The View from Wisconsin

[Geee]

American Thinker:



For those outside the state to fully appreciate the significance of what is happening in Wisconsin, it is necessary to understand the local political situation over the past decade.

To conservatives and to many moderates, the capture of the governorship, the state senate and assembly, two House seats, and the Senate seat formerly held by Russ Feingold, produced a feeling that can only be described as liberation. The total Democratic control that accompanied the Doyle administration resulted in a climate that in its fiscal, legal, and ethical lapses was extraordinary even for a state as politically eccentric as Wisconsin.

Often cited as the state that produced both Bob La Fallotte and Joe McCarthy, Wisconsin politics has generally trended to the populist/liberal. Milwaukee was the first major city to elect a Socialist, Emil Seidel, as Mayor (1910). He was succeeded by another Socialist, Dan Hoan, who led the longest continuous Socialist administration in U.S. history. (Appropriately, a misguided and now deteriorated public works project, known locally as the "Bridge to Nowhere," was named for Hoan.)