opinion

Schneider: Madison curmudgeon, Mayor Paul Soglin, won't beat Scott Walker in this century

When making the announcement last week that he would be running for governor, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin waxed poetic about the state's dairy industry, the growth of the university and public education, and the "advent of electricity" in Wisconsin. Soglin said he would be running a "supper club campaign" to unseat Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Clearly, Soglin thinks he's the right man for the right time. But given his record, it is unclear whether that time is 2018 or 1918.

Soglin was famously first elected to the Madison city council in 1968; five years later, at age 27, he became the city's youngest mayor. A vocal student activist during the Vietnam War era, Soglin proudly declared himself a "radical" during his first successful mayoral campaign in 1973. His opponent that year, incumbent mayor William Dyke, tried to tie Soglin to recent bombings on the University of Wisconsin campus, saying he thought he would win by earning the votes of Madison's "decent" people. During his victory speech, Soglin wryly thanked Madison's "indecent people" for helping him to victory.

But as is the case with any aging "progressive," as they get older, their ideas become more archaic. In an interview with WisconsinEye's Steve Walters last year, the 72-year old Soglin dreamed of a Wisconsin forged by Progressive lion "Fighting Bob" La Follette, in which state government collected more money and doled it out to local governments.

Over the past century, such an arrangement set a trap for taxpayers; when their property taxes skyrocketed, state government blamed local governments for raising taxes, while local governments blamed state government for not sending them enough money. Scott Walker's union reforms began to reverse this trend, allowing more money to stay at the local level rather than being laundered through the state.

Soglin has frequently boasted of his ability to create jobs in Madison, but his city has always had a built-in advantage; it is the home of both state government and Wisconsin's largest university, both of which aren't scheduled to go out of business anytime soon. Soglin has brushed off the city's reliance on government-funded jobs, arguing Madison has thrived despite Scott Walker's draconian cuts to the state workforce; yet the state actually has more full-time equivalent employees now than it did when Walker was elected in 2010.

In fact, Madison has grown quickly in large part due to the largesse of health care software giant Epic Systems, a company for which Soglin once worked. It's the same type of private sector expansion Walker is banking on by luring Foxconn to Wisconsin, a move Soglin has criticized as a "terrible deal." Yet just months ago, Soglin was begging Foxconn to take a nearly 100-year old hot dog factory off his hands when Oscar Mayer moved out of Madison. (Unfortunately for Soglin, he wasn't able to convince the electronics company that encased meats were the future.)

Of course, the spiciest issue of the campaign so far has been Walker's ridicule of Soglin for presenting Fidel Castro with a key to the City of Madison. This is entirely fair shot at Soglin — even after Castro's death, the Madison mayor remembered the murderous Cuban dictator as "a popular leader who inspired generations of Cubans." Unavailable for comment were the generations of Cubans sacrificed in front of Castro's firing squads and who drowned trying to escape to America. It's as if Soglin was unaware the last century — during which the brutality of Communism was unmasked — even occurred.

Clearly, Soglin is from a bygone era when government regulators were seen as the good guys. Ideologically, he's from the early 1900s mold of the romantic autocrats. This is the same era when Woodrow Wilson's right-hand man, Colonel Edward Mandell House, wrote a gripping novel about the heroism of a government bureaucrat. It was called, unironically, "Phillip Dru: Administrator."

It would be difficult to write a complete history of local Wisconsin government without including Soglin; few elected officials have had such a hold on a large city for a half a century. But Soglin is notoriously fighting modernity, cracking down on modern conveniences like Uber and e-cigarettes. Even the Journal Sentinel's progressive columnist Emily Mills has called him an "out-of-touch curmudgeon," and a "cranky aging Boomer who refuses to give up his position and power."

It's a motto unlikely to appear on a T-shirt. But, come to think of it, given its veracity, maybe Soglin is more suited to run for president.

Christian Schneider is a Journal Sentinel columnist and blogger. Email christian.schneider@jrn.com. Twitter: @Schneider_CM