BUMMED OUT BY ANOTHER can't-do candidacy, miffed that his "battleground" state got bumped from the battle plan, Tommy Thompson took a stunning home- stretch shot at the top of the ticket. "I thought George Bush's campaign was probably the poorest-run presidential campaign," the governor of Wisconsin told Don Imus on his October 18 radio show. "And I think this is a close second."
Have you shared this with the Dole people? Imus asked. "I've told them I've been disappointed," Thompson said, "but they have stopped talking to me as of about a week ago." If those comments speak loudly about the Dole campaign, they say a lot about Thompson, too: a prideful, pull-no-punches politician with a penchant for pummeling the opposition.
Just a decade or so ago, Thompson was a small-town Wisconsin pol with a bad haircut, a bad nickname ("Dr. No"), and a bad rap (shrill, right-wing obstructionist). The business editor of the state's largest daily lambasted his "high-decibel, low-IQ rhetoric." The head of the state's Democratic party said his IQ was "smaller than my bra size." A Republican rival called him a " two-bit hack."
To his doubters, he was dull of mind and thick of tongue, a bush-league lawyer-legislator whose exuberant ambition far outstripped his political, intellectual, and oratorical talent. "11 of you thought I was gonna fall fiat on my face," Thompson told writers and editors at the Milwaukee Journal years later. "Didn't think I could govern."
Today he is the country's second-most senior governor, the father of state- based radical welfare reform, and a legitimate if longshot presidential prospect. He even made Bob Dole's veep list, a helpless waiting game he compared to "roasting on a spit." The Thompson tenure in Wisconsin -- chronicled in his new book, Power to the People -- has been epoch-making: the end of the welfare entitlement; the first religious-school voucher law (now in court); state-imposed caps on local school spending; a massive state buy-down of local school property taxes; an explosion of prison-building; the arrival of large-scale gambling in Wisconsin; and a revolution in the possibilities and power of the governor's office.
He is the state's first enduring, high-profile Republican politician in 30 years. In his 1994 landslide, he became the first Republican to carry the city of Milwaukee in a governor's race in nearly 50 years and helped his party end a quarter-century of futility by wresting control of the state assembly. Exit polls showed he got more than half the union vote, and precinct returns suggested he got a third of Milwaukee's black vote.
In a party with unpopular national standard-bearers like Newt Gingrich, success stories like Thompson's scream out for study. How does a Republican deliver on an aggressive conservative agenda in a fatuously "progressive" state -- and stay popular? In Thompson's case, the answers lie partly in his personal style and partly in his agenda, neither one of which is classically conservative. Thompson is, above everything else, an activist. His approach to governing couldn't be less laissez-faire.
"I'm a builder," he loves to say, and he is: a road builder, a prison builder, a stadium builder, a party builder, an image builder, an empire builder. His activism has taken him in conservative directions, like cutting corporate taxes and making welfare recipients work. It has taken him in a few liberal directions, like buying up large wilderness tracts for preservation.
In Power To The People, ideology is a bad word. "I am not an ideologue," he writes. "I'm a doer." Ideology may be good for, well, ideas, but "it may not work in the real world at a given time. . . . My solutions didn't always fit the doctrine of the Heritage Foundation," he tells us, "and I don't litter my speeches with all the buzzwords or the philosophies of Edmund Burke or Friedrich Hayek."
This is partly a pose, of course: What politician cheerfully admits to being an ideologue? But it is more or less true to the man, a career politician once sneered at by journalists, academics, and ruling Democrats, an elastic, flexible, practical, slightly unpredictable student of power. He is the Republican least likely to commit Gingrich's mistake of getting way out in front of public opinion and ceding the rhetorical center to the enemy.
When Thompson started running on welfare ten years ago, he was out in front of opinion leaders, but not voters. He knew that welfare was a huge issue in the high-benefit state of Wisconsin. During his tenure, it has served him politically like nothing else. It is not only his source of national identity. It is the issue Wisconsin voters most associate him with. And there is almost no political downside to being a welfare-reformer today. A good listener, Thompson figured that out before most others.
Even on his most popular crusades, Thompson has been careful and incremental in advancing his agenda. Before his sweeping W-2 welfare overhaul came a long series of highly publicized but very limited experiments. He slashed benefits when he got in, but later poured new money into day-care and training and support services, making his brand of welfare reform look almost liberal compared with plans hatched later by a GOP Congress.
Thompson happens to be a pro-life Catholic, but among his governing priorities, abortion ranks somewhere beneath recycling. His social issues are crime and welfare, not school prayer. The culture war is divisive, and Thompson is almost Clintonesque in his drive for affirmation, his wish to be embraced across political fault lines, and his desire to appeal simultaneously to historically contentious constituencies. (Bill Clinton in De Pere, Wisconsin, on Labor Day: "Let's say the Democrats are pro-business and pro-labor." Thompson in his book: "I am a pro-business governor. And a pro-union governor.")
To activism, pragmatism, and populism, another "ism" can be added: boosterism. Boosterism has done for Thompson what good-natured optimism did for Ronald Reagan: expand his personal appeal beyond his partisan base. Thompson is obsessed by state rankings and intensely competitive about Wisconsin's standing, whether measured in jobs or business starts or Rose Bowls or the cranberry crop. That boosterism, too, knows no ideology. Despite his record as a tax-cutter, Thompson pushed a local sales-tax hike to build a new ballpark for the Milwaukee Brewers. It was the least popular thing he has ever done and, revealingly, the one he has spent the most political capital on.
Two other things have been immensely helpful to Thompson's career. One is Wisconsin's bountiful economy, for which the governor claims some credit. Thanks to years of uninterrupted growth, Thompson has been able to pay for new programs without tax increases. Or put another way, he's been able to cut a few taxes without slashing popular programs. Even after ten years of Thompson, Wisconsin remains a high-tax, high-service state. Under this Republican governor, state spending has gone up faster than inflation.
The other boon to Thompson has been the state's extraordinary gubernatorial veto. Thanks to a constitutional quirk and its expansive interpretation by recent courts, the governor can rewrite legislation by creatively deleting sentences and words and numbers to render new phrases and new sentences and new meaning. In other words, the executive can legislate. Thus, in a purely constitutional sense, he may be the most powerful governor in the country. He has used his bionic veto thousands of times, and with a certain disconcerting swagger. As solicitous as he can be, Thompson also has an arrogant streak. In speeches, he often invites his opponents to just "get out of the way." After Milwaukee archbishop Reinbert Weakland criticized his welfare overhaul on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post, an indignant Thompson demanded an apology and told the prelate to "read his Bible."
That's vintage Thompson. So is a curious but telling anecdote in Power to the People about how he got hooked on politics. During a senior-year college internship on Capitol Hill, one figure impressed him more than all the others, a commanding political presence with a forceful, straight-talking style "that took over the room when he spoke. . . . It seemed as if we were compelled to listen. He spoke without notes for forty-five minutes, and none of us missed a word. Upon returning from Washington I enrolled in law school at the University of Wisconsin, determined to run for political office someday."
The awe-inspiring speaker? Not Barry Goldwater. Not Bobby Kennedy. It was union boss Jimmy Hoffa. Not exactly a young Republican's role model, but something that appealed to Thompson more: a figure of power, a larger-than- life tough guy.
Thompson has carefully cultivated his own power as governor, appreciates the unique command and authority and respect a governor enjoys -- the next best thing to the Oval Office for an American politician -- and has made it clear he regards such career options as senator or cabinet secretary as rather slavish in comparison.
During Thompson's tenure, the office of governor has only become more appealing and powerful across the country, as states assert their influence over welfare and other federal programs. The men and woman running these " laboratories of democracy" are having the time of their lives. For ambitious, action-oriented Republican governors like Thompson, devolution is no doubt consistent with a certain ideological tradition. But it's also consistent with the relish they bring to being in charge and in control of a large enterprise. After all, the power is flowing their way. If one of these governors gets elected president someday, you will wonder how much relish he will bring to devolution, if it's his power that's devolving.
Craig Gilbert is a political reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.