Photo credit: sporst / Flickr
Every once in a while, a truth is revealed that makes you suddenly realize you’ve been living in the past. There are people who perpetuate outdated myths for their own political purposes.
Get this. Madison is not a hippy, dippy Midwestern version of Haight-Ashbury, the land that time forgot, where glassy-eyed, unwashed ’60s youth (they’d be nearly 80 by now) stagger through the streets pronouncing all sorts of things “groovy.”
Quite the contrary. Madison and Dane County are at the center of Wisconsin’s most successful, modern, high-tech jobs explosion. The area is responsible for most of Wisconsin’s jobs growth and nearly 80% of its population increase in recent years. Those jobs and that population are the sort any state’s governor in his right mind would kill for—high-skilled, high-paying jobs attracting highly educated, young millennials.
Craig Gilbert reported those unsung revelations in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel assessing the impact this election year of such rapid growth of the state’s most politically progressive county. It immediately raises questions about why such extraordinary economic success has gone unsung by Republican Gov. Scott Walker, whose failure to create jobs remains one of his biggest political liabilities.
Madison in Our Lives?
Instead Walker keeps trashing both Madison and the University of Wisconsin, the driving engine behind that high-tech jobs surge he should be celebrating. When Madison Mayor Paul Soglin announced his Democratic candidacy to oppose Walker, the governor’s reaction was jaw dropping given what’s really going on in Madison and Dane County. “The last thing we need is more Madison in our lives,” Walker tweeted, claiming “businesses have left and murders have gone up.”
Walker promised in 2010 to create 250,000 jobs in his first term, implying that he wouldn’t deserve to be re-elected if he failed. Now completing his second term, Walker still hasn’t fulfilled that promise, but without Madison and Dane County in his life he would be an even bigger failure.
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Epic Systems, a software company that maintains electronic medical records on a majority of U.S. patients, simply moved from the city of Madison across the border to suburban Verona. There, it built a gigantic high-tech fantasyland, a constantly growing campus of buildings designed as an imaginative English estate that has been compared to both Oxford and Hogwarts. It now employs nearly 10,000 people. Soglin isn’t crying about losing the company since its young, well-paid employees are creating a luxury apartment boom in downtown Madison.
As for murderous Madison, 2017 was an unusual year because Madison’s homicides actually reached double digits at 11. In every other year during Soglin’s current tenure as mayor, homicides ranged from 3 to 8. What kind of governor demonizes one of the safest cities in his state by dishonestly smearing it as some kind of murder capital?
Terrible at Job Creation
An even bigger question, of course, is why a governor with a terrible jobs record—especially one who has just saddled state taxpayers with shelling out $3 billion to a company that so far guarantees to create only 3,000 jobs—would not only fail to take credit for the far greater economic success of the city and county where he works, but would publicly belittle that success.
The question immediately answers itself. You mean thousands of good, high-paying, high-tech jobs can be created without forcing state taxpayers to come up with $3 billion to pay off a fast-talking billionaire CEO? Even under Walker’s most unrealistic, rosy scenarios, Wisconsin is not expected to break even from that enormous taxpayer subsidy for a quarter century.
The other reason the Madison area’s economic boom is an embarrassment rather than an achievement for Walker is that it has happened despite Walker’s bad-mouthing, financial assault on the University of Wisconsin. Great universities create lots of good-paying jobs that never existed before. When Walker brags about increasing educational funding these days, he always leaves out who gutted funding in the first place.
Of course, there’s nothing unusual about Republican politicians running dishonest campaigns based on lies and distorted, outdated stereotypes. Forty years ago, Lee Dreyfus, one of Wisconsin’s most decent Republican governors, smiled when he called Madison “30 square miles surrounded by reality.” Things have changed, and not just that Madison is 77 square miles now.
Even before openly racist Donald Trump, Wisconsin Republicans had a nasty habit of intentionally feeding hateful divisions within the state by running against negative cartoon caricatures of its leading cities—hippy, dippy Madison, man, and Milwaukee, where, you know, those people live.
It would be nice to have a governor who would not only celebrate, but actually invest in economic success and job growth that improves people’s lives throughout Wisconsin, wherever they may live.
Come to think of it, that does sound like a real, old-fashioned idea these days, almost like something out of the ’60s. “Come on people now. Smile on your brother. Everybody get together. Try to love one another right now.”
