It was hard to open a mailbox, change the channel or ride down a street in Madison this year and not be confronted by politics.
While political discussion is by no means a rarity in the state Capitol, Wisconsin's swing state status made State Street eavesdropping evoke episodes of \The West Wing.""
Much like the Madison of the 1960s and '70s, politics pervaded this year. However many longtime residents said the political discussion was more superficial this time around, with cheerleading for favored candidates trumping discussion of societal ills.
Eighty-one-year-old Paul Ginsberg moved to Madison in 1951 and served as UW-Madison dean of students for 17 years beginning in 1970. He presided over one of the most politically active university campuses in U.S. history and holds a dim view of student activism this year.
He said young people should be in an uproar over the rising cost of tuition and the war in Iraq, but, compared to the past, rallies for those issues were sparsely attended in 2004.
""It may well be that the present [UW-Madison] administration is doing a better job of keeping up with student issues than we did back in the '50s, '60s and '70s. But for some reason it's much quieter, and a lot of the older people are asking what does it take to bring out those protests again,"" Ginsberg said.
Despite a blitzkrieg of political ads and candidate appearances, Ginsberg said city residents are much more passive than those from the era that earned Madison the moniker ""Berkeley of the Midwest.""
He said while many Madisonians became energized for their favorite candidates, for the most part political discussion centered on nominees' observable traits and avoided real discussion of societal problems.
""Perhaps metaphorically the difference is that now we put on bumper stickers and think we've done what we need to do,"" Ginsberg said.
Twenty-four-year old Madison resident and recent Progressive Dane mayoral candidate Burt Zipperer said the tremendous amount of money spent on the 2004 election made corporate candidates the talk of the city. Despite Madison's liberal electorate, he thought residents were more concerned with getting President Bush out of office than debating progressive issues.
""I think 2004 was, for a tremendous amount of this community, a banding together in fear to try to stop fascism,"" Zipperer said.
Once nicknamed the ""Red Mayor,"" Paul Soglin rose to prominence during the Vietnam War era and said people had a better command of the issues than they do today.
""The discussion was more dynamic in that period,"" Soglin said. ""It was a discussion that welcomed more participation and was more prone to substance than it was to style.""
