Legislative Staffers: Smart, Useful, and Unhappy

Playground's posting is usually strong medicine. Generally speaking, it is discomfiting. On the other hand, Playground is an equal-opportunity discomfiter; one suspects that the Lefties don't enjoy all he has to say, either.

Here's one of his recent offerings. My reaction follows:

Someone should really tell Assembly GOP legislators that their staff find out everything anyway, usually in advance because legislators are TERRIBLE at keeping secrets. Not telling staff about "secret" meetings only pisses them off.

Funny how GOP leadership constantly talks about the "team." But really, they've completely disenfranchised staff, relegating them from skill player to water boy in just four years.

Scott Jensen knew that staff could be a powerful weapon and worked to include staff in the policy making process.

Under the current leadership, many of the building's best and brightest minds have resorted to leisure reading and three hour lunches because members steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that their staff, by and large, are smarter than most of their own colleagues.

Staff have figured out that "team" is just code for "please drop lit and do doors for members who, in many cases, are entirely too damn lazy to get out and work for themselves." I mean, isn't everyone just waiting for the last-minute "help Carol Owens" plea to go out? It always does.

This is cute. Unhappy, unfulfilled "best and brightest" see their career aspirations (in Gummint: steady paycheck, excellent bennies, nice area to live in....) going down the pissoir because current Leadership thinks less of them than they do of themselves.

Solution, Playgroud: Get A REAL Job. Madison's full of them. So is Arcadia (furniture manufacturing) and Milwaukee (welding.)