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6/24/2005 Why Mike Ellis Should Run; It's Time for the State GOP's Boldest Candidate to Step Up to the Plate By Marc Eisen Bill Kraus and Bob Williams, two old Republican warriors from the glory days of Mel Laird and Lee Dreyfus, were cutting through the Capitol not long ago. They had some time to kill before lunch, so they popped into the office of state Sen. Mike Ellis, the Neenah Republican who’s widely regarded as the keenest policy thinker in the Legislature. Kraus and Williams had a simple message for the 35-year legislative veteran: He ought to run for governor in 2006. Many disaffected Democrats and Republicans view 2006 with dread. There’s a desire for a fresh voice to rise above the drone of mediocrity. That’s where Mike Ellis could come in. Hemmed in by a combative Republican Legislature, Gov. Jim Doyle has shown himself to be tactically shrewd but devoid of bold policy initiatives. Worse, Doyle seems to be premising his reelection on fulfilling an ill-considered pledge to slash 10,000 or more state jobs. This has left many public employees, including true-blue Democrats, seething at what they see as Doyle’s betrayal. The two Republican hopefuls, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker and U.S. Rep. Mark Green of Green Bay, sound suspiciously like Stepford conservatives who might have been bred in that bull semen laboratory in DeForest. Do they possess a single genetic strand that hasn’t been shaped by a GOP political consultant? Ellis, in contrast, is Wisconsin’s John McCain. He’s a champion of campaign finance reform. He’s a ferocious critic of Democrat and Republican special interests for their corrupting hold on the Capitol. He is a Republican that Democrats could like -– a spellbinding speaker and big-picture thinker with a dollop of humor, not to mention a glint of crazy-ass unpredictability. “It would be enormously refreshing to see Ellis run,” says Mike McCabe of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Agrees Ed Garvey, “It’s an interesting prospect if Ellis does run.” More to the point, homeless Republicans who look in dismay at what’s happened to their party might like Mike enough to make him the state’s next governor. You have to feel for them. The Republican Party of Warren Knowles, Lee Dreyfus and Tommy Thompson -- pro-education, pro-growth and attuned to the state’s rich legacy of governmental activism –- has seemingly been taken over by God’s true believers and smooth-talking Amway-like salesmen pitching tax-freeze nostrums and chastity belts, while denigrating the university and demonizing gay people. Says Madison attorney Fred Mohs, “They’re a plague on our party.” To talk politics with Mike Ellis, 64, is to talk substance, not tactics and wedge issues. He has a sweeping unified view of how Wisconsin has spun off the tracks and smashed into the wall -– and, more important, how it might yet regain its status as a leader among states. Though he calls himself pro-life, Ellis ignores the familiar “guns, gays, God and feeding tubes” spiel of the GOP True Believers. Instead, he talks about Wisconsin’s unending fiscal crisis. “We’re perpetually in hock,” he moans, noting that governors and lawmakers have cooked the books to balance the last six straight biennial budgets. “The papering over of the biennial budget deficit immediately throws the next budget into the red, so we can never do any serious reform because we don’t have the resources.” Blame the pols, says Ellis. They’ve mortgaged their souls to the special interests who finance their campaigns. Doyle and the Democrats dance to the teachers’ union tune, while the Republicans take their cues from Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce. “We need to get the special interests out of the game,” Ellis says. “We need to use public money to fund elections. If we did that, the Legislature could break free from the tentacles of the special-interest groups. Then we could solve problem number one: bad budgeting.” Now Ellis is warmed up, laughing and cracking jokes to his aides, looking Elvis-like beneath his sunglasses (a youthful swimming accident overexposed him to chlorine and makes him sensitive to bright lights). Zeroing in on integrity issues, Ellis wants to merge the state’s election and ethics boards (“two toothless giants,” he sniffs), strengthen their powers, and let them root out trouble. “Legislators need to be afraid of something,” he says. Then Ellis comes to the heavy lifting -- restructuring school aid and local government finance. This is a policy area that typically sends lawmakers heading for the exits. This stuff is too hard, too complicated, too freighted with political dangers for the sound-bite rhetoric of the legislative leadership. But Ellis is in his element. Long ago he was a teacher, and he delights in the exposition as he sketches out his Equity in Education Act, which would create a statewide levy to finance K-12 education, with add-ons for certain kinds of students and a facilities building commission reviewing capital projects. “A kid in Crandon should get as good an education as a kid in a property-rich district like Neenah and Madison,” Ellis declares. When it comes to shared revenue, Ellis would dump the current system and give local governments more latitude to decide what taxes to impose and services to provide. Real poor communities, he adds, would continue to get state aid. Suddenly, Ellis looks up. “Jesus, I got a platform!” he exclaims, winking at staffers Mike Boerger and Kurt Schultz. “Where do I get the yard signs? I just came up with more goddamn good ideas than you’re going to hear out of Walker, Doyle -- what’s that other guy’s name? -- yeah, Green, him too.” This is cause for laughter all around. But reality is that Ellis doesn’t sound like a candidate. He’s up for his umpteenth Senate term in 2006, and seems satisfied with the prospect of another four years. Capitol veterans say Ellis lacks the drive, the dedication, the discipline, the organization to mount a statewide campaign. After a moment’s hesitation, Ellis admits there is a lot of truth to that assessment. Running for office means raising big piles of money, he says, and raising big piles of money means selling off big chunks of your integrity and independence to the interest groups. How much money? From $6 million to $9 million for a primary campaign, he says, then another $10 million for the general election. To raise that kind of cash, Ellis says, you might as well as auction yourself on eBay. The interest groups wind up buying your support. “By the time you’re elected, you’re no longer your own person, he says. “You have no independence.” It sounds as if Ellis has irrevocably slammed the door on a gubernatorial race. His brow furrows. Now he backtracks a bit. You could run a primary campaign on a $2 million budget, he allows. “I didn’t say I wasn’t going to run for governor,” he says. “But you have to figure out how in the name of God to do it. I don’t believe in suicide missions.” Perhaps Ellis should cast his eyes upward for inspiration. There, above his desk, hangs an oversized portrait of Gov. Lee Dreyfus, the maverick UW-Stevens Point chancellor who Williams and Kraus helped elect in 1978. Ellis, these two old soldiers argue, is cut from the same cloth. Dreyfus reveled in his outsider role, sounding a bugle call of progressive Republicanism and open government. He won the GOP primary by besting the party’s endorsed candidate, U.S. Rep. Robert Kasten, then easily ousting acting Gov. Martin Schreiber in the general election. Consider that, in a three-way race, Ellis could win the GOP primary with just 34% of the vote. And consider how disgusted state employees are with Doyle and the bashing they regularly take from the Green/Walker wing of the GOP. Might not these normally Democratic state employees cross over and vote for Ellis? Here’s something else to think about: Ellis could benefit from the All Hell Breaks Loose scenario. It’s likely that the Capitol corruption cases against Brian Burke, Chuck Chvala, Scott Jensen and others will come to trial before the 2006 election. Those cases could be the prologue to an even bigger scandal that could define the 2006 election. The real time bomb tick-tick-ticking away could be the Nick Hurtgen indictment. The onetime Thompson administration insider, who moved up to become a Bear Stearns bond executive, is facing extortion and fraud charges in Illinois as part of a massive federal corruption probe. Published reports say investigators are looking into Hurtgen’s Wisconsin dealings. And that’s giving night sweats to Wisconsin GOP leaders. Consider the implications. Hurtgen has close ties to Thompson and his top adviser, Jim Klauser. Hurtgen’s fingerprints are also on the controversial financing of Miller Stadium, the $1.7 billion securitization of the Wisconsin tobacco settlement, and the refinancing of Milwaukee County’s debt for County Exec Scott Walker. That’s not all. Hurtgen, a Republican, also raised money for Jim Doyle in the closing days of the 2002 election. And he had a stake in efforts to land an Indian casino in Kenosha County. Hurtgen, 42, is facing up to 80 years in prison. That raises some interesting possibilities. What if, in a deal to avoid prison, Hurtgen rolls over on somebody big in Wisconsin politics. All hell would break loose, and a reformer like Mike Ellis could be the candidate the voters choose to clean up Wisconsin’s sullied politics. But first he must decide to run. -- Marc Eisen is editor of Isthmus, which has a webpage at http://www.thedailypage.com |
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