Coming soon: My interview with Tammy Baldwin

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The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. Learn more about it here.

It was a Monday afternoon and I was getting ready to sit down for an interview with Sen. Tammy Baldwin, but it wasn’t the first time I saw the senator that day. I actually happened to see her when she visited the child care center where my daughter attends, sort of by chance. 

The week prior, I received a media advisory from Baldwin’s official Senate office about an upcoming visit and discussion at an area child care center classroom. I saw it was going to be in Milwaukee, so I thought I might stop by to attend the event, being that I’d be interviewing the senator later that afternoon, and child care is an issue I’m passionate about. I read the advisory further, and the event would be at the same place where I’ve been doing pickups and dropoffs and spending time with my kids at for years now. Of course I’d go. 

I got there moments before Sen. Baldwin arrived, and said a quick hello to the teachers, administrators and staff who knew me as just one of the Dads, as they excitedly prepared for the visit. They told me my daughter was still sleeping for her afternoon nap, and — knowing her well, of course — we both recognized that under no circumstances would they be waking her up to say hi to me. You can’t mess with that nap (if it actually happens), you know.

Baldwin arrived, toured the facility, and sat down to read a book to several children in one of the classrooms. She had fun with the kids, asked good questions of the staff, and was curious throughout. You could tell she wanted to get into the details on what kind of challenges the center was facing. 

Her presence there, and the timing of the visit, felt like such an incredible coincidence. But perhaps this is somewhat indicative of the type of senator that Tammy Baldwin is. She wants to meet people where they are. And after all, I am a parent, concerned about child care. Maybe it makes sense that — all interview planning aside — that’s where our paths would cross. 

Later, back at the Podcamp Media studios in downtown Milwaukee, I said hello to the senator for the second time that day, and we sat down for a roughly 35-minute interview. We recombobulated.

We will be posting the full video of the interview for you to watch tomorrow at The Recombobulation Area. We’ll be including an audio podcast version of the conversation, as well. Subscribe here to see it all, delivered directly to your inbox. 

While preparing for the interview, I talked to several different people and thought a lot about Baldwin as a senator, and what it is that defines her. She can inspire, but her speeches are not of the soaring Barack Obama variety on the stump. She doesn’t have an especially wonkish reputation, but she will get as deep in the weeds on policy as anyone out there. She tends to be more progressive, but not so much so that it makes her rigid in her ideology. 

In my view, it comes down to two factors that ultimately define her approach. One is to show up everywhere and answer every call. The constituent services aspect of public service is an area where she clearly excels and stands out. That’s something you hear over and over again. 

The second is about being realistic about getting things done for those constituents. There’s a story she tells about passing the Respect for Marriage Act, and how it was more important for her to get the bill passed than to score political points. 

“I didn’t want to have a “show vote” on this,” she said. “I wanted to pass this bill so people could have some security that their marriages would not be in jeopardy in the future if the Supreme Court revisited the topic.”

This, to me, is a story indicative of how she operates as a senator. She could have held the vote on this bill before the 2022 midterms and pressured Republican senators to go on the record, but instead waited, got the requisite number of Republican votes to clear the 60-vote filibuster-proof threshold, and led the passage of the bill. President Biden signed it into law on Dec. 13, 2022. 

One quote from our interview, in particular, has stuck with me since, and it was one Baldwin said as an aside in reflecting about her experience attending events like Pride Fest now in 2024, after being the first openly gay senator elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012. 

“Never mistake progress for victory,” she said. 

That is a simple, but powerful quote. There’s a certain pragmatic quality to the Baldwin-style progressivism, and that’s something that really shined through in our interview, on issue after issue.

And yes, that includes child care. 

“Our discussion after the tour was really about the crisis situation we face in Wisconsin without having enough child care slots, given the demand, which means children are either in unsafe or unregulated care or parents are leaving the workforce because of their responsibilities,” she said. “This is a crisis we have to fix.” 

This, of course, resonated with me as someone who spent several years as a stay-at-home dad. And when I asked about what has been happening at the federal level to address the broken system of child care, she said this:

“Even in a year where there was no ability to spend beyond what we had spent in the past fiscal year, we managed, by moving things around, to increase overall child care funding by $1 billion. (There was) a 9% increase for the Child Care and Development Block Grant this year, and we also had a significant increase in the Head Start program. So we’re very pleased to be able to incrementally increase our commitment, recognizing the crisis we’re in right now. But really, when I look big picture, I think we have to realize that the free market doesn’t work for child care.” 

Here, the senator highlights the in-the-weeds policy details that can often go overlooked and showcases a distinct understanding of the bigger picture on a critical issue. It all seems so very Tammy Baldwin. 

I’m excited to share the rest of this interview with you. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

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Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. He’s also written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 18 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.

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