Herb Kohl's Mixed Legacy

When former Wisconsin Democratic Senator Herb Kohl passed away in late December, the majority of politicians praised him for his philanthropy, work ethic, and support for good causes. Quotes from leading Democrats (current Senator Tammy Baldwin called him "my role model") made it sound as if Kohl was part of Wisconsin's progressive tradition. Spoiler alert: he wasn't. 

No one should minimize the impact of Herb Kohl's philanthropic work. The millions of dollars he dedicated to education and other initiatives made--and continue to make--lasting impacts on the citizenry. The US Senate is dominated by millionaires, but few of them invest it in positive public initiatives as well as Kohl did. 

Former Senator Herb Kohl

Unfortunately, the Wisconsin media seems unwilling to assess Herb Kohl's US Senate legacy in a rigorous manner, and tend to conflate his philanthropy and senate work. The Madison Cap Times editorial tribute to Kohl is the best example, in which the writers include as part of his legacy that "marks him as one of the most significant elected leaders in Wisconsin history" the fact that he kept the Bucks in Milwaukee, funded the Kohl Center, funded the Kohl foundation, and gave out generous scholarships. None of the philanthropic work Herb Kohl engaged in required him to be a United States Senator. None. 

Judging Herb Kohl's legacy as an elected official means taking an honest look at his impact on politics and policy. Journalists, historians, and pundits should not allow Kohl's affable personality and generous gift giving to prevent them from offering candid assessments of his Senate record. Kohl did many good things in his four terms, which have been duly noted in press coverage, but he was also on the wrong side of some of the most critical issues of his time--issues that had enormous impact on the lives of Americans.

Let's starts with Kohl's political legacy. In the early 2000s I attended a speech at UW Oshkosh delivered by then Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug LaFollette. During the question and answer period, a student asked Secretary LaFollette to talk about the role of money in politics. He answered by sharing an anecdote about his run for the United States Senate in the 1988 Democratic Party primaries. Running a grassroots campaign, LaFollette traveled thousands of miles across the state in a used car, knocking on doors and meeting voters in cities, towns, and villages. When he got way up to the northernmost county, he knocked on a door and an elderly woman answered. As I recall from LaFollette's remarks, here is how his conversation with that woman went: 

LaFollette: "Hi I'm Secretary of State Doug LaFollette and I'm running to be your United States Senator." 

Woman: "That's what Herb Kohl is running for, right?"  

The woman knew about Kohl not because he had visited her home, but because he had saturated the state with millions of dollars of TV ads telling Wisconsinites he would be "Nobody's senator but your own." Kohl won the primary that year with a plurality of 47 percent of the vote, prevailing over former governor Tony Earl, progressive activist Ed Garvey, and LaFollette. Kohl defeated 36-year-old Republican Susan Engeleiter in the general election, and when all was said and done had spent around $7 million of his own money. 

Kohl won three more terms (in 1994, 2000, 2006), each time defeating his Republican challenger by wider margins. He was certainly not the first multimillionaire to win a United States Senate seat, but he was one of the first to establish that flooding media markets with millions of dollars of television and other ad spots immediately transforms the flooder into a candidate the press will take seriously. That leads to the perverse situation--we saw it in 2016 with the Trump presidential campaign--where the richest candidate in the race also ends up getting the most FREE advertising from media corporations. 

Throughout Senator Kohl's long tenure in office I was always frustrated by how the corporate media and the establishment Democratic party enabled the "nobody's senator but yours" schtick, as if we would somehow be better off as a state and a nation if every candidate for every office was self-funded. Obviously the dysfunction of contemporary politics cannot be blamed on Herb Kohl, but his success at using his personal fortune to insulate himself from serious electoral competition became the norm across the country. For higher office on both the Democratic and Republican sides, candidate recruitment involves the search for the "benevolent millionaire" who is somehow in touch with the grassroots. 

Herb Kohl became one of the best examples of what campaign finance reform advocates feared would happen after the Supreme Court's horrendous 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held as unconstitutional the limitation on expenditures by candidates from their own personal resources, as well as limitations on total campaign expenditures. The Buckley decision gave us the nefarious "money = speech" principle, which campaign reform advocate Derek Cressman aptly referred to as "court ordered corruption." Justice Thurgood Marshall offered up a powerful dissent: 

One of the points on which all Members of the Court agree is that money is essential for effective communication in a political campaign. It would appear to follow that the candidate with a substantial personal fortune at his disposal is off to a significant "headstart." Of course, the less wealthy candidate can potentially overcome the disparity in resources through contributions from others. But ability to generate contributions may itself depend upon a showing of a financial base for the campaign or some demonstration of preexisting support, which, in turn, is facilitated by expenditures of substantial personal sums. Thus, the wealthy candidate's immediate access to a substantial personal fortune may give him an initial advantage that his less wealthy opponent can never overcome. And even if the advantage can be overcome, the perception that personal wealth wins elections may not only discourage potential candidates without significant personal wealth from entering the political arena, but also undermine public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.

When the Supreme Court opened up the floodgates for big money in Buckley v. Valeo, Justice Thurgood Marshall in his dissent anticipated the corruption that would follow. 

The argument that millionaire self-financed candidates make is that, in not having to rely on Political Action Committee donations or contributions from individuals, they are truly independent. All these rich candidates campaign on some variation of Kohl's "nobody's senator but yours" theme.  A truly independent politician in Washington, I think we would all agree, is one able to resist all the beltway lobbying, put principle over politics, stand with marginalized groups, refuse to support ill-conceived military operations, and take unpopular positions. I'm not sure Herb Kohl's record reflects that kind of independence. "Nobody's senator but yours" supported

• The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as between one man and one woman. A truly independent senator would have stood up for the LGBTQ community. 
• The 1996 "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act." This bill was a cornerstone of the 1994 Republican "Contract With America," and was a result of years scapegoating of "welfare queens" and other attacks on the poor. With the Republicans taking over Congress in the 1994 midterms and fearing his own reelection chances, President Clinton signed the legislation and declared "the era of big government is over." A truly independent senator would have called out how the war on poverty was being transformed into a war on the poor. 
• The 2001 Bush Tax Cuts.  George W. Bush entered office with a budget surplus. His tax cuts of 2001, which Kohl supported, disproportionately benefited the wealthy and set the stage for the massive deficits we see today. A truly independent senator would only support truly progressive tax policies. 
• The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. Passed only six weeks after the September 11 attacks with virtually no deliberation and with senators openly admitting not having read its provisions, the PATRIOT Act greatly expanded the government's authority to spy on its own citizens. Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold was the only member of the body to vote against it. "Nobody's senator but ours" voted for it. 
• The Authorization For Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. This resolution passed the Senate 77-23, with 29 Democrats including Kohl voting Yes. If ever there was a time when the nation needed truly independent senators, it was for this vote. 
• The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. This was the infamous Wall St. bailout. Legislation that, as Matt Taibbi correctly pointed out,  committed American taxpayers to "permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it."  Before the vote, polls showed that citizens were opposed to the bailout. A truly independent senator would have stood with them and demanded that the legislation do much more to hold elite financiers accountable and protect taxpayers before voting yes. 

Each one of these pieces of legislation had enormous impact on society, with mostly negative and in some cases tragic consequences. The Cap Times swept all this under the rug in three sentences: "That did not mean that Kohl got every issue right. We disagreed with his support for the war in Iraq and for the USA Patriot Act. He voted for tax cuts that didn’t sit well with us." 

The purpose of this rant was not to trash the late Senator Kohl. He was a decent man with good intentions. It is no disrespect to Kohl to point out that he benefited from an extremely corrupt campaign finance system, and that his votes did not always reflect the independence he claimed his wealth gave him. As with all millionaire candidates, his wealth became a firewall which protected his incumbency from serious challenges within the Democratic party and from the Republicans. It ought to be possible for Wisconsin journalists to praise Kohl's philanthropy while taking a more rigorous look at his overall record in the Senate.