Very special guest with me this morning, Ben Wickler, a lifetime, Die Hard, Wisconsinite.
Hey, good morning, Ben.
Thanks for joining us here.
Good morning.
It is great to be with you in the State Debuff of the Fluffs.
Now, let's talk about who you are, first of all, because you say Ben Wickler, a lot of people say who.
I've been here for many years.
They still do it with me and with my name, so I could imagine.
All right, so you're a lifelong Wisconsin resident, born and raised here.
Your family's here.
But you had a very important political role on the state for a while.
Let's talk about your life here in Wisconsin.
Let's talk about it.
I do want to correct the record, though.
I had the misfortune of I was maybe too much information.
I was conceived in Wisconsin.
I was not born in Wisconsin.
My parents moved back before I turned one.
So all of my childhood memories were here in the state.
My mom gave birth to me out of the state.
So I cannot I cannot say born in Wisconsin.
I was just
destated and reared in Wisconsin.
And then I want to...
I was just saying, I changed your birth certificate.
I changed that already.
Don't worry about it.
Oh, you know what?
I'm really grateful.
That is something I... In this day and age, it's helpful to have a birth certificate that reflects the story you want.
No, so I grew up just loving the state.
Then I wound up leaving and working around the country for about 20 years, and then moving back, I wanted to
to bring my family up here.
So my wife and I, once we had our third child, we moved back before he turned one.
And we moved back into the house where I grew up.
I bought it from my mom and my stepdad.
And I'm raising my family there.
And my whole family, it's like we all exhaled when we got here.
My kids had lived in a couple of different cities.
And when we got back to Wisconsin, it was just like home with a capital H-O-M-N-E.
And so I...
As you note, I've worked in politics.
I've served as the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin for six years.
And so I was involved in just about every election, you know, big, small and in between during those years and wrapped up about a year ago.
I've been writing a book and I've been just thinking about the state that we all, we love so much.
How hard it is to just...
see the stories of rigorous folks and what it is we love about the state in an environment where, especially political news, it's all about things happening a thousand miles away, conflict, parties, obscure battles over things where each side is diametrically opposed views, and very little about the things that actually knit us together.
And so this is Wisconsin as a project that I'm doing now with Civic Media.
And I'll be in Racine today.
where I'm just talking to folks about what they love about the state and what how things could be better, what things are working well.
And today I'm going to be visiting Benton's and O&H and talking about Kringle, which is our state patriot, which is something that I think there's altogether too little information about for the rest of the state to consume.
I think we're a very Kringle loving state and that's exactly the right thing.
And I'm excited to go and talk to some folks involved in Kringle.
When President Obama was here, he tried Kringle.
And he wanted to take one, and he was thinking of a second one, and he said, no, no, no, my wife would never let me step in the house with two of these.
I want to get away with it.
So everybody, all the other presidents, whenever they come to town, they stop and get a cringle.
That's just the way it is.
Well, the important thing is it's not just every president who comes to Wisconsin, it's also
every person who knows what's good to eat, eats cringle.
This is something where in gas stations across the day, you can find cringle.
You can find it in airports for people leaving the states, their last opportunity to get cringle.
And in my view, there really is no such thing as too much cringle.
So I think it's an institution that really brings people together.
And it is so good.
I think it's the layers.
There's so many layers in the frosting between the filling and all that kind of stuff.
But there's something about
the way it's made that to me really puts it in a category by itself among pastries and I say that it's somebody who enjoys a variety of pastries.
You know it's when you're traveling out west occasionally you'll see a sign last chance for gas for the next you know 200 miles or so last chance for gas.
We should put a sign just before the Illinois border last chance for Kringle.
Because
that is their last
chance.
It's exactly right.
Yes.
Then people would pull over and stock up.
Because sometimes people leave the state without Kringle in their cars.
And what are they going to do?
They're just going to have to suffer.
And I'm sorry for them that that happens.
They do mail a lot of Kringle all over the world.
Because I did talk to some of the people at O&H and so forth.
And they said, yeah, they have a regular mail order list.
People all over the world ordering Kringle by mail.
That is absolutely true.
And that's something that I personally have done.
I have family in different parts of the country, and I have this last Christmas.
My Christmas gift to everybody was a delicious two-pack of Kringle.
I think pecan is the best Kringle personally, but a lot of people like strawberry, different flavors.
So wherever you might live, if you're on my extended family list, it was Kringle time.
Two things I never heard of before I moved here to Wisconsin.
I never heard of brats and I never heard of cheese curds.
As a matter of fact, I was driving up when I was moving from Atlanta to here,
I was driving up the interstate, and I passed a sign that said, B-R-A-T stop, brat stop.
But I didn't interpret it like that.
I thought it said, brat stop.
In other words, it's a playground for your kids to play at.
So I was talking to the guy at the radio station, and he said, what are you talking about?
I said, the brat stop.
He said, that's brat.
It's like a hot dog, but it's bratwurst.
I said, I never heard of it before.
Then I went to the Wisconsin State Fair, and I had cheese curds.
What have these been all my life?
I love cheesecake, but I never heard of them before.
They just don't have them at other places.
And if they do, they're not as good as they are here.
That's true.
That's an important distinction.
I will say I mystified as to why the rest of the country doesn't consume brats and cheese curds because they're they're so obviously delicious.
You know, I presumably other parts of the country have their own regional foods and regional specialties, but.
These travel well.
They're great everywhere.
If you have a refrigerator, you can move significant distance with cheese curds in great shape.
They're still squeaky when you take them out.
And when people visit here, they fall in love with them.
It's just an interesting quirk about the world that the rest of the country hasn't discovered what we know in our stomachs and in our hearts.
They make this place great.
But we have great beer.
We have great brats.
We have great cheese curds.
We have a variety of great dairy products.
There's so much great ice cream and frozen custard in our state.
We have, in my view, some of the best donuts that you can get in a number of different places.
And we have Kringle, too.
And I think all of this is food that, you know, nutritionists might say it's not necessarily the most healthy food imaginable.
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know what the statistics say.
But what it does do is it brings a smile to your face.
And I think that food that makes you, like, just feel good and have fun in social situations, cheese crisps are something where
you can have a bunch of them and everyone can have some.
And that to me kind of reflects the social nature of our state.
We like to get together and we like to enjoy each other and enjoy ourselves and have fun.
And I think our food reflects that.
You know, I learned one thing though, eating cheese curds.
The older the oil, the better the cheese curds.
So if you can let the oil sit for a couple of years, like if you go into a carnival and so forth, if it's been be used for a couple of years,
the cheese curds will taste better than fresh oil.
I don't know why it just is that way.
I can't explain it.
I'm not an oil expert.
I am not a cheese curd expert.
I just know what I like.
The older the oil, the better it tastes.
Joining me, Ben Wickler, author, head booster for the state of Wisconsin, and he's going to prove it right now because Ben is in Racine today.
He'll be tasting Kringle at a bunch of different Kringle places, at different factories, bakeries.
And then you're hosting a town hall meeting tonight.
Talk about that for a second.
Absolutely.
So there haven't been a lot of in-person town halls in Enracing across the First Congressional District.
I think it's been about a year since the last one.
So there's a group of members of Congress that are just traveling around having town halls to hear from people about what they're concerned about, what's going on.
The thing that just keeps coming up is the sense that
People feel like political power, political decisions are being made by billionaires far away, instead of by the people who are directly affected by policies.
There are people across the scene who are unable to afford their health insurance this year, who are buying it on the individual marketplace, and suddenly the rates have shot up because of a change in federal law.
And that is super frustrating.
And the money that was used to help
pay for the health insurance premiums in the government's budget instead of being used for tax cuts for the richest people on earth.
And so that's the kind of thing I think we're going to be hearing about tonight, but really anything that's on people's minds, we want to hear from them.
It's going to be at Memorial Hall.
It's going to be, I think, a great conversation.
There's several members of Congress.
There's Representative Mark Pocan from your neighboring congressional district over in the second.
And I will be the MC of the town hall.
So I think it's going to be a really interesting conversation.
Come one, come all, whatever questions people have, we're going to open it up and live stream it on the internet and just try to give folks a chance to say what's on their mind and talk about it.
And my hope is we can help to.
Build a democracy where everybody's voice counts the same, no matter how much money you have.
That is not how America is supposed to work, that just the billionaires call the shots.
This is supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people.
And if I read the word people correctly, there's no dollar sign involved in it.
It is just about being a person.
So that's the goal tonight.
And I was telling you off the air, the Memorial Hall was the site of the first broadcast of WRJN just about 100 years ago.
Wow, that's a long time ago.
You know, my wife and I are watching the Ken Burns documentary, a 12 hour documentary.
It's a long, long show about the American Revolution.
And I am fascinated by stuff I didn't know about the American Revolution.
The people who fought at farmers, just regular people fighting against the British, who were regular army, who were trained how we ever beat them.
is miraculous.
But we did.
And George Washington thinks I didn't know about this guy before.
He was a guy who just eluded.
He just gave off confidence to the troops.
And even though he lost some battles, he still had a positive attitude about it.
And we're here because of people like George Washington who just didn't give up.
And so it's a great documentary to watch.
The American Revolution from Ken Burns.
And he does great work.
Let's talk about your project with civic media.
It's called This Is Wisconsin.
Let's talk about that.
Absolutely.
So the idea of This Is Wisconsin is that political news, the way political news is often delivered, especially in national media and online, it's just about battles between politicians.
It is an armwrestling match.
It's a horse race.
It's stuff happening far away.
It's big money.
None of it's about how things play out in people's own lives in their own communities.
And, you know, in my view, in a democracy that people are supposed to have the power, and the way you should evaluate what's happening in politics is how it lands in people's real life.
So that was a first sort of thought.
I wanted to try to go where people are in our state and talk to them about how things are working out.
And in thinking it through, it just strikes me that what our politics should be about, what our
Media what people are hungry for is the celebration of the things that are working the things that do bring us together our recognition of what the challenge and what's hard But also thinking you know, how can we make it even better?
How can we build on what's really good?
So this is this content is me as a kind of field correspondent with civic media going around the state with Jonathan my friend with a camera and going you know, visiting local businesses visiting local events talking to folks and just getting a sense of
What is working?
What is it working?
What's fun?
What do we love about the state?
No matter who we vote for, no matter where we live, most of Wisconsinites live in communities of less than 15,000 people.
This is not New York.
Most people live in the biggest city in the country.
This is our state.
And whether you're in Milwaukee, Madison, Racine, or you're in Paris, Wisconsin, or a town of a couple hundred people, there are certain things that actually knit us all together.
that are about what we hope for in our lives, but we want a place that like my own home is where our kids will want to raise their own kids down the road.
Like your family, you're telling me that everyone's moved to Wisconsin and people live within not too far driving distance from each other.
We want to be able to have a place that feels like home where you can aspire to lead the life that you want to live and not have to feel like the roof might disappear from over your head because you can't afford it.
Those are, those are basic things.
And then we want to not just survive, but we actually want to have a good life.
We want to be able to spend time on a lake.
We want to be, you know, maybe it's frozen and we're ice fishing or maybe we're on a boat or maybe we're just fishing or maybe we're swimming.
But there's, there's so much about this state that I think draws people out and makes it a place where, where there's celebration and positivity, even when we have very, very long winter nights or very muggy summer days.
And all those things I want to, I want to try to bring to people.
phones and their screens and, you know, talk about with civic hosts around the state to celebrate in a time when so many people feel pretty down on how things are going in this country to celebrate what makes us feel great.
And that's the goal of this Wisconsin.
Oh, we can get to see the videos that are being shot.
You have a videographer with you.
Are we eventually going to get a chance to see that?
Absolutely.
So if you go to this iswisconsin.com, you can find the, you can find a bunch of videos.
I spent some time with a quick trip talking to folks about, you know,
We are experiencing high gas prices.
There's a war happening halfway around the world that's driving our gas prices up.
But let's say gas prices come down.
What do people want to buy?
They're a quick trip.
I talked to one person.
I talked to Katie, who just loves the hard-boiled eggs, a quick trip.
And we'll come down and she told me about that on camera.
And, you know, for different people.
It's blazers.
It's different people.
It's different kinds of things.
A quick trip is, I think...
A great, not only gas station, but destination of all kinds of stuff.
So talking about gas, talking about whether everything's a war makes sense or not, which I don't think I've met a single person who was enthusiastic about it, but also talking about what it is that we use with the money when we have a little extra money.
You can meet my dog Pumpkin if you go to this is Wisconsin.
I was a pecker walk around with Pumpkin.
You can go to Mickey's Dairy Bar by favorite diner in the world.
You can go to Juneteenth in Milwaukee.
It's the longest running Juneteenth celebration.
In the United States of America, 55 years, I talked to people there about what they loved about it.
Folks pointed out Juneteenth isn't just black history, it's American history, something all of us can celebrate.
And there's a whole lot more to come.
I was just in Appleton.
We visited a bunch of different places.
I met folks with a company that just does car wash marketing.
So if you've ever been to a car wash where they have an octopus or squid or a giant marshmallow man or whatever the wild car wash thing might be,
They, in this little room, they come up with those ideas.
They designed the crazy animals.
They're telling me about all these different gas station designs.
And the story behind the story there was so interesting because it is a two person company, a wife and her husband.
The wife started it when she was a working mom who realized that she was paying so much for childcare that after paying for childcare, she was only earning $8,000 a year.
And when she did that math, it was like she was working in order to be able to have a job.
She decided to leave her job and start this company.
And now there are wonderful car washes across the country.
Actually, the question was all over the country.
And she has a job working with her family that lets her spend time with her kids at two pups.
And that to me is a success story and an economic situation that's pretty tough for a lot of people.
By the way, I saw a pumpkin in one of your videos.
That dog needs a saddle on the back.
A big dog.
Wow.
Pumpkin.
She's a Bernie's man dog.
She's between 90 and 100 pounds, depending on how much kibble she's been eating.
And she's a big, fluffy puddle of love who had a really tough time in the hot, Wisconsin summers.
The last time I took her on a walk, she just went on strike and laid down on the sidewalk to try to catch the cool from the sidewalk.
She's using other two layers of fur coat.
But yes, she will be a frequent guest in the Wisconsin videos.
You know, my daughter moved to Florida after spending her entire life in Wisconsin.
She moved there for a reason, but she moved to Florida.
And during a snowstorm, she goes, haha, you got a snowstorm today.
I said, you know what?
The snow is going to end in an hour.
I'll shovel the walkways.
It'll be gone.
you're going to have to replace your roof when the hurricane comes through.
And that's going to take you a longer time than me shoveling this sidewalk.
So ha ha.
That's exactly the right response.
You know, shoveling, sometimes you need your neighbors to do it if you've reached a certain age, but it is the thing that makes us healthier is the thing that brings neighbors out into their front yards interacting with each other, meeting each other.
No, no.
They be humidity in Florida as I understand it never really goes away.
And I think we've got the better end of the deal.
Okay.
You also wrote a book.
This is the plan.
How to end America's meltdown and save democracy.
I assume the book's available everywhere.
Amazon bookstores, right?
It's available for pre-order.
It's coming out July 21st.
Oh, it can come out there.
Yes.
We're in the sprint to take off.
So this is the plan basically takes
our experience in Wisconsin from the last decade, and it maps it onto what's happening nationwide now.
And there's a real sense, the subtitle of the book, How to End America's Meltdown and Save Democracy.
In the book, I talk about America's meltdown as the sense that so many people have that no matter how hard they work, they can't get ahead, that the system is not working for them, that the essentials in life are increasingly hard to afford, things like a place to live and health care for yourself and your family.
That's the meltdown, the sense that it's just not working.
And my argument is, if we want to fix that, we've got to save democracy, which is to say we've got to move power into the hands of regular folks so that they can write the rules and make the decisions about making a country that works for everybody.
And in order to save democracy, and this is the really central argument of the book, it's not enough to choose who's president.
It's not enough even to have
our federal Congress in, you know, the hands of one side or the other, it's about ensuring that people who believe that the government should work for regular people at every level of office.
And this is what we've, you know, I poured my heart and soul into as the Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair, that of course, you know, Republicans and independents and people who share that fundamental commitment across the state.
But there are some people who don't think that the regular folks should have the power and who try to overturn elections and who try to rig
legislative maps to make sure that only one side of the other wins who try to take away the power of the public to decide who the government actually serves.
And if you want to ensure that the people and not organized money gets to call the shots, you need to fight and organize and work to ensure that people who want to serve the public are on school boards, on city councils, on county boards, are in judicial rules on the state supreme court, in state government, in our state legislative
caucuses and the governor's race, all the way after the House, the Senate, the White House.
And I would argue you've got to reform the U.S.
Supreme Court, too.
And the only way to do that is to have people who believe in reform and fighting against corruption and fighting against the partisanship of the U.S.
Supreme Court.
You need to have folks ready to cast votes on that in the U.S.
Senate, the U.S.
House, and the president will find that is a law.
So it is a top-to-bottom thing.
And the only way to do all that is for millions of people to roll up their sleeves and get involved.
and they get part of their lives to talk to their neighbors, talk to their friends about politics, to get involved in building something that's bigger than any of us.
And that's, you know, I think often when people think about politics, they want someone, the perfect candidate to come along and be able to fix everything.
And sometimes, you know, someone runs for office saying, I alone can fix the thing.
They're the person who can do that.
And it never works that way.
It only works when there's a movement of people in their own communities who are working
to connect with each other and build political power to make something better happen.
And that's the argument that this is the plan.
Well, you teamed up with a good company, Civic Media, because that's what we're all about, democracy.
And I hope to see us here at Kringle with you later today, all right?
I would love that.
Thank you so much.
I'm really grateful for the chance to join you and let's get all the Kringle we can.
Ben, anytime you need to get on the radio, you give me a call.
It's always open.
It
sounds good.
Thanks so much, son.
It's great to have you be able to join me today.
Okay, bye-bye now.
Ben Wickler, everybody, and you can see him.
He will be hosting the Town Hall meeting tonight at Memorial Hall and also at a couple of Kringle Places, O&H, Benson's Bakery.
He'll be all over town today.
Well, it's good to have Ben Wickler as part of our Civic Media family here working with us.
