Then Monday morning comes again, and the car pool takes her dad away, and it is back to fifteen minutes on the phone when he gets off work. Brooke has come up with something that she doesn’t start to say after Monday night phone calls, but waits until Wednesday nights. “Two more sleeps until he gets to come home,” she says once the number has gotten small enough to be comforting. Then the next night, it’s down to “One more sleep.” And in the middle of the night after that, hours after Bria and Brooke have gone to bed, their dad will walk in the house. And he will go into their rooms and wake them up with a kiss to tell them he is home. Even if they almost never remember by daylight that he woke them, they ask him to let them know.
41
Recall
Milton Avenue widens to six lanes with a median where it crosses U.S. Route 14 on the north side of town. It is Janesville’s busiest intersection, with a Kmart and fast food places and three cell phone stores. Late this afternoon, the intersection is the site, too, of unmistakable evidence that the incendiary politics that began up in Madison seventeen months ago, with Governor Walker’s bill to weaken public workers’ union rights, have tarnished the civility on which Janesville has prided itself.
Today is June 5, the day on which Wisconsin voters are deciding whether Scott Walker will become the third governor in U.S. history to be ejected from office through a recall election. The mass protests at Capitol Square have billowed into a crusade by Walker’s opponents to pry him from the statehouse, matched by a counter-crusade to keep him in office. The recall fight is venomous, backed by twice as much campaign spending as any Wisconsin election ever before. It is white-hot. It is in the glare of national news. And on Milton Avenue, it is prompting drivers, as they come to Route 14, to honk or jeer at campaign signs that partisans are waving on opposite corners of the intersection.
The governor has had his troubles in Janesville, which is still, in spirit if no longer as much in fact, a union town. Last winter, a manufacturing association that supports him began to erect billboards around the state that said, “Governor Scott Walker—Creating Jobs for Wisconsin.” The signs listed the phone number to the governor’s office so that citizens could call to thank him. Somehow, no one realized that it might be awkward to place the first of these billboards directly across from the silent General Motors assembly plant. The sign immediately became a laughingstock in town. It was soon gone.
Even so, the governor has his enthusiasts among Janesville’s citizens. One of them is a husky young man with a crew cut who is standing at the intersection’s southwest corner, holding aloft a sign that says, WE STAND WITH WALKER. The young man, Kirk Henry, is a business student at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater and the only Republican in his family. As he holds up his sign, not everyone driving by in Milton Avenue’s southbound lanes shouts friendly sentiments. But Kirk is pleased when a young woman in a white SUV shouts out her window, “Walker for president!” and a man in a green Corvette honks his horn three times, opens his window and yells, “Thank you. Thank you. We are keeping Wisconsin today!”
Kirk Henry leaves his spot at the intersection moments before Dave Vaughn, Mike’s father, arrives on the northeast corner. Dave begins waving to passersby with one hand as, with the other, he grasps a long stick to which is attached a red and white sign that says, VOTE TODAY. Mike has, by now, been working nights for a year on the management side of human resources for Seneca Foods. In his retirement from GM, Dave has become the chairman of the Rock County Democratic Party, as well as the vice president of UAW Local 95. The local’s president, Dave’s old friend Mike Marcks, stands next to him at the intersection, holding up a sign that says, BARRETT. Last month, Milwaukee’s mayor, Tom Barrett, won a primary election to face Walker in the recall. His victory turned the recall election into a rematch, because Barrett lost the governor’s race to Walker nineteen months ago. This time, Barrett was not the top choice of most of the unions, which have invested so much in trying to pry Walker from office. But Barrett is the Democrats’ candidate, so it is natural that Dave and Mike are holding up their VOTE TODAY and BARRETT signs for the benefit of the northbound drivers along Milton Avenue.
What is more surprising is that, as rush hour is building, these two old friends are the only UAW Local 95 guys standing with campaign signs on a street corner anywhere in town. Even though the impetus for the recall began with the goal of protecting union rights. Even though “boots on the ground,” as Dave still likes to say, has always been the local’s way of operating. For decades, Rock County’s Republicans have outspent Democrats in elections—just as, throughout Wisconsin and far beyond, Walker’s supporters have donated nearly $59 million to try to repel the recall crusade, two and a half times the amount that the anti-Walker forces have raised. In Janesville, while the GOP has traditionally had the edge in money, the Democrats, aligned with the unions in town, have had the edge in ground troops to get out the vote.
Except that today, Dave and Mike are the only remnants of these boots on the ground. Two retirees leading an emaciated UAW local.
On this anti-Walker side of the recall fight, the biggest boots on the ground in Janesville are imported. The boots are over at the Union Labor Temple, on Center Avenue, across the street and a block up from the Job Center. Commanding this operation is a woman hired and dispatched to Janesville by the national office of the AFL-CIO, the federation of fifty-six unions in the United States, including the autoworkers. She arrived in town six weeks ago. On the walls of a workroom at the labor temple that is serving as the command post are lists of all the union locals in the vicinity and the strength of their membership. For the once mighty UAW Local 95, which had more than 7,000 active members just over a decade ago, the list shows 438 active members and 4,900 retirees.
The ground troops being coordinated from the Labor Temple include reinforcements from out of town. Union locals from Illinois and further away have sent members into Janesville and elsewhere in Wisconsin to canvass, give rides to polling places, and perform other necessities for getting out the vote.
As these imports knock on the doors of those houses that match the addresses on lists of known Democrats, the rivalries in the recall fight are in plain view. Even in Janesville, which has prided itself on its harmony. Dueling lawn signs hint at neighbors no longer on speaking terms.
In Dave’s own family, his wife, Judy, has banned a nephew from her Facebook page. At sixty, Judy Vaughn is a retired schoolteacher and as ardent a Democrat as Dave. The Facebook trouble began when, to the surprise of no one who knows Judy, she began to post her views about Walker, which boil down to a belief, stronger than she has ever felt about any other politician, that the governor is evil. A couple of relatives didn’t take that too well, including the nephew who eventually posted a reply, asking Judy to please do her politicking on a separate Facebook page because he was sick of her posts and, besides, she wasn’t going to change his mind. Judy posted that she would not create a separate page. Then the nephew had a birthday party and didn’t invite her and Dave. Still, she didn’t unfriend him from Facebook until the day that he posted, “I am sick of my retarded friends and relatives and my union whiners.” That did it.
Ordinarily, while Dave was standing with his VOTE TODAY sign on Milton Avenue, Judy would have been at the Democratic recall headquarters, a rented storefront on Milwaukee Street at which volunteers have been staffing a phone bank and coordinating door knocking. She has volunteered there, all day every day, in recent weeks. But she hadn’t been feeling well. It turned out to be serious—blood clots in both lungs. So the day of the vote, she is in a bed on the third floor of Mercy Hospital, having arrived by ambulance a few days ago in a gray “Recall Scott Walker” T-shirt.
Judy is supposed to be taking it easy, but she is furious that she is cooped up in the hospital on recall day. So she has done the best she can, turning her hospital room into a field office of the recall crusade. A recall T-shirt is draped over a chair next to the IV pole that is drippin
g blood thinner into her veins. Two signs for Barrett are tacked up on the wall across from her bed, just beneath the board listing Judy’s nurses on duty and the time of her medication doses. On the wall directly across from her room’s door is a hand-lettered sign that says VOTE TODAY MAKE IT COUNT BARRETT. Judy insists on keeping the door ajar so that anyone walking down the hall can see the sign if they glance in.
It is just before 7:15 p.m.—forty-five minutes before the polls will close—when Dave arrives for a visit, fresh from his waving and sign-holding stint on Milton Avenue. Judy is pleased—she feels responsible for four anti-Walker votes today, just from talking down the governor to the staff on her hospital unit, including a nurse whose husband hadn’t realized that he could register to vote on the spot. And Judy has combed through every number stored on her phone and called everyone she thought might not have voted yet, omitting the ones she did not consider a reliable vote in favor of the recall. Minutes after Dave arrives, her phone rings, as it has been doing all day. Another field report. “What time did you vote today?” Judy asks this latest caller. “Were they lined up? Really? Wow. Wow. Wonderful.”
She hangs up. “Good will prevail,” she tells Dave. “It will be a long night.”
The expectation of a long night of vote counting around Wisconsin is common wisdom on both sides of the recall fight. Perhaps even a recount. Public opinion polls this spring have suggested a close race. As of a few weeks ago, Walker and Barrett were within one percentage point, though the governor seemed to have pulled ahead by a few points in the most recent polls. So a cliffhanger is what both sides are anticipating as Janesville’s most active Democrats and most active Republicans converge on their respective gathering spots to watch the election returns.
The Democrats, including Dave and Mike, are packing into Steve and Holly’s Restaurant, a long, narrow joint just off Milwaukee Street, with a television perched high over the bar. The Republicans are at the Speakeasy Lounge and Restaurant, a spiffier place with a patio that is lovely on spring nights like this one.
The restaurants are two and a half blocks apart, separated by Janesville’s police headquarters and a Presbyterian church that has stood on this spot since before the Civil War. Though they are close together, the two gatherings symbolize the rift that has appeared in once unified Janesville since General Motors’ announcement that the assembly plant would close—four years and two days from this recall night.
At Steve and Holly’s, not much more than an hour has passed since the polls closed when Fred Yoss starts to yell at the television overhead. Fred worked today as a polling official at another church in town that is Janesville’s largest voting site. At the moment, he is on a bar stool, a few seats away from where Dave and Mike are chatting. “NBC—how can they project that already?” Fred yells, alarmed that the network is forecasting a win for Walker. “I am going to go with the presumption that they still don’t know what they are talking about.”
A few minutes later, at a table on the Speakeasy’s patio, Jay Mielke is breaking out a cigar. Jay is a broadcast engineer in town and Dave’s counterpart: the chairman of the Rock County Republican Party. Before 9:30 p.m., the major television networks have called the race for Walker. Instead of becoming the third U.S. governor ejected from office in a recall election, Scott Walker has just become the first U.S. governor ever to survive a recall vote.
Jay is beaming as Mary Willmer walks onto the patio. Rock County 5.0 is nonpartisan in its economic development work, but it is public knowledge that Mary’s co-chair, Diane Hendricks, has given $510,000 to Walker’s campaign—the single largest donation by any individual. Mary is smiling as broadly as Jay as she high-fives him and the other Republicans seated around this patio table.
For Mary, who has been striving so hard to rebuild the city’s economy, this decisive victory—no one expected that it would be over this fast—is the best news Janesville could get. Jay sees it the same way. Businesses, he is saying as he turns philosophical, have been wary of coming into Wisconsin while a dagger has hung over the future of a pro-business governor. The dagger removed tonight, the governor solidly in office, Janesville—all of Wisconsin, really—is poised for a surge in jobs. What a night.
Back at Steve and Holly’s, the mood feels like a funeral. People are leaving early. Dave is standing near the end of the bar, hands on his hips. “What a bummer,” he says quietly. “I’m devastated.”
“I am just amazed,” Mike says. And then he glances up at the television. “Here comes stupid.”
It is not quite 10:30 p.m., and few of the other Democrats left in the restaurant are paying attention when Walker appears on the screen over the bar to claim his victory. On the stage of the Waukesha County Expo Center west of Milwaukee, before a cheering throng, the governor-who-will-stay-governor is hugging his wife and two sons and thanking God for his abundant grace. “Voters really do want leaders who stand up and make the tough decision,” Walker says. And then he glides toward a conciliatory tone. “Tomorrow is the day after the election. And tomorrow we are no longer opponents. Tomorrow, we are one as Wisconsinites, so together we can move Wisconsin forward.”
Dave and Mike are skeptical about Janesville moving forward with Walker still in office. Statewide, the governor may have won, with 53 percent to 46 percent for Barrett. But not in Rock County. Rock is one of just twelve of Wisconsin’s seventy-two counties that voted in favor of recalling the governor. “Now this governor knows we don’t like him,” Mike is saying to Dave. During his original campaign for governor, Walker pledged to add 250,000 jobs across Wisconsin during his first term; a year and a half since his swearing in, jobs are up by fewer than 30,000.
Mike is thinking out loud. If General Motors ever considered coming back to town, with Janesville and the county having voted for the recall, would Walker ever lift a finger to help?
Dave is quiet. He walks alone to the back of Steve and Holly’s, takes a white paper plate and a hot dog roll and spreads some ketchup. He opens a metal vat and, with tongs, pulls out a bratwurst. Wisconsin food. The same food that Walker will serve to the state’s legislators, Republican and Democrat alike, when he invites them over to the governor’s mansion in a gesture of reconciliation.
Dave walks back over to Mike, two stunned union veterans in a thinning crowd. “We lost the battle,” Dave says, trying to cheer them both up. “We haven’t lost the war.”
“You can’t say we didn’t pull all the pins,” Mike says.
“We did pull all the pins,” Dave agrees.
42
A Rough Summer
One of the basic lessons students are taught in Blackhawk’s criminal justice program is not to let themselves be manipulated by jail inmates. It is common knowledge that some inmates try to prey on guards who they sense are personally vulnerable. And by this summer, correctional officer Kristi Beyer, heralded in the Job Center’s newsletter two years ago for turning hardship into victory, is in a season of vulnerability.
Her son, Josh, is home from Iraq. Home with an honorable discharge after five years in the National Guard. Home, having managed not to be wounded or worse. But something is wrong. He began running out into the backyard, waving knives, hiding behind trees. The police have come a few times to try to calm him down. It hasn’t helped. So, even though she needs sleep during the day after her overnight shift, Kristi has been driving her son to a veterans hospital in Madison for post-traumatic stress treatment.
She and her husband, Bob, aren’t getting along. They don’t see each other much, with her working third shift and him first shift, leaving before dawn to commute to his job as a maintenance specialist in a state office building. Lately, she has been talking about a separation. He tells her they can work things out.
An inmate in the Rock County Jail on a probation violation expresses interest in Kristi. She is receptive. The affair begins in July. She brings him food. She brings him marijuana. She arranges for money to be transferred into his jail account to help him
buy snacks and toiletries from the commissary.
The next month, he is out of jail. They continue to see each other. He wants Kristi to buy him a car. He threatens to tell her husband about their relationship if she doesn’t.
Kristi does not share any of this with her mother. But one August morning, when she gets home from another overnight shift, she settles in on the covered back deck with her Newport 100s for their daily chat.
“I got something to tell you,” Kristi says to her mother.
“Oh, gosh. What?” her mother, Linda, replies.
Her mother has known the tones of Kristi’s voice her entire life, and something in this particular tone gives her the impression that, whatever Kristi needs to tell, it is not going to be just another quirky story about what happened last night at the jail. It is not going to be good.
A rough summer, Linda has been thinking lately. Very rough, with Josh still in treatment for his PTSD and the iffy future of Kristi and Bob’s marriage. Now she tries to steel herself.
“I met a guy,” Kristi says.
Her mother hasn’t seen that coming. The first thing she thinks of to say is: “Kristi, please don’t tell me it was a prisoner.”
“It is a prisoner,” Kristi says.
Her mother typically sides with Kristi, and she wants to now. But she can’t. Instead, she says: “You better try to break that off.”
43
The Candidate
Janesville Page 21
