On Tuesday voters in 24 of 32 Wisconsin towns said it is time to bring the troops home from Iraq. For me, the key cities were Madison and LaCrosse. Since the referendum was expected to pass in Madison, what was key was that it pass by a large margin. It did:
Yes: 24,344 (68.39%)
No: 11,252 (31.61%)
LaCrosse is a working class city of a little over 50,000 and moderate to conservative in its politics. The city council there rejected the referendum, but activists gathered enough signatures to place it on the ballot. A victory for a referendum calling for immediate troop withdrawal in a city like LaCrosse, no matter how large or small the margin of victory, would send a powerful message to the White House. The LaCrosse referendum passed handily:
Yes: 3,614 (54.78%)
No: 2,983 (45.22%)
Results from all 32 towns can be found here.
The Bush Administration and its Congressional enablers cannot ignore these results. Remember, almost all of these referendum questions were calling for IMMEDIATE withdrawal of troops, a position that media spin doctors and Republicrat hacks have been telling us for months has no support within the population. Wisconsin proved them wrong tonight. Had the referendum question called for withdrawal according to some kind of timetable, no doubt they would have passed by much larger margins.
The results in LaCrosse suggest that Oshkosh area activists should seriously consider trying to get the referendum on the November ballot.
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6 comments:
It is sad to see the small number of people voting in this election across the state(or at least on this referendum). I would hardly call this victory. In LaCrosse, there are only a little over 10% of the population voting in favor. Hardly a mandate! If you think this will sway anybody in Washington......I have a bridge.
Jack Straw
This just reminds the voters of why they elect adults to run our nation.
Symbolic gestures are for the symbol minded.
Ballot referenda represent democracy in its purest form allowing voters to express important opinions to local politicians who then take them to Washington to effect policy change. That's exactly what happened in 32 communities where citizens first petitioned for the ballot and then voted.
If we give up on the idea that public opinion matters to those for whom we vote, we give up on democracy. Isn't that what the enemies of America want most?
John Nichols of the Cap Times wrote a great opinion piece on this yesterday:
http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion
/column/index.php?ntid=79143&ntpid=0
John Nichols: Message on war could be no clearer
By John Nicbols
April 6, 2006
In November 2004, the village of Luxemburg, Wis., voted to re-elect George W. Bush by a hefty 701 to 431. The northeastern Wisconsin community has always been a Republican stronghold; indeed, voters there even rejected the re-election of popular Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold two years ago.
It can safely be said that a solid majority of the 2,000 residents of this village of well-maintained homes, neat storefronts and large churches in a rural stretch of Kewaunee County think of themselves as old-fashioned Midwestern conservatives.
So, by the calculus of the Bush White House and their echo chamber in the national media, Luxemburg would be just about the last place in the United States to express doubts about the president's handling of the war in Iraq. And surely, no one would have expected it to vote in favor of a referendum declaring: "Be it hereby resolved, that the village of Luxemburg urges the United States to begin an immediate withdrawal of its troops from Iraq, beginning with the National Guard and Reserves."
Yet, on Tuesday, the citizens of Luxemburg endorsed that statement with a clear majority of their votes.
Luxemburg was not the only Wisconsin community that voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004 but voted against his war on Tuesday. Up the road, the villages of Casco and Ephraim voted for Bush in 2004 and immediate withdrawal resolutions in 2006. Up in northwest Wisconsin, the towns of Ojibwa, Draper and Edgewater, all of which backed Bush two years ago, voted against the war on Tuesday.
Their votes came as part of a statewide rejection of the war that saw 24 of 32 communities vote yes on Bring the Troops Home referendums. Added together, the referendums produced a resounding 40,043 to 25,641 vote against the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq 61 percent to 39 percent. Supporters of the war are spinning like crazy to suggest that the referendums offer a reflection only of liberal, anti-Bush sentiment in college towns like Madison.
The problem they've got is that, while the Bring the Troops Home referendum won Madison by a thumping 62-38 percent, similar referendums won by 70-30 percent in the well-to-do Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood and by a dramatic 82-18 percent in the community of Couderay in rural Sawyer County.
A Bring the Troops Home referendum also won in a La Crosse, the western Wisconsin city where Democratic and Republican presidential candidates including Bush have regularly campaigned over the years because the region around it is seen as a bellwether for national politics. Indeed, despite an aggressive campaign against the withdrawal referendum by La Crosse County Republicans, it won by a solid 10 percent margin.
It is true that referendums were defeated in eight cities, villages and towns. But only in three of those communities did the vote for immediate withdrawal fall below 45 percent.
The Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, the Green Party and other groups that plotted the campaign for these referendums took a number of risks. They wrote resolutions with uncompromising "immediate withdrawal" language and they put them on the ballot not just in traditionally liberal communities but in traditionally conservative cities, villages and towns. They bet on the good sense of Wisconsinites, and in so doing they secured a message that for all the attempts to spin it away cannot be denied. It is time to bring the troops home.
Give me a break, Couderay has 22 people voting. If you take Madison out of the picture, the votes were pretty much 50/50. And I think 10 communtites that voted yes had around 100 voters. You have to look at the #'s closer to actually see what is going on.
The opportunity to voice one's opinion with a vote using a referendum brings voters to the polls. Turnout in Baraboo tripled this election cycle.
If politicians don't pay any attention to the votes in individual communitites, it isn't because they shouldn't.
Anonymous will never get a break when democracy fails to work.
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