Scott Klug represented Wisconsin in Congress for eight years, developing an expertise in health care, telecommunications, and environmental issues. Before entering politics, he was an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter for television stations in Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin. He is a member of the National Public Affairs Team at the Foley & Lardner law firm. Currently, Klug is the CEO of Trails Media Group, Inc. in Madison, Wis., a forty-year-old publishing company aimed at the Great Lakes travel industry.

Scott Klug

former U.S. Representative for Wisconsin, investigative reporter, and anchor

San Francisco Workshop
March 20, 2000

I went to school at Northwestern when I first started my career in journalism. Ben Baldwin, who was one of my old professors, always had a great line that stuck with me that said, If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.

     Its always been kind of an overriding assumption for me, to go back on a regular basis and make sure that a lot of the operating principles I was operating under were actually correct. I think you get down the road and assume what youre doing makes sense and you never get back to ground zero. I want to go back and challenge a couple of assumptions for you, just to make sure you pause before you jump head-first into this years political season.

     The first assumption is this perception by journalists and the public at large that somehow, somewhere, sometime, there was a golden time in American politics. Its a little bit like Garrison Keillors line about Lake Wobegon: Where all the kids are above average. There was a time when the candidates were more honest, when politics was cleaner, when people were much more involved.

     When I left Congress one of the things I had a chance to do was to spend six months at Marquette University under the Nieman Fellowship.&The Nieman fellowships have been used by Marquette to bring people in as theyve left political careers and they have a chance to reflect on what they did and also spend some time with students. [Former Secretary of Defense] Les Aspin was on the campus for a long time, so was George Reedy who was Lyndon Johnsons press secretary.

     Well, I went back to take a look at some academic studies that had been done (which is really a scary thought because academia doesnt come easily for me, which is why I taught one semester and, fortunately for the future of Americas students, left gleefully at the end of last semester).

     There was a great study done years ago that took a look at town hall meetings in New Hampshire and this professors theory was essentially that if you went back and looked at town hall meetings, you would see much higher turnout hundreds of years ago and much greater citizen involvement because people really did care it was a different kind of time.

     So when she went back and looked at these town hall meetings in New Hampshire, and the records exist all the way back to the 1600s, she found exactly what she was looking for. She found the records of a town in New Hampshire where turnout rates at the town hall meeting, which decided everything from kind of town board projects to school projects, was at about 85%. And so she said, Ah-hah, I was exactly right, we have fallen from kind of paradise and if we could step back, wed find a much purer, cleaner form of Democracy.

     Somebody not too long after that said, This really doesnt make a lot of sense, Im going to go look at other town hall meeting turnout records. And they went back and looked at other communities in New Hampshire and discovered something very interesting. The town hall meetings that this professor first focused on had turnout rates that were about 85% because people got fined if they didnt show up at the town hall meeting. They sent somebody to your house the day before to remind you that you were supposed to go. They sent somebody the day of the meeting to make sure you showed up. And after the town hall meeting started, if you hadnt shown up they still sent somebody to your door.

     Now remember, who could vote in these town hall meetings? It was white males who owned land. So were talking about an even smaller subset of the folks who lived in New Hampshire at that point. And if you looked at the other communities, where you didnt get fined and they didnt send people to lasso you to get you to the project, the turnout rates were actually well below 50%.

     Guess what? America in the 1600s was like America in the year 2000. People showed up to vote when it mattered to them and when it didnt, they stayed home. Turnout rates in the first congressional elections in this country in Massachusetts in 1792, George Washington is still president, Thomas Jefferson isnt president yet, all of the Founding Fathers are still alive, we just fought a war for independence 16 years earlier, they just finished the Constitutional Convention about 10 years earlier and the turnout rates in those first Massachusetts congressional elections with white males who had property were an astounding 16%.

     So keep that in mind, because I think there is now this mythology thats become a point of order and a point of reference in the press that says somehow the political system has deteriorated and what you have are turnout rates that are an embarrassment. The fact is, if you stand back and look at American history over the last 300 years, what you see is that participation rises and falls depending on whats going on in the world around you. During the Depression, people were awfully concerned, and they showed up to vote. With the explosion of newspapers in the late 1860s and 1870s, people cared, there was enough going on after the end of the Civil War, people voted.

Theres an argument to be made that says, People dont vote today because theyre tuned out to the system, they dont care, theyre not involved. Theres an equally credible argument to be said, Everythings fine, it really doesnt affect peoples lives that much, governments less of a force than it used to be, so at the end of the day if I dont show up to vote it really wont make any difference because were on cruise control, anyway.

      So dont necessarily assume there was a cleaner, purer time in American politics because there wasnt. And this always reminds me about when the Denver Post won a Pulitzer Prize for a story all of us had missed. Youll remember Adam Walsh, the little kid in Florida who got kidnapped and murdered? And suddenly there were thousands of stories about missing children in the United States and kids suddenly started to show up on milk cartons. I mean it was kind of this hysteria.

      The paper in Denver actually had the good sense to say, Wait a minute, there might be lots of kids missing, but how many of them have been kidnapped and murdered? And what they discovered was; there were a couple dozen cases a year in the United States and most kids who were missing were kids who had been plucked by mothers or fathers in custody cases and moved to another state or they were kids who now turned 14 and ran away from home. And this every parents nightmare where your kid gets plucked from the K-Mart toy aisle really wasnt true, but we had perpetuated this myth in journalism that it was. So, back to turnout: take some time to look at whats actually happened in your neck of the country and in your local districts over time.

The second point is that there is an operating assumption that money corrupts politicians. Okay. Its something that everybodys talked a lot about today: were going to follow the money. Look, I was at Northwestern in 1976 when All the Presidents Men got released. I went to the movie premiere in Chicago. I spent 14 years doing investigative work for TV stations. Cynicism comes easily to me as it does to everyone in this room. And cynicism about American politics, like the mythology about a golden era, is nothing completely new. Mark Twain wrote in the 1860s that America had no distinctive criminal class except for members of Congress. Will Rogers said in the 1920s that it went without saying, he favored the voluntary sterilization of anybody whod been elected twice to Congress with their own knowledge.

      So its natural, I think, to go there, but its not how it really works. Im out of Congress, the statute of limitations has passed. Nobody ever delivered a briefcase full of hundred dollar bills to me. Nobody came in from Exxon and said, If you do this for us, we guarantee your kids will go to college anywhere they want. It doesnt work that way in the political system. Not that there havent been abuses and not that there cant be abuses at the national level, but I think its a mistake to go in with that operating assumption.

     When I first ran against Bob Kastenmeier in 1990, I had a hard time catching any kind of support. [Republicans] had run races against him for years, people whod been politically active backed off saying, This is throwing more good money at bad, I dont want to get involved. And one day in making the rounds from business leaders to Republican activists, I finally had a lunch with a guy named Jim Lange, who was then the president of First Wisconsin Bank in Madison. I talked to Jim for a half hour and he looked kind of like you all look right now, that you had carrot cake and pizza and youve sat in chairs for a long time and he was about ready to pass out in his Caesar salad. Then it turned out that we went to the same all-boys, Catholic Jesuit high school in Milwaukee and his eyes lit up.

     A week later we end up at Jim Langes house in Madison, Wisconsin and hes got a half dozen people seated around the table, and to call this a cocktail party gives it a sense of elegance that didnt exist, there were literally a six-pack of beer on ice and a bowl of beer nuts and those guys became the core of the finance team when I first ran for office and the common thread with all of them is they all either went to Jesuit high school or Jesuit college in Wisconsin. And so if I was kind of the pawn of a vast right-wing conspiracy it went all the way back to the Vatican and Ignatius Loyola.

     As you talk a lot of times about money and sort this out by categories this guy got so much money from car dealers and this woman got so much money from farmers and its big chunks of people. On the local level, were not talking nationally, but on the local level Id encourage you to start thinking about doing profiles of some of the people involved as financial supporters of candidates. It would have made fascinating stories, I think, for folks to profile Todd Teefentoller who was one of the people at Jim Langes house who runs a small printing company with 45 employees, who is worried about small business issues and has been active in Republican politics for years. And Todd wasnt there because it was ever going to do anything to help his printing business, Todd was there out of a sense of goodwill.

So the shocking thing to everybody in this room is that you have candidates who run for the right reasons and people who actually support them for the right reasons. You would do your local audiences a great service if you looked at what the core group of support was around an individual candidate running for office. Its not great, unnamed people who fall into the categories its local people who care about local issues. Lots of those people only care about the candidates for the right reason, because they want somebody there they can be proud of and they still believe in the system.

     Now thats not to say that folks dont give to campaigns out of a sense of self-interest. They do. But its always interesting to me to have reporters scream in horror and say, You took all this money from special interests, you should be ashamed. Thats kind of the subtext, which was always fascinating to me because that was usually on a Tuesday, and then on Thursday the Wisconsin Association of Broadcasters would show up at my office in Washington wanting to talk about spectrum licensing fees and how it was stealing money away from their interests.

     And for everybody in this room now whos wearing a halo because they work for a public broadcasting station, take a look at the people who are on the board of directors of your local public television station. I know who they are in Madison because Im one of them. Everybody whos around that room is politically connected and usually a financial supporter of political candidates or involved in races. The Wisconsin Public TV people put us on [the board] for a very good reason, because they want to watch out for the interest of Wisconsin Public TV in the Wisconsin state legislature.

     Theres nothing wrong with that. Our entire system is essentially based on people all speaking up for their own self-interest and at the end of the day, the theory is the voices all cancel each other out and legislators then make intelligent decisions. Now we can argue about the intelligent decisions part of it, but thats how the system got set up in the country.

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