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Tommy Thompson was holding forth for an audience of journalists in Milwaukee last month when asked about the high-speed rail line from Milwaukee to Madison that Gov. Scott Walker effectively killed even before taking office.

Would Thompson have also turned down the $800 million in federal funding, as Walker had vowed to?

The former four-term governor and one-time Amtrak chairman tried to sidestep the bait. "I'm not going to criticize Gov. Walker," he says, in video made of the Milwaukee Press Club event. "He made a decision, and I support him."

But when pressed, Thompson couldn't resist.

"I would've changed high-speed trains into really being high-speed trains," Thompson said. "I would've changed it and I would've had it immediately Milwaukee to Madison, no-stop. Make it high speed and make it my train."

As governor, Thompson expanded passenger rail service from Milwaukee to Chicago. A decade ago he championed a version of the Milwaukee-Madison high-speed-rail plan and even had a locomotive named in his honor.

But now, before the day was out, Thompson's campaign sought to do damage control with this statement:

"I have consistently opposed the rail project between Milwaukee and Madison, and I believe Gov. Scott Walker did the right thing to reject the line. High-speed rail may work in certain densely populated areas of the country, but not in Wisconsin, and not when the federal government urgently needs to reduce spending and balance the budgets."

The moment was one of many in recent months that capture Tommy Thompson's challenge as he pursues the Republican nomination for the Senate seat that Herb Kohl will give up this year.

Simply put, Thompson is in the grips of an identity crisis.

Always a conservative, the four-term Republican governor and former Bush administration cabinet secretary is now running in a political environment in which his brand of conservatism is suspect. Derided from the right as too moderate - and too "big-government" - Thompson is burnishing his credentials by, in some cases, backing away from positions that once helped him amass huge majorities at the polls and work effectively with a Legislature often controlled by Democrats.

At the same time, the clash over his ideological street cred is further obscuring just how conservative Thompson's record in office really was.

"Tommy Thompson was a very conservative Republican," says Chuck Chvala, the former Senate Democratic leader who ran against Thompson in 1994 and lost by a landslide as the incumbent was elected to his third consecutive term. (Chvala was one of five lawmakers from both parties to lose a seat in the 2001 caucus scandal.)

Thompson implemented one of the first school voucher programs in the nation. He took a tough - critics would say draconian - stance cutting welfare, culminating in W-2, which requires poor people to find work as a condition of receiving state aid.

"I remember going in to talk to Tommy Thompson about an increase in the minimum wage," says Chvala. "You'd have thought I was a gnat on the wall. 'There's no way we're going to do that.'"

Yet despite that résumé, Thompson is spending much of his energy trying to ingratiate himself to the GOP's new base.

"Tommy Thompson is clearly, in my mind, the best candidate for the Republicans in the general election," says Chvala. He points to the ex-governor as a proven vote-getter statewide, especially in the politically mercurial Fox River Valley, where power often shifts between Democrats and Republicans.

But what appeals to voters in a general election is not generally the same recipe for a primary victory.

As Chvala puts it, "Tommy Thompson's challenge here now is, how do you get through a primary where you have people who have gone through gunfire for the right-wing causes?"

'A reasonable guy'

Tommy Thompson took office as governor in 1987 with promises to do the sort of wholesale revamping of the state's political culture that Ronald Reagan set out to do nationally when he became president six years before.

Until then, Thompson had been the Assembly minority leader, a post that earned him variations on the nickname of "Dr. No" as he sought to thwart the agenda of the Legislature's Democratic majority.

Yet even then, for all his tenacity, Thompson earned the respect of many in the other party - people like state Sen. Tim Cullen, who was then in his first state Senate career and led the Democratic majority for four years.

"We got to know each other pretty well," says Cullen during an interview at the Capitol. "I always liked him. He understood what was the most important rule in this building: Your word is everything."

Cullen and Thompson served together on a bipartisan 1983 committee that then-Gov. Tony Earl appointed to resolve a deficit in the state's unemployment compensation fund.

In that context, Cullen says, Thompson was no "Dr. No." "He was a reasonable guy, interested in getting a solution."

Cullen has a theory - which he acknowledges he's never heard from Thompson - about the roots of that pragmatic streak. Thompson's father served on the Juneau County Board in the 1940s and '50s. "County government was the people's friend," he says. "They knew who the poor families were and took care of them. The county was the one that plowed the roads. So he grew up in a home and an environment where government wasn't the enemy."

When he won the governor's race, Thompson asked Cullen to join his cabinet as secretary of what was then the Department of Health and Social Services.

For Cullen, the choice wasn't that difficult. He saw the power of state senators diminishing in favor of lobbyists who had a greater and greater hand in writing legislation. And staying in the Senate leader's role, he says, would have almost certainly put him in contention to run against Thompson in four years.

Most Democrats at the time saw Thompson's victory as an accident that could be undone after one term in 1990, Cullen says. "I never thought that." Thompson was a hard worker and, perhaps because of his unpolished style of speech - dropping his g's and other lapses - people underestimated his intelligence. Cullen suspected he'd be a formidable incumbent to unseat. He also trusted and liked Thompson.

Cullen became Thompson's point man on the governor's first round of welfare reform bills, which capped benefits and then used the savings to bolster programs connecting recipients with the job market. He served as the non-voting chair of a committee consisting of the four legislative leaders who negotiated the terms of the legislation - the same model Gov. Earl had used for the unemployment compensation deficit.

Contrasting that approach with the one Gov. Walker took on last year's budget repair bill, Cullen observes, "Welfare reform only happened in Wisconsin because it was done bipartisan. Democrats had the opportunity to stop it all." They supported it, Cullen says, because the money cut from the program was reinvested to help recipients in other ways.

Cullen left Thompson's cabinet after about 20 months, when he was hired to run a regional office for the health insurer Blue Cross, but never lost touch with Thompson. In 2002, when Cullen was hospitalized with cancer, Thompson called him monthly. By now, the former governor was President George W. Bush's Health and Human Services secretary.

"He said, 'I've got the National Institutes of Health, I've got the best doctors out here; if you need anything you let me know!'"

Mainstream conservative

When Tommy Thompson joined the Bush administration in 2001, CBS News called him "a moderate Republican." Yet no one who followed his career as governor would have considered him anything other than a mainstream conservative.

In his 14 years in office, Thompson repeatedly sprung to the aid of business, awarding tax credits and other incentives for operations to stay in or relocate to the state. Eventually his record sparked complaints of a pay-to-play operation in which such state largesse was traded for contributions to his campaigns. But Thompson and his aides always dismissed the accusations, and voters never seemed to care.

Thompson reined in regulators, stripping the appointment of Department of Natural Resources secretary from the DNR's independent board and installing it as a governor's prerogative.

He neutered the once-powerful Public Intervenor's Office, which operated on the premise that the state's environment was a public trust. The public intervenor served as a counterweight to business lobbyists by providing scientific and legal expertise supporting tighter environmental regulations.

"As a result, important environmental regulations and legislation have become stymied in committee," Jodi Habush Sinykin wrote in a 2004 law review essay. "Indeed, Wisconsin citizens have been faced with the expensive and overwhelming task of defending the Public Trust Doctrine in Wisconsin."

Thompson built up the prison system, including the controversial SuperMax prison. Thanks to tough-on-crime laws he signed, he left office with both a prison population (20,000) and a corrections budget (nearly $1 billion) that had more than tripled on his watch.

As governor, he became famous for his creative use of the partial veto, carving up budget bills like a knife-wielding Benihana chef to shape the Legislature's spending plan to his liking.

Yet through it all, Thompson also cannily tacked a course that would earn him support far beyond the core GOP.

For starters, he usually steered clear of polarizing culture-war issues like homosexuality. And while he did sign several bills restricting abortion, he kept a relatively low profile on the issue. "He didn't want to spend the political capital on the really conservative stuff," says Chvala.

Thompson bashed teachers unions and signed laws that effectively capped teachers' pay. But his budgets also began covering two-thirds of the state's public school costs to hold down property tax hikes.

"He practiced the politics of addition," says Chvala. "He always wanted more people on his side." And if that coincided with his policy goals, so much the better.

Indeed, two signature initiatives associated with Thompson - the Milwaukee Parental School Choice voucher program and W-2 - were crafted or boosted by Milwaukee Democrats.

After Democratic Rep. Annette Williams met with parents in her inner-city district unhappy with Milwaukee Public Schools, she drafted legislation enabling low-income families in the city to use taxpayer money to send their children to private schools. Most Democrats opposed the measure, but with widespread GOP support, as well as backing from some key Milwaukee Democrats, the bill passed.

Thompson "indicated through the news media that if the bill got to his desk, he would sign it," says Williams. He even floated a trial balloon for a statewide voucher plan, but when rural and suburban Republicans who didn't like that idea for their own districts shot it down, "he backed off," the now-retired lawmaker recalls.

And the W-2 welfare-cutting measure ultimately took shape thanks to an unusual alliance between Thompson and Milwaukee Democrat Antonio Riley. The law won national notice for its work requirements as well as its childcare subsidies, but critics said it stranded poor families. "You're attacking the people on the bottom," says Williams, who voted against W-2. "It didn't help. It created other problems."

On the defensive

Thompson's return to the political fray follows three aborted comebacks.

He briefly hoped to be the GOP's nominee for president in 2008, but dropped out in August 2007 after coming in sixth in the Iowa Republican straw poll. In 2009 he threatened to run in the 2010 governor's race but dropped out before officially getting in. Thompson then mulled challenging Sen. Russ Feingold in 2010, but again backed off even as he wooed tea party activists. At the time, he cited family opposition to entering the race.

But with Kohl's announced retirement, Thompson, whose campaign never responded to an Isthmus interview request, is now all in. He's one of three currently vying for the GOP nomination to run against whomever Democrats pick - widely assumed to be U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin, so far the only declared hopeful from that party.

At 70 - and no longer dyeing his gray hair (although one recent commercial was apparently filmed before that tonsorial change) - Thompson would in theory fit an elder statesman's role. Instead, he's been on the defensive.

As President Obama's health care bill began taking shape in Congress, Thompson expressed measured support for the concept. Now that's come back to haunt him: The national conservative organizing group Club for Growth - which is backing Thompson's rival, former congressman Mark Neumann - sends out notices like one that charged "Tommy Thompson fought for ObamaCare alongside his allies in Big Labor." (FactCheck.org unequivocally called the Club for Growth claim "False.")

So Thompson has taken pains to repudiate the Affordable Care Act, noting that he always opposed the bill as it was finally written and signed into law: "As Wisconsin's next U.S. senator, I'll fight to repeal and replace Obamacare with a marketplace approach that puts patients and their doctors in charge of care instead of the federal government," he said in a recent email to supporters.

Critics on the right cite the growth in state spending and employment under Thompson - trends that took place in a time of economic expansion and in part because of the state's prison-building binge.

That growth points to another skeleton in Thompson's closet in this era of public-worker-union bashing. One longtime Democratic observer contends that by expanding the prisons, and thus their employee ranks, Thompson essentially cultivated the prison guards and the Wisconsin State Employees Union as an interest group.

In return, the union's leaders endorsed Thompson for a fourth term in 1998 - even as another GOP was emerging that would ultimately strip the union of virtually all its rights more than a decade later. Now Thompson, who once spoke proudly of his administration's relationship with the union, has signed on to that same anti-union agenda.

On the issue of embryonic stem cell research, Thompson once argued for it in Bush's cabinet. In a November speech at the Vatican, he opposed it. And in place of the governor who soft-pedaled the culture war, a new radio ad from the Senate candidate blasts the Obama administration - and Baldwin - over the proposed regulation requiring employers, including religious institutions, to cover contraception.

Different times

For all the carping voices from the right, and Thompson's efforts to appease them, he is likely to be a formidable contender in the Republican primary next August.

Based on how intensely the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has been training its sights on Thompson - a mix of messages that alternately play up his post-government lobbying and the criticism he's gotten from some tea party groups - he seems to be the candidate Democrats think they'll most likely face.

And when the national Club for Growth endorsed Neumann, a group of conservative bloggers wrote a joint open letter condemning the choice and criticizing Neumann's campaign last year against Scott Walker in the gubernatorial primary. Meanwhile, Wisconsin Club for Growth - the state affiliate of the right-wing group - pointedly distanced itself from the action, issuing a statement that it didn't endorse candidates.

Republican state Sen. Dale Schultz comes from the same part of Wisconsin as Thompson, calls him a mentor and has endorsed him. He sees Thompson as one Republican who shares an important quality with former President Bill Clinton.

"Both men had the ability to get done what they got done because they could reach across the aisle and find common ground with people. And I think that is a quality you don't see in a lot of people these days," Schultz says.

He finds questions about Thompson's bona fides absurd - and he's confident Thompson will ultimately prevail over them.

"Tommy Thompson, like me, would describe himself as an unrepentant Republican," says Schultz. "These days the notion of who's a conservative or a Republican has morphed to the point where Teddy Roosevelt can't be a Republican, Ronald Reagan can't be a Republican, and there are some folks on the right who would like to say that Tommy Thompson can't be a Republican anymore.

"I think that's a shame," Schultz says. "And I don't think that bothers Tommy Thompson one iota because he's his own guy. He's perfectly capable of defining for himself who he is and what he thinks is important."

Chvala expects Thompson to continue to run to the right to win the primary - and if he succeeds, then to try to move to the center against Baldwin.

But these are different, far more polarized times, the former state senator warns. The sort of broad popular consensus that Thompson so often mastered in the past may elude him.

If a Sen. Thompson winds up representing Wisconsin in Washington next year, Chvala doubts he'll be the man who so artfully expanded his political base as governor.

"He will be on the conservative side."