As the campaign season comes to an exciting (and relieving) close, let’s take a look at what happened state and nationwide Tuesday evening:

Wisconsin Governor:

Considering the wave of Republican victories that swept across the nation Tuesday night, the blame for the GOP loss of the governor’s mansion can be reduced to five words: Scott McCallum is not cool.

A perfectly good and decent man I believe he is. A sense of humor I believe he has. A leader he may be. A television personality he is not, and it killed him.

Quite frankly, this shouldn’t have happened. Granted, the state’s fiscal situation was not what it should have been. Granted, he was thrown into fill the fairly large political shoes of one Tommy Thompson.

But it all comes down from the top. McCallum’s inability to act as a calming and charismatic executive led to his inability to lead a well-directed campaign. Instead, his campaign was marred by a weak, inconsistent message and a constant sense of confusion.

Jim Doyle was not a heavyweight. Yes, he was the anointed son of a deeply rooted Democratic Party apparatus in a state still dominated by unions, farmers, teachers and new-age liberals in Madison and minorities in Milwaukee.

Few can argue that he wasn’t polished; but at the same time he wasn’t clean, and he certainly wasn’t unstoppable. His muddled “everything to everyone” message went largely unexploited by the McCallum team, which instead insisted upon making Watergate out of Bingogate and slinging mud about his past. No one in this race was looking forward; McCallum had the more-haunting recent past, so he’s now unemployed and still badly in need of a haircut.

Wisconsin Attorney General:

McCallum had four words; this one gets three: “Top of ticket.”

Once again, this shouldn’t have happened, and it almost didn’t, as a little snaffoo in my native Rock County threw the state’s law-enforcement community and its gun owners for a loop well past midnight. It seems the Associated Press misreported the actual margin of Peggy Lautenschlager’s victory in the union-dominated county by several thousand votes; what looked like a neck-and-neck race with Vince Biskupic ahead at the bewitching hour was suddenly tipped heavily into Lautenschlager’s favor.

Biskupic had the leg up in name ID for the better part of this race. He carried appeal as a man who stood tough on crime in a climate where rampant lawlessness had inundated the very place where laws are crafted. He put away a lot of hardcore, violent criminals for a long, long time. And he was a cop, not a politician — a great quality for this race at this time.

But those who showed up at the polls to choose Doyle chose Lautenschlager as well. Biskupic simply couldn’t make the race into its own contest. To do that takes politicking, and Vince is a cop — his main campaign plank was to stay out of the partisan fray. In the end, he couldn’t stay out of McCallum’s hip pocket. The margin of victory was four points in both statewide races.

The Statehouse:

Republicans held onto their majority in the State Assembly, and in doing so they managed to pick up two seats amidst the indictment of their party leadership on felony counts for abuses of power.

But the shocker came in the State Senate, where the GOP upset the applecart and picked up a reasonable majority. Republicans Ron Brown, Joe Leibham and Cathy Stepp all unseated incumbent Democrats in tight contests.

Stepp’s race in particular appeared a proxy war between the ascending Republican leadership and the remants of Chuck Chvala’s reign in the state legislature. Incumbent Democrat Kim Plache, D-Racine, was a protégé of Chvala while Stepp is a homegrown candidate who amassed incredible grassroots support and upset the applecart in Racine, one of the top-three Democratic municipalities in the state. Stepp’s 700-vote victory and the other GOP pickups in Madison bring to light the true weakness of the governor’s campaign ? the state was ready to move to the right, and it did so by stepping on McCallum’s toes.

A slightly more-than-obvious silver lining for conservatives: Doyle will go one term. He won’t be able to keep his spending promises if he can’t get a tax increase through the Republican legislature, which he won’t. In the meantime, the conservative “farm team” in this state must take some time to grow out of Tommy’s shadow. Look for a Scott Walker or a Mark Green in four years to ride the cause of change to victory.

The House:

Bush kills two birds with one stone: an unprecedented gain by the administration’s party in a mid-term election and the upending of an entrenched Dick Gephardt, who is now as much a presidential afterthought as Pat Buchanan. Look for a more-centrist Democrat to take the reigns of the minority, almost assuredly a southerner who supported Bush’s Iraq resolution.

The Senate:

The biggest surprise of the evening no doubt, but hardly unfathomable 72 hours ago. Republicans won a lot of races, all of which were within ample striking distance. They simply ran solid campaigns with solid candidates at a time when a popular president pounded the pavement and brought in the dollars.

The nation always tends to favor Republicans in times of international crisis; Tuesday was no exception. The 50-some pieces of legislation now sitting on Daschle’s desk should finally get some attention.

However, the story of the night was Minnesota’s Norm Coleman upsetting the geriatric Walter Mondale in what was billed two weeks ago as a lock for the former vice president. Much of this can likely be attributed to Paul Wellstone’s “memorial” service and the resulting disgust among moderate and undecided Minnesotans.

Apparently Coleman lined up volunteers and donations like mad as soon as the Democrats ceased their hooting, hollering and booing in solemn remembrance. Once the big “mo” got on Norm’s side, the president appeared to take care of the rest.

A lot of the talking heads and pundits seem to point responsibility for the GOP takeover directly at President Bush. But the fact of the matter remained that conservatives in this race ran on an agenda, and liberals ran on attacking conservatives. At the end of the night the Democratic party is stripped of its leadership and its two best prospects for the White House in two years — with a host of new faces to choose from and the onus of moving the country in the right direction set squarely on the GOP, the games of ’04 have already begun …

Eric Cullen ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in political science.