Photo credit: Starley Shelton
It’s always amusing to see how East Coast political reporters cover events in the Midwest when they’re forced to venture into totally unfamiliar territory such as Wisconsin.
Covering the Wisconsin presidential primaries this time, many of them discovered a hitherto unknown phenomenon they called “Wisconsin Nice.”
They tossed it around to describe right-wing Republicans and right-wing talk radio here, which they somehow found to be much kinder and gentler than the uglier versions existing elsewhere.
The idea is totally absurd to anyone who’s actually lived in Wisconsin through the polarizing, scorched-earth politics of Gov. Scott Walker that have split this state right down the middle.
And, of course, the concept makes no sense at all when you realize they’re using it to describe voters and talk show hosts who prefer the reprehensible Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to the vile billionaire Donald Trump.
The n-word Cruz brings to mind is nasty, not nice.
Cruz’s colleagues find him so loathsome that even though he’s the last candidate standing to prevent Trump from leading their party to widespread defeat in November, only a handful of Republicans, including Walker, can bring themselves to endorse him.
And, in fact, there’s no reason to believe Cruz would be any better a candidate than Trump.
Cruz supports Trump’s most bigoted, hateful ideas—wasting billions to build a massive wall on the Mexican border, ordering police to round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants and barring Muslims from entering the U.S.
Then Cruz adds other equally destructive ideas all his own—shutting down the U.S. government until Congress destroys the Affordable Care Act that insures 20 million people, defaulting on U.S. debts to wreck our national economy and creating a Supreme Court that would repeal Roe v. Wade after 43 years to prevent any woman from ever again legally ending a pregnancy.
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If those are ideas nice Wisconsinites support, I sure wouldn’t want to live in the hell hole envisioned by more mean-spirited Republicans.
Walker’s and Ryan’s Fake Niceness
Most of us recognize where this absurd notion of Wisconsin Republican niceness came from. Two of our state’s most prominent Republicans—Walker and House Speaker Paul Ryan—fake such niceness to try to make their vicious, right-wing ideas seem more harmless and benign.
Unlike personally repellant, right-wing Republicans like, oh let’s say, Cruz, both Walker and Ryan really do seem like nice guys.
They’ve perfected the innocuous, wide-eyed innocence of Tony Perkins in the closing scene of Psycho, when Norman Bates says anyone watching him would think he wouldn’t hurt a fly.
You need to closely examine the cruel consequences of Walker’s legislation, which destroys workers’ wages and lets a destructive, polluting mining company write its own environmental rules, or Ryan’s House budgets, which dismantle Social Security and Medicare to give enormous tax cuts to the wealthy, to realize that Walker and Ryan are not nice people.
That phony, low-key niceness doesn’t work nearly as well nationally. Primary voters quickly bored of Walker as a presidential candidate and Ryan didn’t exactly whip crowds into excited frenzies as Mitt Romney’s running mate four years ago.
Which is why the fantasy of Republican leaders—and quite likely Ryan himself—of a contested party convention turning to Ryan as their white knight to save Republicans from both Trump and Cruz is probably just that, a fantasy.
Already discredited party leaders should be careful what they wish for.
Cruz cannot secure enough delegates at this late date to win the presidential nomination. All he can do is prevent Trump from winning enough delegates himself.
But the overwhelming majority of delegates at the July convention will have been brought there by millions of Republicans voting in hard-fought primary elections for either Trump or Cruz.
The first- and second-place candidates are two ruthless gutter fighters whose angry, impassioned supporters have thoroughly rejected the wimpy preferred candidate of the Republican establishment, the milquetoast son and sibling of the last two Republican presidents.
The frontrunner’s rallies already have escalated into violent attacks on anyone who opposes their candidate, who crudely encourages such violence by shouting from the podium the equivalent of “Sic ’em!” And the second choice has what Shakespeare described as that dangerous “lean and hungry look.”
Will self-appointed Republican leaders who have shown absolutely no ability to control their fiercely racist and hateful grassroots rabble in the primaries actually dare to turn their backs on both of the choices of their own enraged voters and nominate someone else who hasn’t campaigned for president a single day or won a single vote?
Wisconsin won’t be remembered as such a nice turning point in the battle for the nomination if it leads to a nationally televised bloodbath at the Republican convention with delegates brawling in the aisles, bludgeoning each other with those signs identifying their states and angrily walking out denouncing their party as they torch Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena to the ground.
We warned Republicans about appealing to extremists.
