{"id":187795,"date":"2011-03-03T00:58:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-03T05:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/03\/03\/could-wisconsin-democrats-please-send-some-spare-backbone-to-washington-dc\/"},"modified":"2011-03-03T00:58:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-03T05:58:00","slug":"could-wisconsin-democrats-please-send-some-spare-backbone-to-washington-dc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/03\/03\/could-wisconsin-democrats-please-send-some-spare-backbone-to-washington-dc\/","title":{"rendered":"Could Wisconsin Democrats Please Send Some Spare Backbone to Washington, DC?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After a couple of weeks of a growing grassroots effort to initiate recall campaigns against 8 Republican state Senators, the Wisconsin Democratic party <a href=\"http:\/\/voices.washingtonpost.com\/plum-line\/2011\/03\/breaking_wisconsin_dems_throw.html\">has officially joined the effort<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: blue;\"><p>The Wisconsin Democratic Party has decided to throw its weight behind a nascent grassroots drive to recall a number of GOP state senators, a move that will considerably increase the pressure on them to break with Governor Scott Walker, the Dem party chair confirms to me.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The proposals and the policies that Republicans are pushing right now are not what they campaigned on, and they&#8217;re extreme,&#8221; the party chair, Mike Tate, said in an interview. &#8220;Something needs to be done about it now. We&#8217;re happy to stand with citizens who are filling papers to recall these senators.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Previously, Wisconsin Dems had not publicly supported talk about recalling GOP Senators, in hopes of privately reaching a negotiated solution to the crisis. The Wisconsin Democratic Party&#8217;s decision to support the recall drives represents a significant ratcheting up of hostilities and in essence signals that all bets are off.<\/p>\n<p>Eight Republican Senators are eligible to be recalled right now, [the state Senate has staggered terms, and you cannot initiate a recall in the first year of a term] and various groups around Wisconsin are beginning to file papers to make it happen. Tate told me that the party would throw its organization behind such efforts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You know, I think that when the base is motivated, this might be a better idea than what they do in DC, which is to try to defang motivated Democrats, and call them names like &#8220;Professional Left.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Then again, what do I know.&nbsp; I don&#8217;t have experience <strike>engineering the biggest electoral reversal for Democrats in history<\/strike> with the realities of politics.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe deliberately demoralizing the party faithful actually works.<\/p>\n<p>And maybe I&#8217;m Charlie Sheen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After a couple of weeks of a growing grassroots effort to initiate recall campaigns against 8 Republican state Senators, the Wisconsin Democratic party has officially joined the effort: The Wisconsin Democratic Party has decided to throw its weight behind a nascent grassroots drive to recall a number of GOP state senators, a move that will &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1000,1023,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections","category-labor","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187795"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}