I went for a five-mile walk inside Brookfield Square Mall today because it was raining, and, wow, has that place gone downhill. It’s a ghost town with a whirlyball place. To pass the time and forget how many loops around the mall it was going to take me, I spoke on the phone and texted with political insiders. Two Republicans, a moderate Democrat, and an Independent.
About the time I rewarded myself at the sale rack at H&M (which is kind of a redundancy), my mind whirling with all of the political analysis, it hit me:
Tom Tiffany is the state dad, Kelda Roys is the crazy aunt, and Herb Kohl did the milk thing first.
This is an insight so on point that it can’t possibly be refuted. You won’t be able to unsee it.
There is actually a serious point within the satire. Politics is a game of definition. Politics 101: define yourself and your opponent(s) before they define themselves or you. Also: how do people FEEL about you? Do they want to have a cliched beer with you? Or a glass of whole milk as it were? Tiffany is doing a really good job with that.
State vs National
The Democrats want to NATIONALIZE the race and falsely turn Tiffany into the mean, angry, scary toxic tariff national guy who hangs with Trump. They are a one-act play, and that’s all they’ve got because their policies don’t work and have grown increasingly extreme (seriously, they want to abolish ALL immigration enforcement, even against violent criminals? Their frontrunner wants to ABOLISH police and prisons??) They want to smash every norm.
Tiffany, the state dad, won’t have any of that nonsense. All Tiffany needs to do is be the normal guy in this race, and he has a good chance of defeating the bad political cycle.
He’s the guy who was a dam tender, whose mom cans, and who goes to dairy farm breakfasts, and this all defines him in a super comforting way as a STATE candidate, and not a NATIONAL one, because he’s FAMILIAR to us in a quintessentially and uniquely Wisconsin way. He’s just a Wisconsin guy. It’s like he’s combined Herb Kohl (his state fair milk house and Wisconsin brand) with Tommy Thompson’s small town roots and Tony Evers’ folksy euphemisms. Wisconsin doesn’t elect flashy governors. Tiffany needs a STATE political identity first and foremost in voters’ minds. He’s doing that one glass of whole milk at a time.
I’ve decided to treat Wisconsin (and national) politics like the circus it is. Send in the clowns. If you want to read boring and dry stuff about politics instead, go read the Journal Sentinel or try listening to Charles Benson.
Thanks for sticking with me. Let’s carry this metaphor now through to its natural conclusion.
You know, when you were 21, and you screwed up your checkbook by blowing money you didn’t have or when you had a flat tire or ran out of gas along the side of the road, all things I’ve done, Tom Tiffany is the Dad who swoops in and fixes stuff, while offering a stern lecture to please put air in your tires next time and stop driving on empty. Then, he shows you how to fix the tire yourself so you learn.
As I’ve written before, he’s the guy you want driving the state pontoon boat and balancing the state checkbook. Tom Tiffany is the most authentically rural governor candidate we’ve ever had, at least in modern times, and this is an archetype we all recognize. He’s the down-to-earth Wisconsin dad in a sweatshirt who can fix his own brakes, who mans the grill, and who, on Thanksgiving, promptly decamps to the livingroom to watch football. He’s not going to screw Wisconsin up.
Be a Larry
I know many men like this because I am Wisconsin born and bred. Those who follow me on Facebook know that my almost-stepdad Larry is such a man. When I ran over a tree branch and knocked the belt off my riding lawnmower, Larry, bedecked in his olive-green Carhartt sweatshirt and scruffy blue jeans, came over and fixed it. Then he made me take a photo of all of these numbers inside the hood so I’d know which belt to get next time.
Larry advised me that politics is full of bozos, and I should move on from it all. When politics comes up, Larry goes in the living room and turns on House Hunters. Larry suggested we all go see a movie about D-Day. When I brought over Jambalaya for dinner, Larry drolly suggested that next time I should stick with a burger or steak please. He worked at Briggs and Stratton, and he runs a small engine repair shop. I brought him Paczki in honor of his Polish roots.
Tom Tiffany is a Larry, although, in truth, a more conservative one. He’s a bit awkward and not terribly charismatic, but this plays to his favor because we trust that he’s not going to mess the state up. He’s a steady rudder.
Let’s move on to Roys.
Roys is the crazy aunt who goes on unhinged tirades at Thanksgiving about abortion and Trump, causing the wisest men to decamp to the living room before dessert, and who then leaves early to feed her five cats, screeching off in her Honda Civic with the “I Heart Public Schools” and Coexist bumper stickers because someone pointed out that Kamala was kind of nuts. Would you want her balancing the state checkbook? Hell no.
Kelda Roys Is Fran Hong Without the Knit Cap
Roys scares me more than Francesca Hong, by the way, because she’s just as radical but packages it differently; she’s Hong without a knit cap.
But at this point, it seems obvious that the Democrat establishment is settling on Sara “do nothing and why does Evers hate me” Rodriguez as the person they think can defeat anti-establishment upstarts Hong or Mandela Barnes in the Democrat primary instead. Follow the money. I wonder, though, if Roys, due to her WEAC endorsement and the union’s organization, ends up slicing off just enough of the establishment vote from Rodriguez to ensure Hong or Barnes makes it through the primary. That would be helpful to Tiffany because even with all of this, it’s still a bad cycle.
What about the rest of them?
If Roys is the crazy aunt, Hong is the fun aunt, the one who’s out in the garage in a weird jumpsuit talking about anime and furries and trying to get the younger 20ish cousins to smoke weed when mom and dad aren’t looking. But you wouldn’t want her running the state. Good Lord!
Mandela Barnes?
He’s your brother’s best friend, and they probably sit in a corner of the garage all night playing video games and snickering about the hot chicks in the college bar or laughing about an almost fistfight with the frat bros over the Uber they all had to take because their driver’s licenses are suspended. Then they probably put a f*rt joke pillow under grandpa. But, yeah, you wouldn’t want him running the state, either. He would probably spend the entire night avoiding Hong because… oh never mind.
I heard the Dem establishment oppo book on Barnes is a mile thick, by the way, but without Bice around anymore, who is going to print it? Bruce Murphy? Molly Beck only goes after Republicans. TV needs images. Time will tell.
The Democrat Establishment Now Wants Sara Rodriguez
Rodriguez is the non-crazy aunt who brings over a pan of tasty funeral potatoes, which is why Republicans should hope she doesn’t get through and why Democrat powerbrokers, after earlier flirting with the idea of David Crowley, are now trying to aggressively engineer it. I’m basing that insight on the big ad buys coming in now for her, not just on her barely winning a meaningless straw poll of insiders at the Democrat convention or Kalshi having her suddenly tied with Hong in prediction markets. No one even got 200 votes! But in more credible polls, she’s the only candidate who seems in striking distance to prevent the Democrats’ nightmare scenario of Nominee Hong or Barnes. So she becomes the fall back. Rodriguez is surging.
I’ll give it to you straight. Rodriguez is probably their most electable choice, who can get moderates, even though she reinforces the perception she’s not ready for prime time every time she speaks. And even though Evers hates her, and she hasn’t done anything. But going after a candidate who hasn’t done anything can be like throwing a dart at Jello. Just look at Evers. In contrast, Roys has a super crazy legislative record. Rodriguez was there only a couple years and did almost nothing (see the pattern?) I know because I looked.
They called Herb Kohl nobody’s senator but yours, and it worked. I can’t remember a single thing he really did either except give us cheap strawberry milk at the fair.
If the Wispolitics straw poll said anything, though, it’s that the Democrat field remains hopelessly fractured. I think Hong, Barnes, Rodriguez and maybe Roys all have a chance to win the primary. Barnes might power through the primary due to his name ID alone in this fractured field. Don’t count him out, all the doomsdayers posting about that irrelevant straw poll besides.
Rodriguez is the relative who pulls up in a blue minivan with little stick figure family members on the back window.
Missy Hughes (the actual most reasonable Dem), David “Milwaukee County government is a total mess” Crowley, and Joel “Tom Barrett’s godson” Brennan aren’t relevant enough to satirize. I don’t waste time mocking people with zero chance even though Brennan has a mega rich family member. They’re the relatives you’re not close enough to invite to dinner at all, I guess.
Look. Circling back. Tom Tiffany is hokey; he’s the kind of dad who wears black socks with khaki shorts to the state fair and who tours Europe with a big camera on a strap around his neck. But that’s good.
True story. One time, after I opined that Tiffany is not charismatic but this is good, he texted me and informed me that his daughters think he is charismatic. But he wasn’t angry. It was funny.
The ‘Got Milk?’ Campaign Works
Tiffany’s hokey (but authentic) “got milk?” campaign is genius. I just hope they know when to stop and don’t have him prancing around with a milk mustache next. Even the villainous Dem legislative leader Dianne “I killed the surplus deal and trashed Evers besides” Hesselbein is using glasses of milk as props now, which proves my point that Tiffany is starting to define this race as being about rural state stuff and not national politics. If Roys starts toting around a jug of milk next, you’ll know he’s won.
He’s familiar to us, all of it is. Remember: Wisconsin’s last governor, Tony Evers, was elected because he was (to most voters, not me) the comforting Wisconsin hokey do-no-harm antidote to the exhausting drama of the Walker years (and I like Walker, and would gladly have him back, but it was exhausting, mostly because of the divisive liberal reaction to him). All but the diehards are equally exhausted by Trump era drama and the left’s insane reaction to him. We just want normal so we can get on with our lives, and hopefully have enough money in our pockets to live decent ones.
Some people might find it more fun smoking weed in the garage (I wouldn’t; say no to drugs), but that flirtation fades off fast for most of the rest of us. At some point, you realize the fun aunt is never going to fix the lawnmower. And we really need that to work.
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