Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, April 6
Nice Job, Wisconsin
Way to go, Wisconsin: More than 2 million people voted in our state on Tuesday - nearly half of those eligible to do so. That’s a massive turnout for a primary election, the best here since 1972 and second best nationwide this year.
You did your duty, even if it meant standing in long lines. A voter waiting in line to cast her ballot at Cass Street Elementary School Tuesday evening told us she was behind 100 others, most of them like her under the age of 30 who had come to exercise the franchise.
Way to go, Wisconsin: Younger voters, many of them Democratic supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, flocked to the polls on the state’s college campuses and elsewhere. Voters ages 18 to 29 made up 19 percent of the Democratic electorate, and Sanders got 82 percent of those votes.
Way to go, Wisconsin: You told former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Sanders’ rival for the nomination, that she has to work harder to win your support. Sanders won with 57 percent of the vote compared with 43 percent for Clinton. He won with liberals, men and the young and fought her to a draw with women voters. A third of Democratic voters said honesty was the most important quality in a candidate, and Sanders was supported by 83 percent of those who felt that way. Clinton’s disturbing record on open government, which we laid out in an editorial last week, is no doubt part of the problem.
Way to go, Wisconsin: You sent the P.T. Barnum of American politics packing for New York. Businessman Donald Trump was so badly beaten in Wisconsin that he didn’t bother to make an appearance on Tuesday night. His campaign issued a statement: “Lyin’ Ted Cruz … is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump.”
Which is nonsense and sells Wisconsin voters short. Cruz thrashed Trump on Tuesday - from the bright red Milwaukee suburbs to the Fox Valley and beyond. He won with men and women, young and old, blue collar and white collar and with those disgusted by Trump’s campaign. By a large margin, Republican voters said Trump “ran the most unfair campaign,” according to exit polls. Trump remains the least qualified candidate of our lifetimes, a man who has barely thought about the most important issues facing the nation let alone learned how to articulate a coherent position on them. Unfortunately, his horror show of a candidacy will go on.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, whom we recommended, finished a distant third, and the calls for him to quit the race will grow in advance of the New York primary on April 19. Hang in there, governor. With a contested convention more likely, there is no reason to quit. Kasich remains the best qualified and most independent of the three remaining GOP candidates.
Through our editorials leading up to the election, our goal was to focus attention on ensuring honest, open, clean and effective government in Wisconsin and the nation. Citizens have a right to that, and, by voting in such numbers on Tuesday, citizens of our state made their voices heard nationwide.
Way to go, Wisconsin!
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The Capital Times, April 6
Trump and Cruz have embarrassed themselves, their party, their country
Donald Trump and Ted Cruz brought to Wisconsin a Republican presidential primary fight that was, at once, ugly and devoid of meaningful options for responsible voters.
As they took each other apart in campaign stops from Superior to Kenosha, Trump and Cruz plumbed the depths of American politics. Along the way, the blowhard billionaire and the shut-the-government-down senator seemed to be doing everything in their power to reinforce the revulsion at their respective candidacies.
While it is true that both contenders played fast and loose with the facts, there was no reason to doubt the basic premises of what the candidates were saying about one another. Trump called Cruz a “liar,” and portrayed the senator from Texas as a sleazy political careerist. Cruz dismissed Trump as an “out of his depth” pretender who was waging a “disgusting” campaign.
They were both right.
In Wisconsin, they were both ranting and raving about insulted wives, alleged infidelities, and every other soap-opera scenario that could be imagined. It got so bad that the National Enquirer shoved aside Hollywood scandal stories for politics. And Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the last adult standing on the Republican debate stage (if they have any more debates), described the final round of Trump-Cruz bombast as “sort of a knee-jerk.”
That was putting it mildly.
The Wisconsin immigrant rights group Voces De La Frontera - which encouraged multiracial, multiethnic protests against the extremism of Trump and Cruz - was blunter.
“Trump and Cruz are calling for the deportation of all 11 million undocumented people, and Cruz recently promoted Sheriff Arpaio-style policies of mass racial profiling and police harassment of Muslim communities,” said Voces De La Frontera executive director Christine Neumann-Ortiz. “We have a moral obligation to defeat this dangerous hate before it grows and becomes a strong political and social movement. This Frankenstein is a creation of right-wing mainstream politics that promotes rhetoric and policies that scapegoat immigrants, minorities, poor people and union members to the benefit of Wall Street, the banks and corporate America.”
Now Wisconsin has voted. But this Republican race will continue.
If this race stays on the current path, it is hard to imagine how a party that nominates either Trump or Cruz will survive as anything akin to the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, or even Reagan. The notion that one of them is preferable - as Cruz backers such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (a failed GOP contender who recently endorsed the Texan) suggested during the Wisconsin fight - is comic. And the Republican elites who peddle such fantasies deserve their political fate.
But America does not deserve the damage that is being done to its image by Trump and Cruz.
The crazy campaign that these candidates have been running - with Trump celebrating waterboarding and talking up the idea of letting more countries develop nuclear arsenals, and with Cruz talking about targeting Muslim neighborhoods in ways that violate all the basic premises of the Bill of Rights and the American experiment - has surprised and bewildered world leaders.
And world citizens.
That should come as no surprise.
As President Obama noted last week, “People pay attention to American elections. What we do is really important to the rest of the world.”
Responding to concerns that have been raised with regard to Trump’s frightening openness to nuclear proliferation, the president suggested that “the person who made the statements doesn’t know much about foreign policy, or nuclear policy, or the Korean Peninsula or the world generally.”
Secretary of State John Kerry expressed broader concerns a few days earlier.
Though he did not mention Trump and Cruz by name, it was clear whom Kerry was talking about on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” when he said that the 2016 campaign “upsets people’s sense of equilibrium about our steadiness, about our reliability, and to some degree I must say to you, (based on) some of the questions the way they’re posed to me, it’s clear to me that what’s happening is an embarrassment to our country.”
“Everywhere I go, every leader I meet, they ask about what is happening in America,” said Kerry. “They cannot believe it. I think it is fair to say that they’re shocked. They don’t know where it’s taking the United States of America.”
Neither do Americans.
But Republican leaders such as House Speaker Paul Ryan really should be reconsidering their dysfunctional approach to the race that is ripping apart their party and their country. Ryan’s friends and neighbors protested Trump’s visit to their town last week. But the speaker of the House continued to combine his absurdly mild criticisms of the extreme language of Trump and Cruz with pledges to back whomever is nominated. As such, Ryan is enabling a Republican race that the secretary of state indicates has become “an embarrassment to our country.”
Trump and Cruz have no shame.
But Ryan and other on-the-sidelines Republican “leaders” should be ashamed of what their party is doing to itself and to America’s image on the global stage.
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Beloit Daily News, April 6
A sensible center? Not in Wisconsin
Wisconsin mattered. The question is - as this long campaign season turns eastward - whether it will make any real difference in the eventual outcome.
That’s because this may be the strangest presidential political circus America has seen in several lifetimes. Nothing makes sense. By now … well, usually before now … both parties have settled on a nominee and it becomes an orderly march to the conventions. Not this year.
If it wasn’t for the Republicans’ Weirdest Show on Earth, the Democrats’ Hold Your Nose for Hillary slog would be the story of the year. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont, now has captured five of the last six contests. If not for the party establishment rigging the game by handing Hillary Clinton hundreds of so-called “super delegates,” she would be in a virtual dead heat with Sanders. Clinton may claim the nomination when it’s over, but at this stage there does not seem to be much enthusiasm.
And then there’s the Republican slugfest. Sen. Ted Cruz won Wisconsin convincingly and crowed like he’d just locked up the nomination. Truth is, he still trails Donald Trump by a few hundred delegates. The campaign now shifts to New York and the Atlantic Northeast - in other words, Trump country. Trump may not get to the required 1,237 delegates to lock up the nomination before the convention, but Cruz is even less likely to overtake the front-runner.
And that seems to be the strategy. Deny Trump the necessary delegates and bet on a contested convention turning to Cruz. Meanwhile, John Kasich - arguably the best and most acceptable candidate for November - is relegated to coat-holder.
Trump, with his huckster style, has been the headline act. But it’s almost as interesting to witness the Republican establishment swallow hard, grit teeth and try to smile while embracing Cruz as the anti-Trump. That’s because everyone knows the party establishment loathes Ted Cruz. If pundits had predicted a year ago that party regulars would be hoisting the Cruz banner, they’d have been laughed out of the room.
One thing that can be said with some certainty about the Wisconsin vote is this: All the polarization is still there, simmering hot. Republicans picked the most right-wing guy in the race. Democrats picked the most left-wing guy in the race.
If anyone had been holding out hope for the sensible center, forget it.
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