukee.
The events that led to this moment began last year. In November, Wisconsin voters chose Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett to become the state’s next governor. After Barrett left Milwaukee, common council president Willie Hines Jr. became interim acting mayor as the council scheduled the special election, as it usually does, for February, with an April runoff if no candidate received a majority vote in the first round. Hines, as common council president and acting mayor, ran in the special election as expected. The previous acting mayor in the last special election in 2004, Marvin Pratt, had also run for mayor and led the first round, but lost to Barrett in the second round runoff. However, the race for a rare open spot in Milwaukee’s mayorship quickly became crowded as several prominent candidates joined Hines. County Sheriff David Clarke, a controversial Democrat whose positions often hew closer to the Republican Party, ran for mayor a second time after his first run in 2004. Barrett's chief of staff and longtime friend Patrick Curley, who has worked with Barrett in city hall and in Madison for decades, ran as Barrett’s preferred successor. Bob Donovan, a Republican alderman since 2000, ran in a quixotic campaign as likely the token Republican in the race. Lastly of the major candidates, Angela Walker, a Milwaukee native who works as a bus driver and local union leader, joined in.
With only a few months between Barrett’s election as governor in November and the first round primary in February, there was not much time for the candidates to pull out in front of one another. The early speculation was that Curley as Barrett’s protégé would be the front runner, but Curley’s reputation as Barrett’s attack dog while chief of staff proved true with his short temper. A few ill-received comments reduced Curley’s support to mostly the Barrett loyalists. This still meant there was a significant amount of support for Curley in the primary, but it made the overall race for the top two competitive between all major candidates. Walker meanwhile was the outsider in the race against three politically experienced candidates, but her connection to Milwaukee union leaders, an endorsement from Green alderman Ryan Clancy[5] and from the regional and state parties, and a vigorous door knocking campaign fueled by union leaders and state Green activists, Walker quickly made a name for herself and put herself squarely in the running against the more experienced candidates. In campaigning, Walker has made strong use of her union activity and working class career as a bus driver in laying down her priorities of raising Milwaukee’s minimum wage, supporting unionization efforts in the city, working with the state and MCTS to get Milwaukee a rail transit system, and reviving the proposal to extend the Chicago Metra commuter rail’s North Line to Milwaukee from its current terminus in Kenosha. The grassroots campaign for Walker led her to a narrow second place in the February primary, putting her in the April runoff against Sheriff David Clarke.
Against any other Democratic opponent, Walker probably would have been sunk from the moment the first round results came in. Against Clarke, however, she had a chance and Milwaukee politicians knew it. Clarke was an officer in the Milwaukee Police Department for over two decades before he was appointed Milwaukee County Sheriff by Republican governor Scott McCallum in 2002. Since then, Clarke has been nearly a constant source of controversy, and only won the 2006 and 2010 Democratic primaries by single digits. Clarke also has a history of endorsing Republicans including Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker in his last two runs for reelection and his run for governor last year. So, with the runoff between Clarke and Walker, slowly a number of Democratic politicians emerged in either endorsing nobody or endorsing the Green Walker over the Democrat Clarke. With the race supposedly nonpartisan it might not have been noticeable, but to watchers of politics who were paying attention, it indicated a slow but steady shift in momentum. The decline to endorse from both governor Barrett and Curley were the first big signs of trouble for Clarke. The biggest endorsement came from acting mayor Hines, who said in his statement that “Angela Walker and I hold many of the same fundamental principles and share the same goals and vision for the city of Milwaukee” in what seems to be a rare sign of crossover between Democrats and Greens as of late. The final boost to Walker’s campaign arrived two weeks ago from California, when the wave of protests now dubbed the “Occupy Movement” began in San Francisco. Since then, Occupy camps and protests have popped up in a number of American cities including Milwaukee. The protests were immediately framed in opposing lights between the two candidates, with Clarke calling the Occupy Movement a “wave of crime” that he would root out as mayor and connecting Walker’s socialist identification to the conservative attack slogan of “San Francisco Socialism.” Walker embraced the movement calling it a necessary pushback against the corporate greed that put the country and many cities including Milwaukee in their current economic and financial position. Walker also claimed solidarity with the protesters citing that as a union organizer and a bus driver she has seen first hand much of the poverty that is affecting Milwaukee, and that direct action to oppose such circumstances is a good and necessary one, not a criminal action. The current national polling around the Occupy Movement is divided but narrowly supportive, with the latest poll from Gallup at 38% approving and 33% disapproving. The swell of support of the movement from unions and a tacit nod of approval from Senator Russ Feingold has indicated that at least in Wisconsin somewhat more voters are for the Occupy Movement than against it. Support like that is common for such a new wave of protests, but it can just as quickly fade. It appears that Angela Walker has captured that groundswell at just the right time to ride it to the mayor’s office with a margin of victory of 53.7% to 46.3% over Sheriff Clarke.
Walker marks a milestone for both the Green Party and a revival of the idea of socialism in the United States. She is the first Green member elected to mayor of a large city outside the west coast. However, she is not the first socialist to be elected mayor of Milwaukee. The city actually has had three socialist mayors before in its history between 1910 and 1960, all elected as members of the Socialist Party. Emil Seidel was Milwaukee’s first Socialist mayor, serving for two years from 1910 to 1912. Daniel Hoan served as mayor from 1916 to 1940, and Frank Zeidler, Milwaukee’s last Socialist Party mayor, served between 1948 and 1960. The success of the Socialist ticket in Milwaukee became known as Sewer Socialism, for its focus on issues of public health and infrastructure in the city, in particular the frequent praise for Milwaukee’s sewer system in the early 20th century, and the move of its candidates away from the more revolutionary rhetoric of the time. Similarly, the Green Party has seen recent success in Wisconsin, with county officials being elected in Douglas and Bayfield counties as early as the 1980s, and more recent success in other county offices as well as in the Madison and Milwaukee city councils. Walker’s election as mayor seems to mark a symbolic meshing of the modern Green and historical Socialist tendencies of the city. The revival of a modern Sewer Socialism does seem to mix well with the Green Party’s values, and Walker as a transit union organizer fits the bill of combining the two broad positions into one.
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David Conley Marks 25 Years And Counting For Wisconsin Greens
April 18, 2011
SUPERIOR, WI - Two weeks after Angela Walker became the first Green Party member elected mayor of a major city outside the west coast, the Wisconsin Greens achieved another historic milestone. In Douglas County on Lake Superior, county supervisor and Green Party member David Conley is on his twelfth term in office and as of this month has marked 25 years on the board of supervisors. Conley was first elected to the Douglas County board in 1986 and has been on the board ever since, making the Douglas County board of supervisors the legislative body with the longest record of having a Green Party member in the entire country. In fact, Conley’s tenure on the Douglas County board of supervisors dates so far back in the history of the Green Party, that it nearly predates even the beginnings of the formation of a national Green Party.
The Green movement in the United States started in the 1980s, with the first large scale gatherings of politically-minded members of the environmentalist movement being the North American Bio-Regional Congress and the Green Founding Conference, both held in 1984. The Founding Conference held in Saint Paul, Minnesota is usually cited as the starting point for the eventual creation of the Green Party. It was the site of the drafting of the current Ten Key Values which has since become the bedrock of the national and state Green Party platforms[6]. These collections of environmental activists soon developed a regular correspondence with the idea of eventually forming a national party, but before then, a number of state and local regional political organizations were created to bring together and coordinate political activity at a more grassroots level. In Wisconsin, even before the Wisconsin Green Party was founded in 1988, a number of regional Green groups within the state were already active.
Conley was and still is a member of the Lake Superior Greens, a regional activist group in Wisconsin and Minnesota that lobbies for local environmental issues. His wife, Jan Conley, is one of the leaders of the group as well as a member of multiple environmentalist and wilderness protection organizations in the Lake Superior area. When Conley was first elected to the Douglas County board of supervisors though, the Lake Superior Greens were one of the major forerunners of the state and national Green Party movement and included two other members who were key in kickstarting the Green movement in Wisconsin and in founding the Wisconsin Greens: Frank Koehn and Walter Bresette[7]. Koehn was first elected in 1986 like Conley, but to the county board of neighboring Bayfield County. He served on the Bayfield board for twelve years until 1999 and is still the second longest serving Green elected official in Wisconsin after Conley. Bresette, a member of the Red Cliff Chippewa, was an indigenous rights activist in northwest Wisconsin. Both Bresette and Koehn were active in a number of environmental and indigenous protests in northwest Wisconsin during the 1980s including fighting to stop sulfide mines in the area and in what became known as the Wisconsin Walleye War. That series of events that occurred in northern Wisconsin stemmed from a series of court rulings in the 1970s and 1980s that upheld the rights of several Ojibwe tribes to fish on traditional fishing grounds. The final ruling issued in 1987 held that treaties from the early 19th century regarding hunting and fishing grounds were still valid and allowed the tribes to hunt and fish in territories designated by those treaties even if the areas were not on current reservation lands. In the following four years, confrontations between tribe members, state park wardens, and indigenous rights activists on one side and sport fishermen, residents, and visitors on the other occurred sporadically in areas covered by the ruling. In 1991, after years of nonviolent protest by the tribes, Wisconsin finally stood by the court ruling and thanks to people like Bresette and Koehn, tribal fishing has continued ever since.
Bresette, Koehn, and the Conleys also participated in a number of protests in the late 1980s against the construction and expansion of sulfide mines in northern Wisconsin, such as the proposed Crandon mine near Ladysmith. Some of the proposed mines were on reservation lands, and once again created an intersection of protest and activism between the indigenous rights and environmentalist movements that helped create the Wisconsin Green Party and the national Green Party. Today, those foundational traditions can be seen in the continued efforts in both protest and politics by the Green Party in areas such as the protests against the Keystone pipeline expansion in South Dakota and Nebraska. The presence of David Conley in the Douglas County board of supervisors provides a small but meaningful continuity between the earliest days of the Green movement and the Green Party's current status as a small but influential party that continues the fight on these and similar issues.
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Oakland Police Clash With Occupy Camp at City Hall, Arrest Hundreds of Protesters
April 21, 2011
OAKLAND, CA - Since beginning in San Francisco a month ago, the Occupy Movement has spread across the United States and Canada with protest camps and demonstrations being held in dozens of major cities in both countries. The Occupy protests in Oakland have been focused largely around a camp formed in Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of city hall. The Oakland camp was one of the first protests to spring up in the wake of the original Occupy march and protest camp in San Francisco, gathering hundreds of people just four days after the March Down Montgomery took place. Since then, the camps and other protest areas in San Francisco and Oakland have been seen as the epicenter of the Occupy Movement. Micah White, an editor at the company Adbusters which was the major promoter of the Occupy Movement online before it was launched, has been a frequent attendee at both camps as well as the one in People’s Park in Berkeley where White lives.
However, as one of the central locations of the Occupy protests, the Oakland protest camp has come under heavy scrutiny by police. Most cities where the Occupy Movement has spread have attempted to maintain a civil relationship between the protesters and police, with officers generally keeping distance between themselves and the protest camps and avoiding moving in or making arrests unless the protests are spilling over to a point of posing a danger to themselves such as disrupting traffic. Last week, Oakland mayor Wilson Riles Jr. worked with Occupy to peacefully clear the camp in front of city hall amid growing reports of unsanitary conditions in the demonstration camp and graffiti and other vandalism of the plaza. The ad hoc leaders of the Oakland protest including White worked with city officials and police to clear the plaza and let maintenance crews come in to clean up the area. However, it appears after the cleanup, it was unclear whether protesters were to be allowed to reenter the plaza. After protesters returned over the weekend, police assembled a presence nearby starting Tuesday morning. Yesterday on Wednesday April 20, police moved into Frank Ogawa Plaza and made hundreds of arrests while clearing the park of the estimated nearly 2,000 protesters there at the time. Police used batons and in some cases tear gas to clear the park as they reclaimed the plaza, a much different scene to the mostly peaceful clearing of the park the first time last week.
The reaction to the clearing of the plaza has been swift from many people in the Bay Area. Former state legislator and civil rights activist Angela Davis and former Oakland congresswoman Barbara Lee vehemently condemned the actions of the police. Davis has been speaking at Occupy protests around California for a couple weeks, including a speech given at the Oakland camp last week. San Francisco mayor Matt Gonzalez and even Mayor Riles called the police officers’ response “harsh” and “heavy-handed” with Riles saying that the officers overstepped their bounds in terms of how he wanted to approach the situation of the Occupy camp. This seems to put Riles at odds with Oakland police chief Anthony Batts. Batts, who has been Oakland's police chief for a year and a half after seven years as head of the Long Beach police department, said in a statement that the incident was caused by poor communication between city and police officials and bureaucratic red tape delaying policy changes. Batts also put the blame on broader problems in the police department such as a lack of funding leading to understaffing and needing officers from other cities in the area leading to a lack of preparation and coordination in the operation. As an example of the staffing issues in the Oakland department, some of the officers involved in the clearance of the Occupy camp were from the San Francisco and San Jose police departments. This also has caused a stir in San Francisco, where the response and support of the Occupy protests from mayor Gonzalez has put the mayor and the Green Party at loggerheads with Sheriff Michael Hennessey, who is running for mayor this year.
Police chief Batts may have cited the department’s staffing issues as a cause, but the violent clearance of the Occupy camp is only a continuation of a years long string of troubling issues the Oakland Police Department has been mired in. In 2003, Oakland PD had a number of court mandated policies and federal monitoring reports imposed on it after a particularly damning scandal involving the “Riders”, a night shift patrol that was accused of planting evidence and beating up or robbing suspects in West Oakland. Since then, the department has been subject to an originally five-year consent decree that is now going on its eighth year in force, an independent monitoring report on reform progress, and a mandate of a stricter crowd control policy. According to civil rights attorneys, yesterday's raid on the Occupy camp may be a violation of the crowd control policy. The potential violation of the policy likely only heightens the scrutiny the city is placing on the police department as the mayor and city council struggle to find a way out of Oakland’s current budgetary hole. The staffing and funding issues around Oakland’s police department were one of the major topics of last year’s mayoral election and neither Riles nor councilor Rebecca Kaplan, also a mayoral candidate last year, were too keen on seeing more money go to the department or its officer numbers increased back to what the department considers normal staffing levels. With yesterday's action, Oakland PD has not done much to get back in the good graces of the city council or the mayor.
[1] As in OTL, Adbusters was one of the original key organizers and promoters of the Occupy protests.
[2] Source: https://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content/the-regents-club/1854684/
[3] For what the Banker's Heart looks like: https://artandarchitecture-sf.com/bankers-heart.html
[4] Even in OTL, Milwaukee has still only had 6 mayors in the 75 years since 1948. Including one acting mayor who only served for a few months.
[5] Ryan Clancy of the Bay View neighborhood is elected alderman from the 13th district in 2008.
[6] The Green Party site has a pretty good series on its history. The section on this part of its history is here: https://www.gp.org/early_history
[7] When I started planning for this section I thought I would find more on Conley than I ended up being able to. So this ended up being a bit more just on the history of the Wisconsin Greens, so enjoy that.
March 21, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO - The normal daily business of downtown San Francisco was disrupted today as over a thousand protesters descended upon the city’s financial district. Protesters gathered early in the morning around the Vallejo Steps a few blocks south of Telegraph HIll. As the number of protesters swelled into the hundreds, the group began to make its way down Montgomery Street reaching close to Market Street by noon. After the walking protest, hundreds of demonstrators moved to set up a camp at A. P. Giannini Plaza off of Montgomery and California streets, two blocks north of where the so-called “March Down Montgomery” ended. The march, which is said to have been inspired by the African Spring and is in part an escalation of the university tuition protests that took place throughout California last year, is aimed at calling attention to the role banks have played in the current financial crisis and the alleged lack of accountability that financial institutions have faced for their role in the 2008 global economic crash.
The demonstration today started after months of planning and circulation on the internet and social media websites. While many demonstrators claim that the protest is leaderless, the promotion of the march and occupation of Giannini Plaza began in January by activist media organization Adbusters. Kalle Lasn, editor in chief of Adbusters, said that much of the grievances by the editors at the organization comes from the idea that leaders of the financial sector “had not been brought to justice” following the 2008 stock market crash. Senior editor Micah White has served as one of the major on the ground sources for media organizations looking into the origins of the current protest[1]. White, who is based in nearby Berkeley, was at the march and is currently part of the camp at Giannini Plaza. He was one of the early promoters of the "March Down Montgomery" and the "Occupy The Bankers Heart" slogans that spread on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
From conversations with White and others throughout the day, it became clear that the decision of Montgomery Street in San Francisco and Giannini Plaza as the sites for the march and ongoing demonstration as well as the timing of the protest are rooted in the causes for the protest. Montgomery Street, which runs north-south through downtown San Francisco from Telegraph Hill to Market Street, is known as the “Wall Street of the West” for being the home of many corporate or regional headquarters of the country’s largest financial institutions. The march on its way through the financial district passed the famous Transamerica Pyramid, former home to Transamerica Corporation, as well as the corporate headquarters of both Wells Fargo and Bank of the West. The protest also passed by the headquarters of Blum Capital, an investment firm owned by Richard Blum, a finance investor and University of California Regent. Last year, University of California students launched protests and building occupations at a number of campuses across the state after the board of regents raised tuition significantly and the revelation that part of the university’s budget shortfall was caused by the collapse of a number of real estate investments in the 2008 financial crash. Blum, who sits in the university system's investment committee, oversaw many of the university's investments over the past decade which failed in the crash[2]. The choice of this weekend as the timing of the protest is also likely connected to the student protests, as this weekend was the start of Spring Break for the University of California system. Reporters from the protest on the ground have talked to a number of college students from around both California and the rest of the country who have come here for the march.
The ending point of the ongoing demonstration is also significant. After moving south along Montgomery Street, the protest split at California Street with one group continuing down Montgomery to its end point at Sutter Street, while another group spilled off into California Street to begin gathering in A. P. Giannini Plaza. Giannini Plaza sits in front of the building that was the former headquarters of Bank of America before its merger with NationsBank and move to Charlotte, North Carolina in 1998. The plaza is also the site of a 200 ton black granite sculpture by Japanese artist Masayuki Nagare. The official name of the abstract block of granite is “Transcendence”, but thanks to seminal San Francisco journalist Herb Caen, the sculpture acquired a new nickname; The Banker’s Heart[3]. That appellation apparently inspired the loosely defined organizers of today’s protest to center the static protest in Giannini Plaza with a symbolic camp set up around the Banker’s Heart. Protesters at the plaza say they plan on continuing the camp in front of the former Bank of America headquarters as long as they are able to physically remain. The shortest concrete time commitment we’ve heard from some protesters at the camp has been to stay there at least a week - until Spring Break is over.
***
Milwaukee Will Have Self-Described Socialist Mayor For First Time in 50 Years
April 5, 2011
MILWAUKEE - The city of Milwaukee hasn’t elected a new mayor very often. In fact, aside from two acting mayors who only served a few months each, Milwaukee has only had four mayors in the past 63 years since 1948[4]. So a new mayor entering office is a momentous occasion of its own for the city. However, yesterday’s election has given citizens of Milwaukee witness to another rare moment in the history of the city. For the first time in half a century, the city of Milwaukee will have a mayor who openly describes themselves as a socialist. With the votes from yesterday’s election fully counted, the Green Party affiliated Angela Walker has defeated David Clarke to become the next mayor of Milwaukee.
The events that led to this moment began last year. In November, Wisconsin voters chose Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett to become the state’s next governor. After Barrett left Milwaukee, common council president Willie Hines Jr. became interim acting mayor as the council scheduled the special election, as it usually does, for February, with an April runoff if no candidate received a majority vote in the first round. Hines, as common council president and acting mayor, ran in the special election as expected. The previous acting mayor in the last special election in 2004, Marvin Pratt, had also run for mayor and led the first round, but lost to Barrett in the second round runoff. However, the race for a rare open spot in Milwaukee’s mayorship quickly became crowded as several prominent candidates joined Hines. County Sheriff David Clarke, a controversial Democrat whose positions often hew closer to the Republican Party, ran for mayor a second time after his first run in 2004. Barrett's chief of staff and longtime friend Patrick Curley, who has worked with Barrett in city hall and in Madison for decades, ran as Barrett’s preferred successor. Bob Donovan, a Republican alderman since 2000, ran in a quixotic campaign as likely the token Republican in the race. Lastly of the major candidates, Angela Walker, a Milwaukee native who works as a bus driver and local union leader, joined in.
With only a few months between Barrett’s election as governor in November and the first round primary in February, there was not much time for the candidates to pull out in front of one another. The early speculation was that Curley as Barrett’s protégé would be the front runner, but Curley’s reputation as Barrett’s attack dog while chief of staff proved true with his short temper. A few ill-received comments reduced Curley’s support to mostly the Barrett loyalists. This still meant there was a significant amount of support for Curley in the primary, but it made the overall race for the top two competitive between all major candidates. Walker meanwhile was the outsider in the race against three politically experienced candidates, but her connection to Milwaukee union leaders, an endorsement from Green alderman Ryan Clancy[5] and from the regional and state parties, and a vigorous door knocking campaign fueled by union leaders and state Green activists, Walker quickly made a name for herself and put herself squarely in the running against the more experienced candidates. In campaigning, Walker has made strong use of her union activity and working class career as a bus driver in laying down her priorities of raising Milwaukee’s minimum wage, supporting unionization efforts in the city, working with the state and MCTS to get Milwaukee a rail transit system, and reviving the proposal to extend the Chicago Metra commuter rail’s North Line to Milwaukee from its current terminus in Kenosha. The grassroots campaign for Walker led her to a narrow second place in the February primary, putting her in the April runoff against Sheriff David Clarke.
Against any other Democratic opponent, Walker probably would have been sunk from the moment the first round results came in. Against Clarke, however, she had a chance and Milwaukee politicians knew it. Clarke was an officer in the Milwaukee Police Department for over two decades before he was appointed Milwaukee County Sheriff by Republican governor Scott McCallum in 2002. Since then, Clarke has been nearly a constant source of controversy, and only won the 2006 and 2010 Democratic primaries by single digits. Clarke also has a history of endorsing Republicans including Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker in his last two runs for reelection and his run for governor last year. So, with the runoff between Clarke and Walker, slowly a number of Democratic politicians emerged in either endorsing nobody or endorsing the Green Walker over the Democrat Clarke. With the race supposedly nonpartisan it might not have been noticeable, but to watchers of politics who were paying attention, it indicated a slow but steady shift in momentum. The decline to endorse from both governor Barrett and Curley were the first big signs of trouble for Clarke. The biggest endorsement came from acting mayor Hines, who said in his statement that “Angela Walker and I hold many of the same fundamental principles and share the same goals and vision for the city of Milwaukee” in what seems to be a rare sign of crossover between Democrats and Greens as of late. The final boost to Walker’s campaign arrived two weeks ago from California, when the wave of protests now dubbed the “Occupy Movement” began in San Francisco. Since then, Occupy camps and protests have popped up in a number of American cities including Milwaukee. The protests were immediately framed in opposing lights between the two candidates, with Clarke calling the Occupy Movement a “wave of crime” that he would root out as mayor and connecting Walker’s socialist identification to the conservative attack slogan of “San Francisco Socialism.” Walker embraced the movement calling it a necessary pushback against the corporate greed that put the country and many cities including Milwaukee in their current economic and financial position. Walker also claimed solidarity with the protesters citing that as a union organizer and a bus driver she has seen first hand much of the poverty that is affecting Milwaukee, and that direct action to oppose such circumstances is a good and necessary one, not a criminal action. The current national polling around the Occupy Movement is divided but narrowly supportive, with the latest poll from Gallup at 38% approving and 33% disapproving. The swell of support of the movement from unions and a tacit nod of approval from Senator Russ Feingold has indicated that at least in Wisconsin somewhat more voters are for the Occupy Movement than against it. Support like that is common for such a new wave of protests, but it can just as quickly fade. It appears that Angela Walker has captured that groundswell at just the right time to ride it to the mayor’s office with a margin of victory of 53.7% to 46.3% over Sheriff Clarke.
Walker marks a milestone for both the Green Party and a revival of the idea of socialism in the United States. She is the first Green member elected to mayor of a large city outside the west coast. However, she is not the first socialist to be elected mayor of Milwaukee. The city actually has had three socialist mayors before in its history between 1910 and 1960, all elected as members of the Socialist Party. Emil Seidel was Milwaukee’s first Socialist mayor, serving for two years from 1910 to 1912. Daniel Hoan served as mayor from 1916 to 1940, and Frank Zeidler, Milwaukee’s last Socialist Party mayor, served between 1948 and 1960. The success of the Socialist ticket in Milwaukee became known as Sewer Socialism, for its focus on issues of public health and infrastructure in the city, in particular the frequent praise for Milwaukee’s sewer system in the early 20th century, and the move of its candidates away from the more revolutionary rhetoric of the time. Similarly, the Green Party has seen recent success in Wisconsin, with county officials being elected in Douglas and Bayfield counties as early as the 1980s, and more recent success in other county offices as well as in the Madison and Milwaukee city councils. Walker’s election as mayor seems to mark a symbolic meshing of the modern Green and historical Socialist tendencies of the city. The revival of a modern Sewer Socialism does seem to mix well with the Green Party’s values, and Walker as a transit union organizer fits the bill of combining the two broad positions into one.
***
David Conley Marks 25 Years And Counting For Wisconsin Greens
April 18, 2011
SUPERIOR, WI - Two weeks after Angela Walker became the first Green Party member elected mayor of a major city outside the west coast, the Wisconsin Greens achieved another historic milestone. In Douglas County on Lake Superior, county supervisor and Green Party member David Conley is on his twelfth term in office and as of this month has marked 25 years on the board of supervisors. Conley was first elected to the Douglas County board in 1986 and has been on the board ever since, making the Douglas County board of supervisors the legislative body with the longest record of having a Green Party member in the entire country. In fact, Conley’s tenure on the Douglas County board of supervisors dates so far back in the history of the Green Party, that it nearly predates even the beginnings of the formation of a national Green Party.
The Green movement in the United States started in the 1980s, with the first large scale gatherings of politically-minded members of the environmentalist movement being the North American Bio-Regional Congress and the Green Founding Conference, both held in 1984. The Founding Conference held in Saint Paul, Minnesota is usually cited as the starting point for the eventual creation of the Green Party. It was the site of the drafting of the current Ten Key Values which has since become the bedrock of the national and state Green Party platforms[6]. These collections of environmental activists soon developed a regular correspondence with the idea of eventually forming a national party, but before then, a number of state and local regional political organizations were created to bring together and coordinate political activity at a more grassroots level. In Wisconsin, even before the Wisconsin Green Party was founded in 1988, a number of regional Green groups within the state were already active.
Conley was and still is a member of the Lake Superior Greens, a regional activist group in Wisconsin and Minnesota that lobbies for local environmental issues. His wife, Jan Conley, is one of the leaders of the group as well as a member of multiple environmentalist and wilderness protection organizations in the Lake Superior area. When Conley was first elected to the Douglas County board of supervisors though, the Lake Superior Greens were one of the major forerunners of the state and national Green Party movement and included two other members who were key in kickstarting the Green movement in Wisconsin and in founding the Wisconsin Greens: Frank Koehn and Walter Bresette[7]. Koehn was first elected in 1986 like Conley, but to the county board of neighboring Bayfield County. He served on the Bayfield board for twelve years until 1999 and is still the second longest serving Green elected official in Wisconsin after Conley. Bresette, a member of the Red Cliff Chippewa, was an indigenous rights activist in northwest Wisconsin. Both Bresette and Koehn were active in a number of environmental and indigenous protests in northwest Wisconsin during the 1980s including fighting to stop sulfide mines in the area and in what became known as the Wisconsin Walleye War. That series of events that occurred in northern Wisconsin stemmed from a series of court rulings in the 1970s and 1980s that upheld the rights of several Ojibwe tribes to fish on traditional fishing grounds. The final ruling issued in 1987 held that treaties from the early 19th century regarding hunting and fishing grounds were still valid and allowed the tribes to hunt and fish in territories designated by those treaties even if the areas were not on current reservation lands. In the following four years, confrontations between tribe members, state park wardens, and indigenous rights activists on one side and sport fishermen, residents, and visitors on the other occurred sporadically in areas covered by the ruling. In 1991, after years of nonviolent protest by the tribes, Wisconsin finally stood by the court ruling and thanks to people like Bresette and Koehn, tribal fishing has continued ever since.
Bresette, Koehn, and the Conleys also participated in a number of protests in the late 1980s against the construction and expansion of sulfide mines in northern Wisconsin, such as the proposed Crandon mine near Ladysmith. Some of the proposed mines were on reservation lands, and once again created an intersection of protest and activism between the indigenous rights and environmentalist movements that helped create the Wisconsin Green Party and the national Green Party. Today, those foundational traditions can be seen in the continued efforts in both protest and politics by the Green Party in areas such as the protests against the Keystone pipeline expansion in South Dakota and Nebraska. The presence of David Conley in the Douglas County board of supervisors provides a small but meaningful continuity between the earliest days of the Green movement and the Green Party's current status as a small but influential party that continues the fight on these and similar issues.
***
Oakland Police Clash With Occupy Camp at City Hall, Arrest Hundreds of Protesters
April 21, 2011
OAKLAND, CA - Since beginning in San Francisco a month ago, the Occupy Movement has spread across the United States and Canada with protest camps and demonstrations being held in dozens of major cities in both countries. The Occupy protests in Oakland have been focused largely around a camp formed in Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of city hall. The Oakland camp was one of the first protests to spring up in the wake of the original Occupy march and protest camp in San Francisco, gathering hundreds of people just four days after the March Down Montgomery took place. Since then, the camps and other protest areas in San Francisco and Oakland have been seen as the epicenter of the Occupy Movement. Micah White, an editor at the company Adbusters which was the major promoter of the Occupy Movement online before it was launched, has been a frequent attendee at both camps as well as the one in People’s Park in Berkeley where White lives.
However, as one of the central locations of the Occupy protests, the Oakland protest camp has come under heavy scrutiny by police. Most cities where the Occupy Movement has spread have attempted to maintain a civil relationship between the protesters and police, with officers generally keeping distance between themselves and the protest camps and avoiding moving in or making arrests unless the protests are spilling over to a point of posing a danger to themselves such as disrupting traffic. Last week, Oakland mayor Wilson Riles Jr. worked with Occupy to peacefully clear the camp in front of city hall amid growing reports of unsanitary conditions in the demonstration camp and graffiti and other vandalism of the plaza. The ad hoc leaders of the Oakland protest including White worked with city officials and police to clear the plaza and let maintenance crews come in to clean up the area. However, it appears after the cleanup, it was unclear whether protesters were to be allowed to reenter the plaza. After protesters returned over the weekend, police assembled a presence nearby starting Tuesday morning. Yesterday on Wednesday April 20, police moved into Frank Ogawa Plaza and made hundreds of arrests while clearing the park of the estimated nearly 2,000 protesters there at the time. Police used batons and in some cases tear gas to clear the park as they reclaimed the plaza, a much different scene to the mostly peaceful clearing of the park the first time last week.
The reaction to the clearing of the plaza has been swift from many people in the Bay Area. Former state legislator and civil rights activist Angela Davis and former Oakland congresswoman Barbara Lee vehemently condemned the actions of the police. Davis has been speaking at Occupy protests around California for a couple weeks, including a speech given at the Oakland camp last week. San Francisco mayor Matt Gonzalez and even Mayor Riles called the police officers’ response “harsh” and “heavy-handed” with Riles saying that the officers overstepped their bounds in terms of how he wanted to approach the situation of the Occupy camp. This seems to put Riles at odds with Oakland police chief Anthony Batts. Batts, who has been Oakland's police chief for a year and a half after seven years as head of the Long Beach police department, said in a statement that the incident was caused by poor communication between city and police officials and bureaucratic red tape delaying policy changes. Batts also put the blame on broader problems in the police department such as a lack of funding leading to understaffing and needing officers from other cities in the area leading to a lack of preparation and coordination in the operation. As an example of the staffing issues in the Oakland department, some of the officers involved in the clearance of the Occupy camp were from the San Francisco and San Jose police departments. This also has caused a stir in San Francisco, where the response and support of the Occupy protests from mayor Gonzalez has put the mayor and the Green Party at loggerheads with Sheriff Michael Hennessey, who is running for mayor this year.
Police chief Batts may have cited the department’s staffing issues as a cause, but the violent clearance of the Occupy camp is only a continuation of a years long string of troubling issues the Oakland Police Department has been mired in. In 2003, Oakland PD had a number of court mandated policies and federal monitoring reports imposed on it after a particularly damning scandal involving the “Riders”, a night shift patrol that was accused of planting evidence and beating up or robbing suspects in West Oakland. Since then, the department has been subject to an originally five-year consent decree that is now going on its eighth year in force, an independent monitoring report on reform progress, and a mandate of a stricter crowd control policy. According to civil rights attorneys, yesterday's raid on the Occupy camp may be a violation of the crowd control policy. The potential violation of the policy likely only heightens the scrutiny the city is placing on the police department as the mayor and city council struggle to find a way out of Oakland’s current budgetary hole. The staffing and funding issues around Oakland’s police department were one of the major topics of last year’s mayoral election and neither Riles nor councilor Rebecca Kaplan, also a mayoral candidate last year, were too keen on seeing more money go to the department or its officer numbers increased back to what the department considers normal staffing levels. With yesterday's action, Oakland PD has not done much to get back in the good graces of the city council or the mayor.
[1] As in OTL, Adbusters was one of the original key organizers and promoters of the Occupy protests.
[2] Source: https://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content/the-regents-club/1854684/
[3] For what the Banker's Heart looks like: https://artandarchitecture-sf.com/bankers-heart.html
[4] Even in OTL, Milwaukee has still only had 6 mayors in the 75 years since 1948. Including one acting mayor who only served for a few months.
[5] Ryan Clancy of the Bay View neighborhood is elected alderman from the 13th district in 2008.
[6] The Green Party site has a pretty good series on its history. The section on this part of its history is here: https://www.gp.org/early_history
[7] When I started planning for this section I thought I would find more on Conley than I ended up being able to. So this ended up being a bit more just on the history of the Wisconsin Greens, so enjoy that.