The Doyle "Blink": As Phony as the Cap "Crisis"

There's that old saw about two similar items being a coincidence, and three being a trend, you know? And so when news hit this past week of a potential deal to raise the cap on vouchers in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, I started seeing a trend in the right half of the Cheddarsphere: Doyle blinked! (Sometimes, Doyle caved!) Examples:

• Chip: Jim Doyle “blinked” in the standoff because the Democratic base in Milwaukee was starting to sweat this, big time.
  
• Fraley: Doyle blinks a lot.
  
• Esenberg: Doyle gets out of the school house door? Did Doyle cave on school choice?
  
• Patrick: Anything that pisses off the teachers unions is a good thing. The fact is Doyle caved.
  
• Binversie (at Owen's place): Read the Deal. Doyle got creamed.
  
• DiGaudio: DIAMOND JIM GETS OUT OF THE SCHOOHOUSE DOOR. Looks like there is a deal to increase the cap (not remove it) on Choice enrollment. Diamond Jim blinked and Milwaukee schoolchildren won.

To be fair, not all on the right like the deal (mostly because of the $25 million promised for SAGE funding), and not all are happy with John Gard's hand in making it happen. But those saying that Doyle "blinked" (or worse), like the ones above and the ones I probably just haven't seen yet, are lying. While I do not support this compromise, I can at least look at it objectively and see that Doyle is in no way the one who caved most to make this happen. Consider:

• For almost two solid years before last week, Doyle had been offering to raise the cap in exchange for things like more funding for MPS, or greater accountability in the choice schools. Though he personally opposes the program, he has always been willing to accommodate the needs of Milwaukee parents, students, and taxpayers. For those same two years, John Gard never once offered to sit at the table to work out a deal. Blinker? Gard.
  
  
• Doyle's November proposal to raise the cap included all of the following, which have either been signed into law already or have been promised by legislative leaders: An increase in SAGE funding; an increase in the enrollment cap in Racine's charter school program; accreditation for all voucher schools; required standardized testing in all voucher schools; changes to eligibility requirements to make it easier for families to stay in the program. Blinker? Gard.
  
  
• Doyle has always wanted to keep the enrollment cap limited, offering at first 18% and then 20% of MPS enrollment. The deal ends up at about 25%. Gard has always wanted--sent the bill to Doyle several times for a veto, in fact--100%, or, effectively, no cap at all. Blinker? Gard.
  
  
• Doyle wanted a "hold Milwaukee harmless" provision that would ease some of the extra bite felt by Milwaukee taxpayers due to the vouchers. He didn't get that one.

So how is it that the right Cheddarsphere can lie about Doyle's blinking like this? It's easy, actually: The right has spent the last couple of years creating a "crisis," and then, ever since the cap hit, they have been lying about Jim Doyle's role in that "crisis." By internalizing the previous lies--that Doyle wanted to "kill choice" and was "standing in the schoolhouse door"--they can now believe the lie that it was Doyle who "blinked."

The truth is that Republicans, in concert with their backers at pro-voucher organizations like School Choice Wisconsin, manufactured a "crisis." Gard's refusal to compromise with Doyle, plus SCW's rejection of DPI's plans to protect existing schools and current students, combined to make this issue, as one conservative commenter noted, "a very powerful campaign weapon." So they capitalized on it: In ad after ad, MMAC, ACE, and others blamed Doyle for creating the mess that might have kicked 4000 students out of their choice schools, rather than the real culprits. Bloggers repeated the lie ad nauseum that it was Doyle's fault that these families would suffer, that Doyle was opposed to raising the cap (never mind that he had produced written offers to do so). They even ran photoshopped pictures of Jim Doyle's head on the body of an anti-desegregationist governor blocking the literal schoolhouse door. These were all lies.

But they repeated the lies, and refused to listen to those of us on the left who pointed out that they had their facts completely wrong. It was a little bit like arguing against truthiness--the facts may change, as Colbert says, but their opinion doesn't.

This set them up perfectly for the phony "blink": If they believe, in error, that Doyle would never agree to raise the cap and, in fact, was trying to kill it (Doyle, being a "wholly owned subsidiary of WEAC," must want to kill it, right?), saw the deal as a cave on his part. Since they did not believe that Doyle had ever offered to compromise on the issue before (when, really, that was Gard), they saw Doyle as the one who flip-flopped.

And this is reflective, I think, of the way the right often works: Spread enough seed lies, and then you can reap them when needed. For example, when I say "Howard Dean," what's the first thing that comes to mind? If you said "wacky liberal," you might just be a conservative. In reality, Dean was to the right of almost all the other 2004 primary candidates, but his opposition to the Iraq War drove the narrative. Now whenever Dean makes a salient point of any kind, the right trots out the "wacky liberal" label and ignores him. (Or, sandwiched in between posts about how incivil the left is, posts more photoshopping.)

The same happened here. It's something Republicans do well (we Democrats don't like to lie), and if Howard Fuller and Brother Bob and a few others who actually think about children instead of campaigning hadn't dragged Gard to the table, they would have completely gotten away with it.