Random Proxmire Posting
Among the Google News alerts I have is one that I expect to send me very little; a search for William Proxmire. I'm not big on idol worship among pols, but Proxmire is perhaps the one exception to that rule with me. Perhaps no shock that I don't cringe from the same adjective used to describe Prox the most: iconoclastic. There's simply not many that I respect more than Proxmire for his independence and willingness to gore the occassional sacred cow.
It's not uncommon that some blurb or another online will mention the former Wisconsin Senator, and on perhaps a more morbid note, I have it so that when his battle with Alzheimer's is done, I might learn about it in a timely fashion.
In the latest News Alert I get, comes this column from Oregon:
Years ago, William Proxmire, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, of all places, made a name for himself two ways.First, he started handing out the Golden Fleece Award to people who wasted taxpayers? money. He could have handed out 10,000 awards a day and never run out of recipients. He started with the $500 toilet seats on Air Force planes and federal studies about the sex lives of worms and went from there.
Second, to my knowledge he never spent so much as $1 on his campaigns. He walked around Wisconsin and actually talked with people, asked them about their lives and what the government could do for them.
?Get the h?- off my back!? is probably what he heard most.
And he won election after election.
I think we need more Proxmires and fewer advertising spend-a-thons. I think we need folks running for office who have worked for a living instead of riding their family coattails their whole lives.
I think we need people who possess basic common sense and care about more than the next election.
Aside from the Everyman sort of appeal to it, I must offer one correction as a somewhat observant student of Proxmire's (thanks C-SPAN!). William Proxmire DID spend more than $1 on campaigns. In fact, he spent upwards to $57 on a campaign that netted him 63.6% of the vote in 1982, which was a down year for Prox ... he won 72.2% in 1976. All that from standing outside of Packers games, shaking hands with everyone he could reach out to (and meticulously counting the number of hands shaken with a clickable counter held in a warm pocket with the other hand). Proxmire knew that the power of incumbency held enormous ability to reach the public, and he took every advantage of it. If a news station in Milwaukee wanted a sound bite, Prox might well have taken them up 100% of the time on the offer. If there was a State Fair going on, you knew you could count on Prox to greet you (long before Wal Mart caught onto the concept!). If there was a county fair going on, you knew you had decent odds of seeing Prox there if the crowd was big enough.
Alas, I'm not sure I agree with the author that we need more Proxmires. I'm reminded of something Joe Biden said when Prox announced he wouldn't run for re-election in 1988: The Senate has just enough room for ONE William Proxmire. But it needs that one Proxmire. Its that shortage, I maintain, that is missed the most.