Public television?s investigative series “Frontline” did a great job last week telling the life stories of President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney. So great it actually made me want to vote for them. Not because they came off as particularly brilliant or capable or caring. But rather because they came off as all these things and more, including unserious, haughty and ineffectual. Human, in other words.
Arguably at the forefront of efforts to understand what fuels political stance-taking in Wisconsin is UW-Madison associate political science professor Kathy Cramer Walsh, who spent more than a year gathering the opinions of regular folk in face-to-face interviews around the state. In a guest column in this newspaper in June she noted that “politics is often … about us versus them” and candidates “often make claims about the ?type? of people they are battling on behalf of.”