The Legacy of Tommy Thompson

Tommy Thompson. Photo courtesy of the UW System.

Another milestone for Tommy.

Tommy turns 84 on Wednesday.

If you don’t know his last name, you’re not a cheesehead who follows politics.

There’s only one Tommy who was a 20-year Assembly member, four-term governor, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, health-care executive and business consultant, candidate for President and U.S. Senate and former president of the Universities of Wisconsin.

And, because Tommy always has to be mentioned, he says he still could run for governor, even with a heart-regulating pacemaker. Don’t bet on that, though.

Where to start remembering a legend?

Maybe growing up in Elroy, where he polished eggs in the grocery and one-pump gas station his father owned. It was such a friendly community, “You could call the wrong number and still talk for an hour,” he said many times. He listened to his dad, a Juneau County board member, debate what local government could and couldn’t do. His mom was a teacher.

He got a UW-Madison law degree, went home and decided to run against a veteran Wisconsin Assembly member as a 24-year-old. He got an allowance from his dad, worked his butt off and went to the Assembly as a first-term Republican in 1967.

For 20 years, Tommy — who Democrats’ nicknamed “Doctor No” for his opposition to many of their legislative proposals — dreamed that being elected Assembly Speaker would cap his political career.

He strayed from that goal twice: In 1979, he lost a campaign for Congress. In 1986, he won the Republican primary for governor and then upset Democratic Gov. Tony Earl in November. (“The entire Capitol press corps bet that I wouldn’t win.”) He never got that job as Assembly Speaker, but served in so many others.

“I’m a builder,” Tommy once told a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter who asked about his legacy. (His first response to the question was, “I’m not dead yet!”)

And build he did: A new Brewers stadium, which Tommy told the reporter he was sorry wasn’t built in downtown Milwaukee. Prisons in rural areas. New buildings for the Administration and Agriculture departments. A Corrections Department headquarters. A master plan of four-lane highways. Upgrades for UW campuses.

Governor Tommy was a master of bipartisan deals who kept his office door open to all legislators. He got Democrats to start the private-school voucher program in Milwaukee for low-income poor students and pass major “W2” welfare-reform legislation.

“He developed welfare reform in part by inviting welfare moms to come to the Executive Residence for breakfast or lunch and talk with him about what it would take to get them off of welfare and into a family-supporting jobs,” recalls former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, who worked closely with Tommy on policy and politics.

“You don’t see that style of leadership very often these days,” Jensen adds. “We would all be better off if other leaders looked to [Tommy’s] example.”

When lawmakers brought up changes Tommy didn’t want to deal with — legalizing concealed weapons, for example — the governor asked them what they needed to keep that bill off his desk.

There was a 6-foot “veto pencil” propped in a corner of his East Wing office. It was more than symbolic; Tommy holds the record for the most partial vetoes — 457 — in the two-year state budget Democrats passed in 1991.

Although Tommy insisted he was a conservative, general-fund spending exploded on his watch — going from $8.77 billion in his first two-year budget to $22.5 billion in his last budget.

Tommy broke with many conservative Republicans on stem cell research. He championed it as governor, introducing UW-Madison’s pioneer researcher James Thomson in his 1999 State of the State speech, and championed it as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

He recalled his work on that in his book, Journey of a Lifetime: “It was at a cabinet meeting … when President George W. Bush asked me if I would stay afterward.  ‘I need to address stem cells,’ the president said. ‘I want to know more about them’.”

Tommy then led a Stem Cell 101 class for White House leaders.

He left Bush’s cabinet in 2005, joined boards of major businesses and ran for president for five months in 2007. He resumed world travels as a consultant until winning the 2012 Republican U.S. Senate primary and then losing to Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

While still the presumptive GOP candidate for the Senate, a Journal Sentinel story suggested that, at a conference at the Vatican, Tommy’s position on stem-cell research had changed. The newspaper reported that he supported research on adult stem cells and no longer supported research on embryonic stem cells.

His position on high-speed rail, which he championed for the East Coast as chairman of the Amtrak board, also seemed to evolve. When former Republican Gov. Scott Walker refused to accept federal cash as a down payment to start high-speed rail service between Milwaukee and Madison, Tommy said he agreed with Walker.

Tommy’s next challenge: Being named UW System president early in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic closed down the nation. He championed the system, which was not popular with Republicans who control the Legislature, until he left that position in March 2022.

“Tommy’s got a record of political and policy achievement that will likely never be matched in Wisconsin,” says Bill McCoshen, who Tommy mentored in politics and government and appointed to be the youngest Commerce Department secretary in state history. “But his infectious positive attitude and willingness to work with anyone to solve big problems are what made him so great.”

Tommy did all that by never pronouncing the final “g” in a word. “It was all ‘goin’ and ‘doin’ and ‘helpin’ and ‘fixin’,” two veteran Tommy watchers recalled.

One crowd-pleasing Tommyism: “Wisconsin — where eagles SOAR, Harleys ROAR, and Packers SCORE!”

Happy birthday, Tommy Thompson.

Steven Walters started covering the Capitol in 1988. Contact him at stevenscotwalters@gmail.com