Wanted: Mayoral Candidates

Posted August 10, 2010 by meisen
Categories: Development, Politics, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

Madison has been blessed with so many assets–from great physical beauty to a huge built-in employment base of public employees–that the city’s charmed life seems as preordained as the morning sun.

In this opinion column for Isthmus, I suggest that darker times may be around the corner, and that we need a mayor who is up to the challenge. The column begins:

You have to like Dave Cieslewicz as mayor.

He seems almost the perfect fit for a progressive-minded city filled with gently graying baby boomers. He’s funny in a self-deprecating way. He’s calm and reassuring when he speaks to civic groups. He knows the city’s history. He extols its quirkiness. He bikes a lot. He’s green-minded. And, like everyone else in Madison, he’s an amateur urban planner.

He sounds perfect, but for a nagging concern: Dave Cieslewicz seems to play the role of mayor better than he performs its duties.

It’s not that he lacks accomplishments. But after he’s logged nearly eight years in office, I’m prompted to ask the Peggy Lee question: “Is that all there is?”

For more, go here.

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The War Not At Home

Posted August 8, 2010 by meisen
Categories: Education, Politics, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

It’s odd–no, disturbing–that the  United States can be involved in two wars, and so few Americans are touched by it. How can this be healthy for a democratic society?

My Isthmus column from  almost three years ago (featured  the other day at the alternative newspaper site) makes the case for a draft and national service.  The headline– “Madison’s military problem: It isn’t Army recruiting, but our attitude towards serving”–sums up my concerns .

The column begins:

Monday, Nov. 5, [2007,] wasn’t a good day for the U.S. military in Madison.

Over at the Doyle administration building, anti-war activists were lobbying the Madison school board to remove Army recruitment signs from high school sports stadiums.

Critics say the ads mislead impressionable young people and support unconscionable war-making. I have a problem with that.

I’m at a loss to understand how a sign asking, “Are you Army strong?” and giving a recruiter’s phone number represents a threat to young people. On a list of the top 2,000 baleful media images thrust before kids — have you seen the American Apparel ads pitched to teenage girls? — this ranks maybe 1,834th.

Over at East High, meanwhile, the military’s estrangement from the good people of Madison was in even starker relief.

Roughly 70 parents and students turned out for a “junior night” look at post-graduation prospects for college, technical school, and yes, the military. Not one participant stopped by the military recruitment table, Sgt. Frederick Hutchison of the Marines and Machinist Mate Michael Pflanzer of the Navy told me….

For more, go here.

Over at the Doyle administration building, anti-war activists were lobbying the Madison school board to remove Army recruitment signs from high school sports stadiums.

Critics say the ads mislead impressionable young people and support unconscionable war-making. I have a problem with that.

I’m at a loss to understand how a sign asking, “Are you Army strong?” and giving a recruiter’s phone number represents a threat to young people. On a list of the top 2,000 baleful media images thrust before kids — have you seen the American Apparel ads pitched to teenage girls? — this ranks maybe 1,834th.

Over at East High, meanwhile, the military’s estrangement from the good people of Madison was in even starker relief.

Roughly 70 parents and students turned out for a “junior night” look at post-graduation prospects for college, technical school, and yes, the military. Not one participant stopped by the military recruitment table, Sgt. Frederick Hutchison of the Marines and Machinist Mate Michael Pflanzer of the Navy told me.

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An Underdog’s Chance

Posted July 26, 2010 by meisen
Categories: Politics, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

As I write this post, it sure looks bad for the Democrats in November. But with three months to go before the election, it would be foolish to dismiss Tom Barrett’s chance to be elected governor.

Hey, who knows what will happen?

In this story for Isthmus, I decided not to write a a conventional candidate profile,  but to lay out the scenario is which Barrett might win.

Here’s how it begins:

The email from the Republican partisan might as well have had a sound file attached of him laughing and chortling.

He was among a number of activists — Democrats and Republicans alike — whom I asked how Democratic gubernatorial nominee Tom Barrett might pull off a win in what looks to be a deliciously good GOP year.

“It is truly stunning,” the Republican partisan wrote back. “It took the GOP eight years [of President George W. Bush], split partisan control, scandals and a war to ruin their brand. The Democrats have ruined their brand in a mere 18 months.”

Cue the chortling. “In that time, Democrats have alienated and energized the middle and the right by overreaching…while alienating their own base on the left by underdelivering on any actual policy.

“It is the worst of all worlds,” he announced with the subtlety of an executioner swinging an ax. Democrats are demoralized, while “the right and the tea party middle…will crawl across broken glass on top of fiery coals to get to the polls.”

This would be a truly vertiginous turn of events. It seems like only yesterday that Wisconsin Democrats were on top of the world….

To read more, go here.

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The Cap Times Web Experiment

Posted July 23, 2010 by meisen
Categories: Media, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

For whatever reason, a story I wrote two years ago on The Capital Times’ move to a mostly Web existence surfaced the other day at the Association of Alternative Newspapers’ archive. (Or so I learned from a Google alert.)

Given my interest in the media, I might as well post it. Here’s how the story begins:

Good luck, Cap Times. You’ll need it. Converting from a six-day-a-week paid paper to an online news site is like jumping from a very high cliff into a very deep and mysterious pool.

The paper might be killed. Or it might be transformed.

One thing’s for sure: The Capital Times that Madison has known for 90 years will be gone. Online publishing is a fundamentally different proposition for both journalists and readers. Experts consider it a classic disruptive technology that reorders daily life for just about everyone it touches and destroys what was thought to be a durable economic model for the eclipsed technology.

Newspapers won’t die off as quickly as slide rules did when calculators were introduced, but the changes under way are so epochal you’d be foolish to believe anyone who speaks confidently of what publishing will be like in 10 years.

“Nobody knows anything,” as veteran screenwriter William Goldman famously said of the secrets to successful movie-making. The newspaper business is even more in the dark as to how it will make its next buck.

Actually, newspapers are beginning to make out a possible future–paywalls and online subscriptions. It may be time for me to check back with the Cap Times and see how its experiment fares.

For more of the original story,  go here.

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Graaskamp’s Great Rail Corridor Study

Posted May 8, 2010 by meisen
Categories: Development, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

Jim Graaskamp was the most memorable  person I’ve met in four decades of reporting. If only I could find a misplaced file that has transcripts of  of our interviews!

Jim was passionate and incredibly articulate. His opinions were anchored in an  encyclopedic understanding of real estate dynamics. A patient teacher, he could explain them to the densest of reporters. Best of all, he was fearless and gave great quotes.

That Jim Graaskamp was also quadriplegic and confined to a wheelchair only added to his legend. An oft-told story, to the point of  becoming apocryphal, concerned him being named as Wisconsin’s handicapped person of the  year.   One of his students supposedly exclaimed: Who knew?!

Did I mention how brilliant Graaskmap was? In this column for Isthmus, I recall one of his great studies for the city of Madison. It begins:

The James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate can be found on the fourth floor of the UW-Madison School of Business building. To the right of the entrance is a montage of drawings of the legendary professor, who died in 1988, interspersed with several rubrics that have guided generations of real estate developers, appraisers and analysts.

Among them is a message that resonates for Madison today: “The successful real estate deal is nothing more than a series of crises tied together by a critical path.”

Mired in a rough patch of downtown redevelopment, City Hall has had a hard time managing these crises. In recent years, major development proposals — Union Corners, Avenue 800, the Fiore library plan – have collapsed after exhaustive negotiations.

But even more troubling is Madison’s loss of that “critical path” in guiding the central city redevelopment. That path, I would suggest, should lead to the largely vacant east rail corridor, almost 100 acres and hands down the best spot to create the jobs that should be at the heart of a serious downtown strategy….

Read more here.

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Assaying the Doyle Years

Posted April 29, 2010 by meisen
Categories: Milwaukee Magazine, Politics

I wrote earlier on Gov. Doyle for Wisconsin Interest. Here’s a shorter take for Milwaukee Magazine, using mostly different sources. The critical conclusion isn’t any different though.

The column begins:

A decade from now, one can imagine a beaming septuagenarian named Jim Doyle sitting on a dais in Milwaukee as the former governor is honored for ushering in a bold new era of train travel.

He will be lauded for laying the tracks of a 21st-century Wisconsin economy. The KRM commuter rail he helped launch would have by then joined I-94 as one of the main streets connecting Milwaukee with the booming Chicagoland economy, drawing thousands of new jobs to Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha. And he will be celebrated for securing the breakthrough $810 million federal grant for his high-speed rail line, thereby creating the “I-Q Corridor,” as tech-booster Tom Still first dubbed it, connecting bustling technology clusters in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Madison, Milwaukee and Chicago.

Or maybe not.Such are the iffy prospects of a burnished legacy for a governor whose two terms were haunted by the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and distinguished by a leadership style that shunned risk and punted too many important issues.

Read more here.

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Where Do You Get Your Veggies?

Posted April 22, 2010 by meisen
Categories: Organic Farming/Local Food, WisBusiness.com

For some families in Milwaukee and Madison, the answer is from  a weekly box they pick up from a local farmer. I looked at the community-supported agriculture movement in a post for WisBusiness.com. CSA subscriptions are booming, but I found  some problems for both farmers and consumers.

The story begins:

The local food movement is providing a noticeable boost this spring to Wisconsin farmers who sell seasonal-vegetable subscriptions to families in the Milwaukee and Madison areas.

“We’re having a real growth spurt,” says John Hendrickson, a senior outreach specialist with UW-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. “Local food has just been exploding.”

In Milwaukee, more than a thousand people turned out at a March open house at the Urban Ecology Center. Fourteen farmers offered subscriptions in a program called community-supported agriculture (CSA).

“We saw a lot of people from the suburbs this year,” says coordinator Jamie Ferschinger. “The idea of fresh, local food, and getting it from someone you know, is starting to spread.”

Madison’s CSA program is far bigger. Consumer demand has so grown that the organizers moved the CSA open house from Olbrich Gardens to the much larger Monona Terrace Convention Center, where a record 42 farmers talked to about 1,700 interested consumers.

Read more here.

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Questions for Michael Pollan

Posted April 7, 2010 by meisen
Categories: Organic Farming/Local Food, The Progressive

My interview with Michael Pollan is another piece from the recent past that I wanted to post here. We talked at his home in Berkeley for an hour plus. He is impressively, almost frighteningly,  articulate. But that should be no surprise to his readers. The story ran in the November 2008 issue of The Progressive. It begins:

Michael Pollan has got people talking. His recent books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, have captured the public imagination, setting off countless coffee shop discussions, dinnertime arguments, and oh-so-many blog posts.

Even more impressively, his exploration of modern-day agriculture and the dysfunctional American diet has prompted his readers to look at their own eating habits with a new sense of understanding and often a desire for change.

Read more here.

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Trouble downtown

Posted April 5, 2010 by meisen
Categories: Development, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus

I’ve written a lot on Madison development over the years. Those stories informed the skeptical take I offer on the library expansion and the Edgewater Hotel subsidy in this guest column for Isthmus. It begins:

I’ll say this for him: Mayor Dave Cieslewicz took the 11th-hour collapse of the Fiore Co.’s library plan in stride. Without missing a beat, he announced that the city will move quickly to Plan B — renovating the existing library at its Mifflin Street site.

But as unflappable as the mayor is, he can’t really hide the disarray at City Hall. Too many big and potentially signature deals have collapsed at the city’s feet during his stewardship…

Read more here.

For an earlier, equally skeptical view of the Edgewater proposal, read this Isthmus column from last September.

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What’s black and white and bleeding all over?

Posted April 5, 2010 by meisen
Categories: Media, Wisconsin Interest

I intend to post a few  stories I wrote before starting this online archive. This piece on the decline of the Wisconsin newspaper industry dates to March 2009 when it was published by  Wisconsin Interest.

It  cuts close to home. I’ve spent  my adult  life working in newspapers (save a post-college stint at a factory in Kenosha), including, The West Bend News, The Capital Times and Isthmus, plus a cup of coffee at The Janesville Gazette.

The story begins:

If you’re a deep-pocketed business executive in a flourishing industry, you gather at the richly appointed Fluno Center on the UW-Madison campus for your deep-thought conferences. More modest enterprises and nonprofits send their execs to the UW’s shop-worn Pyle Center for their soul-searching. This, of course, was the proper setting for a worried group of newspaper executives on March 28, 2008.

The good news was that they weren’t squirreled away in a dining room at Denny’s out on the Interstate. Given the parlous state of newspaper economics, this might have made more sense. Their papers might have split the cost of the $5.99 “Grand Slam” breakfast special.

“We’re in a time of decline,” Stephen Gray of the American Press Institute told the 60 or 70 people present. “It’s a time of fear, depression, even despair.” Yes, fear, depression, even despair. Nobody was shocked by Gray’s words, because everybody knew they were true.

Go here to read more.

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