'One Wisconsin Now' Groups Tied Politically

Established in 2005 by several veteran Democratic activists, One Wisconsin Now officially describes itself as an "independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization that unites research, policy, message, communications and networking activities of organizations that are dedicated to a progressive public policy agenda in Wisconsin."

The group's first executive director was John Kraus, who had previously been director of the state Democratic Party.

The group actually operates as three separate and legally distinct entities engaging in various forms of political activity:

* One Wisconsin Now is a tax-exempt organization aimed at building grass-roots support for policies like the Healthy Wisconsin universal health care plan advocated by Democrats in the state Senate. * The Institute for One Wisconsin Now is a liberal think tank and educational group that, in recent months, has also been pushing the Democrats' health care plan in a series of public forums around the state. * One Wisconsin Now Action is a federally registered political organization that engages in "issue advocacy" like the campaign against state Supreme Court candidate Annette Ziegler (R, WI).

One Wisconsin Now and the Institute for One Wisconsin Now both decline to identify their donors, but netroots director Cory Liebmann says the money comes from "progressive individuals, organizations and groups, such as foundations and unions."

As a political organization, however, One Wisconsin Now Action is required to file reports with the Internal Revenue Service that show its funding has come from handful of large contributors: New York media mogul Joseph Rosenmiller gave $139,000, for example, while New York philanthropist Alida Rockefeller Messinger gave $75,000, and Epic Systems CEO Judith Faulkner and her husband Gordon gave $24,000.

The IRS reports also show that, apart from its own political activities this spring, One Wisconsin Now Action gave $45,000 to the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, another Democratic-linked group that targeted Ziegler.

The three groups share the same staff, although Liebmann says employees are paid out of separate accounts depending on the kind of work they do. According to the IRS reports, One Wisconsin Now Action has paid One Wisconsin Now more than $41,000 for unspecified expenses over the past two years.

One Wisconsin Now went without an executive director for nearly a year, until longtime Democratic operative Scot Ross was chosen for the post. Prior to his hiring earlier this month, Ross had served as an aide to state Sen. Jon Erpenbach, the lead author of the Senate Democrats' Healthy Wisconsin plan.

And why this should matter to all of us in EACH of our states:

Playing hardball

Liberal blogger emerges as major political player at Ziegler’s expense

David Callender — 8/30/2007 11:40 am

When Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler faces her day of reckoning before the state Judicial Commission, there’s one name that should be on her mind: Cory Liebmann.

A former private investigator turned liberal blogger, Liebmann was the first to question whether Ziegler, as a judge in Washington County, violated conflict of interest rules by hearing foreclosure cases involving a bank where her husband was a paid member of the board of directors.

Liebmann’s barrage of press releases and blog postings touched off statewide media reports focusing on Ziegler’s alleged ethical lapses that, in turn, became a major issue in her race for the court against Madison attorney Linda Clifford.

Though victorious at the polls, Ziegler also won the dubious distinction of becoming the only Supreme Court justice ever to win a seat while under investigation for violating the code of judicial ethics.

The campaign against Ziegler also established Liebmann’s organization, One Wisconsin Now, as a major player in state politics and, perhaps more importantly, showed just how a grass-roots group with a shoestring budget can take on some of the state’s biggest and best-financed special interest groups.

Liebmann, 35, estimates that all of his efforts cost less than $50,000, but they forced Ziegler and her supporters to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising trying to counter the negative publicity.

While Liebmann and One Wisconsin Now ultimately lost their battle to keep Ziegler off the court — she won with roughly 58 percent of the vote — the ethics issue helped Clifford close the more than 2-to-1 lead Ziegler had early in the race.

The conflict issue has continued to dog Ziegler in the months since the election. In May, Ziegler agreed to pay $17,000 in fines and legal costs to the state Ethics Board, which found she violated the ethics law that regulates all public officials.

And the state Judicial Commission, which was scheduled to meet Friday, is also investigating the charges. The commission’s proceedings are secret unless the commission files a complaint with the state Supreme Court.

Ziegler’s campaign manager, Mark Graul, acknowledges that no other groups were “nearly as aggressive” in taking on his candidate during the election. Although he disputes how much damage One Wisconsin Now actually did to Ziegler’s campaign, he contends that, “as long as they continue receiving money, they’re very much going to be part of the political landscape in Wisconsin.”

One Republican strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, however, warns that many GOP candidates could find themselves facing similar attacks from the group next fall.

“If the Republicans don’t get something like One Wisconsin Now soon, they’re stupid,” the strategist says. “We have got to figure out some way to wage the same kind of guerrilla warfare they’re doing.”

Evangelical zeal

In many respects, One Wisconsin Now is like other long-standing advocacy groups, such as Wisconsin Right to Life and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, as well as recent arrivals such as the Greater Wisconsin Committee. All are aimed at trying to change policy through grass-roots organizing and media exposure.

What distinguishes One Wisconsin Now from the other groups, though, is use of the Internet as its primary vehicle for reaching activists, and its emphasis on grass-roots organizing and communication through the Internet instead of such traditional means as direct mail and television, radio and print advertising.

That allows the group to offer supporters a bigger bang for the buck and puts it on the cutting edge of political organizing, says Madison attorney Mike Wittenwyler, who specializes in working with advocacy groups.

When such groups began exercising their political muscle in the 1980s, it was mainly through direct mail, which required the groups to amass huge mailing lists and to develop sophisticated printing and mailing operations. Now, says Wittenwyler, the same kinds of lists can developed through just a Web site, with all the communication done by e-mail.

On top of that, groups like One Wisconsin Now that specialize in doing their own investigative research can also drive media coverage, as in the Ziegler case, Wittenwyler adds.

“It used to be that if you were in the public relations business, your tools were paid media (for advertising) and earned media (through news coverage),” he says. “Now there’s this third category of quasi-earned media that arises from the blogs.”

That’s where Liebmann’s skills come in.

Although he is not the group’s executive director, as “netroots director” he remains its principal voice, commenting on everything from Ziegler’s campaign for the high court to the need for universal health care to a crusade against the state’s big-business lobby, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.

Liebmann brings an almost evangelical zeal to his job. That, he says, is a by-product of his upbringing as a fundamentalist Christian, including a stint as a youth pastor for an Assemblies of God church.

Liebmann says his own transformation from a conservative Christian to one of the state’s leading progressive voices was both religious and political.

Growing up in one of Milwaukee’s housing projects, Liebmann says his mother struggled with mental health issues, including a fear of crowds so severe that she seldom left their apartment. But friends and neighbors who were active in a local Southern Baptist church reached out to his family, “and that’s probably what kept me out of trouble,” he says.

“That’s one of the good sides of fundamentalism,” he adds. “As messed up a situation as we had, they still took us in.”

But as Liebmann, who holds an undergraduate degree in theology, prepared to enter the ministry, he began struggling with his sexual orientation.

“I sought counseling. I did everything they tell you to do” to “cure” homosexuality, he says. “It was a very difficult time. It’s like trying to change your DNA.”

As Liebmann came to terms with being gay, it triggered a re-evaluation of the religious doctrine he’d been taught in church.

“I came to the conclusion that their very strict, legalistic interpretation of the Gospels was just wrong” when it came to homosexuality, he says. “And I realized that if they were wrong about this, they could be wrong about a whole lot of things.”

Despite his spiritual questions, Liebmann continued working on a master’s degree at Marquette University, where he was working full time as a security guard to pay for his studies.

Ultimately, though, Liebmann says he found it too difficult to balance both work and school, and when he and several friends were the victims of an attack outside a gay bar in 1998, his focus turned to getting justice for the victims. Liebmann undertook a one-man crusade that forced Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann, who was initially reluctant to undertake the case, to prosecute the assailants.

“I didn’t win any friends in the DA’s office on that one,” he says.

Liebmann dropped out of Marquette and, in part thanks to the attention he got from his friends’ case, he landed a job from a local private investigator.

While much of the work involved shadowing cheating spouses, Liebmann says he learned from the criminal cases that he handled “just how easy it is to lock people up and throw away the key.”

Liebmann began blogging during the presidential campaign in 2004, and he says the appeal of blogging is self-evident: “Everyone has an opinion. And if you have an issue that is sticking in your craw and the mainstream media aren’t covering it, this is a way to let people know about it.”

He says his political views are “definitely progressive,” adding that they have “evolved” from his own spiritual quest. “If you look at Christ, he told his followers to focus on ‘the least of these among you.’ That’s a huge message that conservatives are missing.”

He began to blog more seriously in early 2005, just as Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, a Republican, began considering running against Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle.

In part because of his mother’s experience, Liebmann says he was incensed when Walker proposed cuts to the Milwaukee County mental health system.

“He really got my goat, so I started digging around” and found that Walker had received campaign contributions from firms that did business with the county. Liebmann’s allegations were picked up by the Associated Press, and the County Board ordered an audit of several of the contracts. That audit cleared Walker of any wrongdoing, a finding Liebmann disputes.

The newfound attention raised the profile of Liebmann’s first blog, Eye on Wisconsin, which was also boosted by veteran Democratic strategist Bill Christofferson. Christofferson pushed to get Liebmann included on a list of bloggers hosted by www.wisopinion.com, an outgrowth of the WisPolitics news Web site.

Christofferson says he was impressed because “Cory had a nice style and an interesting, slightly different way of looking at issues sometimes. His blog also seemed to be well-researched.”

Liebmann says when he first began blogging, his family thought it was just a hobby, but he says, “I had the feeling all along that the blogging was going to lead to something.”

By 2006, as Liebmann’s private-eye work was starting to drop off, he was approached by executive director John Kraus at One Wisconsin Now, who proposed that Liebmann start blogging for the nascent organization.

“I remember thinking: ‘You’re going to pay me full time to blog?’” Liebmann says. “Of

course

I took the job.”

Direct hit

Liebmann says his work for One Wisconsin Now is less overtly partisan than when he was running his personal blog because the group cannot legally endorse specific candidates. In Ziegler’s case, Liebmann says he was asked to apply his private-eye techniques to the Supreme Court race, “and I was happy to do it.”

As he pored over Ziegler’s Statement of Economic Interests, he found that the Washington County judge and her husband, whose family owns a financial services company, had vast stock holdings, including holdings in tobacco, pharmaceutical and oil companies.

Liebmann’s interest was piqued first by Ziegler’s ownership of Wal-Mart stock. He posted a blog in late January questioning whether she had a conflict of interest in hearing a civil case involving Wal-Mart.

It was a direct hit; after Liebmann raised the issue and his report received mainstream media coverage, Ziegler recused herself from the case.

“That’s when I figured we should check all this stuff out,” he says, including Ziegler’s handling of cases involving West Bend State Bank, where her husband served as a paid director.

Liebmann hit the motherlode. On Feb. 28, he announced in a press release that he had found at least 45 cases in which Ziegler had acted in cases involving the bank. He charged that, “when no one was looking, Ziegler turned a blind eye to her own conflict of interest in the West Bend Savings Bank cases.”

Ziegler, he wrote, owed voters an explanation “why she stepped off the Wal-Mart case and why she didn’t step away from the cases involving her husband.”

In a week, Liebmann’s accusations were front-page news, and Ziegler, who had handily won the primary against Linda Clifford and Madison attorney Joseph Sommers, found herself in a defensive crouch.

When Ziegler told a Spring Green candidates’ forum that she used a “gut check” to determine whether hearing such cases violated the state’s code of judicial ethics, “the blogosphere blew up, and I knew I had to keep blogging on it. She just kept giving us more ammunition.”

Ziegler took office earlier this month with a complaint against her still pending before the Judicial Commission.

She acknowledged in her settlement with the Ethics Board that she acted on matters in which her family stood to benefit, which violated state law, but the Ethics Board determined that Ziegler and her family did not actually benefit from any of those decisions.

Liebmann says the Ziegler case put One Wisconsin Now on the political map, but it’s far from the group’s last step. He contends that the group is now helping to drive the debate on a host of issues, from universal health care to the role of the state’s big-business lobby in setting the legislative agenda.

For Liebmann, the personal remains political.

“I’m a low-key person, but if I feel like someone is wronging me or something I believe in, I’ll go after them like a pit bull,” he says.

http://www.madison.com/tct/news/stories/208293

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