03/27/06 Local War Referendums Divide Voters

Judy Hale says President Bush wrecked her son's life.

Her boy, 25-year-old Brian Musser Jr., spent a year in Iraq in the Army. He's been back home for nine months, but he's jittery and prone to flashbacks of finding his buddy dead from a sniper's bullet.

"There's times he'll call me and just cry," said Hale, a waitress at the Village Square Family Restaurant in this town of about 4,000 people 20 miles southeast of Madison.

But Debbie Bair, 51, a part-time bartender at Pete's Inn just down the street, says she has a nephew in the Navy ready to volunteer for a second stint in Iraq. The president is doing the right thing, she says. After all, better to fight terrorists over there than in Wisconsin.

I'm totally for the president," Bair said.

The fissure between Hale and Bair, symbolic of the nation's mood since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, will be on full-scale display in Wisconsin April 4 when voters in 31 cities, villages and towns -- including Evansville -- go to the polls to decide referendums calling for Bush to start pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq.

City councils around the nation have approved measures opposing the war or calling for troops to come home. Harlem township in northern Illinois voted to bring the troops home in a March 21 referendum. In Burlington, Vt., anti-war activists gathered enough signatures on petitions to ask voters to urge the city to work to prevent overseas deployments of the Vermont Air National Guard. Last March, at dozens of annual town meetings in Vermont, communities voted on the war, mostly backing resolutions critical of it.

Peace activists have pushed the referendums in Wisconsin, collecting enough signatures to get them on the ballot in tiny burgs like Egg Harbor in Door County and Hayward in Sawyer County, and in big cities like Madison and La Crosse. Fifty-one soldiers from Wisconsin have died in Iraq since the invasion.

The referendums carry absolutely no legal weight, however. Municipalities can't dictate policy to the federal government, and Bush, who has repeatedly refused to set a timetable for troop withdrawal, said last week the decision to pull out of Iraq will fall to a future president.

Still, the referendums could influence Congress and play a role in the fall elections, said University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Jon Pevehouse. If Congress becomes more anti-war, it could apply more pressure to Bush, he said.

"There's no direct effect, but it's not necessarily an exercise in futility," Pevehouse said. "The other thing this does, frankly, is keep it on the front burner for the media and the public."

The referendums are dividing neighbors.

Paul Mitchell, managing editor of the Sawyer County Record in Hayward, said he doesn't know which way his city will go. Even area conservatives seem to be changing their minds about Iraq in recent months as violence there continues, pushing that country closer to civil war, Mitchell said.

"People are extremely divided about it here," Mitchell said.

In Baraboo, about 40 miles northwest of Madison, 40 people or so attended a debate over the merits of the city's referendum two weeks ago.

Lance Burri, 36, who lives in Baraboo and works as an aide to state Rep. Frank Lasee, R-Bellevue, argued against the referendums at the debate. He said the referendums simply hand terrorists more propaganda and encourage them to step up attacks on American troops, hoping to break the public will.

"It's just a terrible thing for us to be doing," Burri said in a telephone interview.

Nancy Dillman, 58, who owns an art gallery in downtown Baraboo, said she likes the idea of a referendum. The war in Iraq is a disaster, she said, with frightening parallels to Vietnam.

"We're not going to come out of this a winner in any way," Dillman said. "I don't think it's dishonorable to pull out. We made a mistake. Let's pull our people out."

In Evansville, crimson signs proclaiming "Yes Bring The Troops Home" have sprouted in at least half-a-dozen yards. The city's referendum is unique -- it asks two questions,

whether troops should go home now or whether people support "our honorable President's leadership" against "the unfathomable wickedness of the forces of terror."

Talk of the referendum is on the lips of the morning regulars at the Village Square, waitresses there said. Hale, 58, said she'll vote to express her anger at Bush and what he's done to her son. But she knows it will make no difference.

"We've got to get through Bush and we're not going to get through Bush," she said. "It's going to be useless. At least we know we can try to wake him up."

Jim Martin, 48, a handyman in Evansville, thinks the public cast its lot in the 2004 election, in which Bush beat Democratic challenger John Kerry. Now it needs to let Bush make his decisions. Municipalities like Evansville shouldn't waste taxpayers' money running a referendum that means nothing, he said.

"The fact of the matter remains, we're at war," he said as he ate his lunch at the Night Owl bar.

But Diane Bailly, a 52-year-old insurance agent in Evansville, said it's sad no one has learned from past wars.

"I don't see there's a lot of honor in continuing to lose men and women to that bottomless pit over there," Bailly said. "We need to get some women in charge. We're not such warmongers."

WAR REFERENDUMS

Thirty-one cities, villages and towns in Wisconsin will vote April 4 on U.S. involvement in the Iraq war, most asking whether the United States should immediately begin withdrawing troops: The municipalities are: Algoma, Amery, Baraboo, Casco, Draper, Edgewater, Egg Harbor, Ephraim, Evansville*, Exeland, Forestville, Frederic, Hayward, Kewaunee, La Crosse, Ladysmith, Luxemburg, Madison, Monona, Mount Horeb, Newport**, Ojibwa, Osceola, Perry, Shorewood, Sister Bay, Sturgeon Bay, Vermont, Watertown, Whitefish Bay and Winter.

*Evansville also has a referendum asking whether people support "our honorable president's leadership" against "the unfathomable wickedness of the forces of terror."

**Newport** referendum asks whether the United States should hand operational commands over Iraq national security to the Iraqi government before the end of 2006.