A tale of two governors: meet Tommy Thompson, dismantler of the welfare state, and Jim Edgar, the riverboat king - Wisconsin and Illinois politics

National Review, May 16, 1994 by Daniel D. Polsby

OFF-YEAR elections are typically unkind to the party in control of the White House, and 1986 was no exception. An already weak GOP dropped eight seats in the House and lost control of the Senate. But it did pick up eight governorships, including, improbably, Wisconsin, one of the country's most liberal states. Wisconsin voters were in a dark mood that year, brooding about taxes, the highest in the region, the erosion of the state's industrial base, its faltering farm economy, and the trap of being a welfare magnet (that is, bidding public-assistance recipients away from states with lower benefits). So Wisconsin bounced its liberal governor, Tony Earl, and cast its lot with a dark horse, the minority leader of the state Assembly, who had earned the nickname "Dr. No" in a twenty-year-long legislative career. Tommy George Thompson, age 45 at the time, thus entered the national stage.

Tommy Thompson has what pundits like to call rough edges. "I'm just a kid from Elroy," the governor likes to say. He used to be known (though less so recently) for his precarious diction. But his political skills were never precarious. During his first run for governor, he successfully defined the election as a referendum on his opponent. The national media were surprised when Thompson coasted home with a 7-point margin of victory. Four years later, no one was surprised when he crushed the savvy and respected Tom Loftus, Speaker of the Assembly, by a 16-point margin. Up for re-election again this year, Mr. Thompson has public-approval numbers so high--three-quarters of the voters rate his performance "good" or "excellent"--that brand-name Democrats are finding reasons to stay out of the race.

Tommy Thompson is the darling of left-wing Wisconsin. Generally speaking, Republicans who beguile left-liberal constituencies do so by being liberal, like John Lindsay, or, better, by becoming liberal, like John Anderson or Harry Blackmun. None of this for Tommy Thompson. On the contrary, he is a movement conservative whose hero is Barry Goldwater ("In my heart, I still know he's right"). To be sure, his talisman--"reform"--is a magic word in Wisconsin, which considers itself to be the reformingest state in the Union.

But though Robert LaFollette and the Progressive movement shaped Wisconsin's self-identity for the twentieth century, the roots of the state's politics are ethnic. A plurality of residents are the descendants of German immigrants who deeply admired the welfare state that Bismarck set up in Prussia. Wisconsin was early in developing one of the largest public sectors in the nation, with welfare payments and taxes that have been (and remain) among the country's highest. A resident of Milwaukee with an annual income of $100,000 has a higher tax burden than a resident of such tax-happy jurisdictions as New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

Tommy Thompson aims to undo all that. Some of the great landmarks of the welfare state are on their way out the door.

Privatizing Wisconsin

BEGIN with public education. The Milwaukee Parental choice Program is famous because of the coalition between Mr. Thompson and Polly Williams, a Democratic member of the Wisconsin legislature. This modest voucher program provides $2,500 grants-in-aid to allow parents to remove their children from Milwaukee's terrible public schools. At present the program embraces only seven hundred pupils--a statutory cap limits participation to 1 per cent of the public-school rolls, and forbids the grants to be spent in any of the city's excellent Catholic schools. Grant recipients have been extremely satisfied with the program, and their children have shown a pattern of improving attendance and attitude, if not yet consistently better test scores. And according to a study by John F. Witte, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin who had been highly skeptical of educational choice, the Milwaukee program has not, as the teachers' union had predicted, "skimmed" the best students from public schools or favored better-off families at the expense of poorer ones. In mid February, Miss Williams and Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist asked the legislature to consider expanding the program by half and removing the ban on parochial schools.

The legislature is not about to do so just now. Ever since Chrysler closed down the old American Motors assembly plant in Kenosha in 1988, the teachers' union has been the most important labor voice in Wisconsin, and on this issue it has drawn a line in the sand. But the camel's nose is under the tent; sooner or later the public schools' finance monopoly is doomed. Although Mr. Thompson has been content to allow others to carry the ball on school reform, no one doubts that most of the credit belongs to him.

Welfare reform has been a similar story. Virtually every state has something or another that can be called "workfare." But "learnfare" is a Thompson innovation: parents on welfare have their benefits cut unless their teenage children regularly attend school. The revolutionary theory here--that it is the responsibility of parents, not truant officers, to make sure that children attend school--is still deemed scandalous in some parts of the state, like Madison; but the electorate seems to like it.