Screens were set up around the Capitol to provide better viewing of the inauguration of Gov. Tony Evers (right), who was sworn in by Chief Justice Patience Roggensack (far left). Evers’ wife, Kathy, is with him.
Karen Holden is an emeritus professor of public policy and consumer science at UW-Madison. She wasn’t planning to attend the inaugural ceremony for Gov. Tony Evers and other state officers Monday at the state Capitol and, once there, wasn’t necessarily going to stay for the whole show. But she found herself drawn in. And when Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes gave his speech, she got a bit misty.
“I’m not a terribly emotional person,” Holden said after the ceremony concluded. But she “finds it very moving” that the new administration “is going to try to make Wisconsin a state that will work together.”
“I’m an economist,” she added. “I think good policy is not a partisan issue.” She noted that the state needs an educated workforce and that Evers, the state’s former schools superintendent, has worked in a field where “you can’t be partisan… and you have to work with everybody.”
In keeping with his conciliatory tone since ousting two-term Gov. Scott Walker in the November election, Evers focused his inaugural address more on uniting the public around shared values than on specific policy goals. But he did front-end his roughly 10-minute speech with at least two substantive targets: to fully fund public schools, including providing all-day pre-K, and to protect people with pre-existing medical conditions.
But, he then noted, “today is bigger than these issues that we all care about. We cannot fix these problems unless people come before politics. We’ve become paralyzed by polarity and we’ve become content with division. We’ve been indifferent to resentment and governing by retribution.”
Walker was presumably one person Evers had in mind with this reference to the politics of resentment. Walker, who was seated in a front row behind the podium for the ceremony, was booed by some in the gallery when introduced with other former governors including Gov. Jim Doyle, who, while not terribly popular during his two terms with either Democrats or Republicans, got the loudest round of applause from the audience.
In a statement released Jan. 6, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) noted that the GOP-led Legislature and Evers “surely will have policy differences” but said they all agreed that “K-12 education is a…
