Last week was a big news week on several dimensions for Wisconsin. Trump’s poll ratings, a Green Amendment to the Wisconsin constitution and NFL draft days in Green Bay all created headlines.
Hats off to Mark Murphy!
Let’s start with the Packers and draft days. CEO Mark Murphy and his team proved that the NFL’s smallest city is big time when it comes to the football business and community spirit. The three-day draft event pulled more than 600,000 people into Wisconsin and showed the world that the Packers organization is first class.
My dad must be smiling in in the hereafter over the overwhelming success and support for the team. He served on the Packers board for 36 years after he returned from service in WWII and was one of the Packers leaders who sold stock in a non-profit corporation, an almost unheard-of concept.
The six Packers stock sales over the years saved the franchise from insolvency for the community and the state as other franchises sold out to multi-millionaires, even billionaires.
Founding Coach Curly Lambeau tried to buy the franchise in late 1949 for $200,000. He wanted to take it private as a for-profit company. The board refused, and Curly left for the Chicago Cardinals in early 1950.
What is little appreciated about the Packers sustainability for a century is that its board of directors and seven-person executive committee is made up of not only community members, but also some of the shrewdest businessmen in the United States. Some of its leaders over the years have run companies that now generate more than $1 billion in revenues.
Further, they are not money managers and investors who have made their millions in transactions on the market; they are leaders who have run major operating companies with thousands of employees.
They know how to make organizations hum. They know how to build top-lines and bottom-lines. They understand assets and cash flows. They also know how to play it forward by building a community and a state.
How many other teams have done what Murphy’s team has done to redevelop the west side of Green Bay?
How many other teams have started a venture fund of $100 million to promote entrepreneurs, the sparkplugs of job creation and economic growth?
How many other teams have started a foundation with more than $40 million in assets that distributes $1.5 million to almost 400 other non-profit organizations serving youths and a wide variety of community needs across the state?
Is it any wonder that Wisconsinites love the Packers? Their loyalty is intense. Respect for the Packers goes beyond the state borders. There are the 13 championships, of course, but there is also the understanding that the Packers have 537,000 shareholders. All the shareholders get is a paper certificate to hang on the walls of their Packers dens and the right to vote for directors.
It’s an incredible story, a dramatic history, and it’s real.
Except the injuries and bloated salaries, it is the best of diversions for hard-working Wisconsinites.
Green Constitutional Law — Hats off also to three Wisconsin Democratic lawmakers for sponsoring a constitutional amendment to enshrine the right of people living in this state to have clean water, pure air and healthy soil.
Newly elected Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin of Whitefish Bay, Rep. Darrin Madison of Milwaukee, and Sen. Mark Spreitzer of Beloit are championing a proposed amendment that reads:
“The people, including future generations, have the right to a clean, safe and healthy natural environment, including clean water, clean air, healthy soils, self-sustaining ecosystems in a safe and stable climate and to the preservation of our natural, cultural and helpful qualities of our environment. These rights shall never be infringed. And shall be subject to strict scrutiny review in court, shall be protected equitably for all communities in the state, and this constitutional amendment is self-executing.”
This is a grand opportunity for Republican legislators to get back in the good graces of conservationists across the state. They can step up to co-sponsor the amendment.
Conservation has almost always been largely a bipartisan issue in the state. It is only sensible in a state blessed with natural resources — the Great Lakes on two borders, the Mississippi River on the west border, more lakes than any other state at 15,000, smaller rivers and creeks everywhere, wetlands, forests and prime soils.
The amendment will have to go through an arduous process of legislative and citizen approval, and it should pass those hurdles given the support in polls for conservation at 80% of Wisconsin citizens.
National Polls: Trump Dropping – It is a good thing for Donald Trump’s ego that he is a psychopath.
Leaders like him are beyond narcissists who like to be liked; psychopaths don’t care what anyone else thinks about them; they just want attention and power.
That makes him relatively immune to the sharp drop off in approval ratings. He scores below 50% approval in most areas of public concern. Even on immigration control, his primary platform, he has fallen below 50%.
It may come as a surprise in this thoroughly purple state that his combined ratings across all major polls in the country have dropped so quickly. According to The New York Times average of polls, across polls with different biases, his approval ratings have sunk to an average of about 45%, down from 52% one week after he took office.
Those polls show little drop in his support among Republican voters. He won by a 68% vote margin last November in Washington County.
Where he has lost the most is among independents. His disapproval ratings in that swing bloc has increased from 46% in January to 58% in a recent Quinnipiac University Poll.
According to a recent New York Times/Siena Poll his tariffs and a new global trade war have hurt him. Only 43% approve of his management of the economy.
In the same poll, a sky-high 76% of voters said the president should not be able to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court.
GOP leaders must be rethinking their face to the voters here and in other 49 states.
