Becky Young Got to Me

John Nickols in the Capital Times:

Longtime lawmaker Becky Young never gave up -- and people listened

John Nichols
November 19, 2008

The better part of a dozen years ago, on a Friday afternoon, I was sitting in my office at The Capital Times, and the phone rang.

"John," said the gruff voice at the other end of the line, "this is Tommy Thompson."

The governor, then at the height of his power, was not in the habit of calling journalists, and especially not on Friday afternoons.

But Thompson had made a decision.

"I'm going to get some money for transportation and child care into this W-2 plan," he said of his groundbreaking welfare reform proposal. "Becky Young got to me."

Young, then a state representative from Madison, had been banging away at Thompson for months, arguing that the W-2 plan Thompson had made his signature initiative was destined to fail the working moms the governor said it would help.

Young, who has died at age 74 after a long battle with cancer, had no patience with grand pronouncements by presidents or governors. She was a detail person. And the details of Thompson's welfare reform scheme made no sense to her. Requiring women with no money to leave their children behind and travel miles to get to job training centers was not just impractical, it was a dangerous plan that could harm the most vulnerable people in Wisconsin, she said.

Many of Young's fellow Democrats, feeling battered by electoral setbacks in the mid '90s, were willing to let Thompson have his way. Becky Young refused. She kept on Thompson and his aides, meeting with them, demanding that they study the potential impact of their proposals. "Public policy is frequently driven by anecdote," the state representative from Madison's west side complained. For Young, anecdotes were insufficient. She wanted facts, and commitments.

And Thompson finally made them -- not because Democrats held them to account but because Becky Young would not let up.

Becky Young never let up.

***snip****

Becky Young was into governing. And she was willing to do the work -- focusing on complicated transportation, education and social service issues that most officials preferred to leave to bureaucrats.

Young respected the bureaucrats, but she believed that legislators needed to be in the thick of the policy-making process. And she was never satisfied with promises or anecdotes.

She wanted government to work. No, strike that, she made government work.

Tommy Thompson knew this. That's why he finally ditched the happy talk and did what Becky Young demanded. The spending initiatives Young forced Thompson to accept did not make W-2 perfect -- Young was always a critic -- but they made the scheme far more humane and more rational than it would have been. As the former governor admitted, "Becky Young got to me."

There will be a visitation for friends and family of Becky Young on Friday from 3 to 6 p.m. at Cress Funeral Home, 3610 Speedway Road. A memorial service is being planned, but details have not been completed.