As I mentioned earlier, I’m deep in the weeds of putting the new issue of the Washington Monthly online so y’all can peruse it for free, starting Monday morning. But we did do something special this time around by giving sneak-peeks at two of our feature articles. One of them is on Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. He’s a hot topic right now because he’s well-positioned to do very well if not win the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. And that makes him a serious contender to become the Republican nominee and quite possibly the next president of the United States.
I’ll let Ed set this up:
In a sneek peek from the June/July/August issue of the Washington Monthly, the University of Maryland’s Donald F. Kettl (who is also a former director of the Robert M. LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin) takes a closer look at Walker’s assault on the unions and concludes it made little or no sense other than as an act of partisan and ideological warfare that he would be likely to continue in Washington if he becomes president.
Only a few of us live in Wisconsin, but virtually all of us live in America. We can all be impacted by a Walker presidency, and I think it’s useful to try to understand the man. If Prof. Kettl is correct, Walker is likely to continue his war on government and public service unions in Washington DC with even less justification than he had in Wisconsin. He’s also likely to be vindictive towards those he perceives to be his political enemies, even if those people are just trying to raise a family while working somewhere in the Federal bureaucracy.
But to really understand Kettl’s analysis, you have to look at his proof that Walker got famous and popular by tackling a set of problems that didn’t actually exist.
Sound familiar?
In a sneek peak from the June/July/August issue of the Washington Monthly, the University of Maryland’s Donald F. Kettl (who is also a former director of the Robert M. LaFollette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin) takes a closer look at Walker’s assault on the unions and concludes it made little or no sense other than as an act of partisan and ideological warfare that he would be likely to continue in Washington if he becomes president.
Isn’t the point he did this because he thought it would be the way to the GOP nomination for President at some point? He’s been trying to hit pretty much every hot button issue. Unions. The rights of women. Higher education. You name it.
I’m not sure if he started out thinking about the White House so much as thinking about settling scores in Wisconsin.
interesting. I’d thought he was just a Koch puppet pursuing their agenda to become their man in the White House
Living the nightmare here in Wisconsin. Scott Walker has been calculating every move since his entry into politics to end up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Do not underestimate his positioning abilities.
He does, however, have many vulnerabilities that this dairy state woman hopes a national vetting will uncover. A treasure trove of incompetence dating back to his years as Milwaukee County Executive is there for the taking without a whole lot of effort if anyone would bother to dig.
He was almost certainly planning for a presidential run. Walker’s operational mode has been to use the current office to shoot for higher office, and he’s usually been able to get out before having to answer for all the damage his political machinations aimed at the next office due to the current one.
As a resident of Milwaukee County and a person who has observed Walker’s rise to power and success since he became County Executive in 2002, I disagree. Walker has been thinking about the White House since about the time he learned to walk.
He is an opportunist par excellence and as such he is, and always has been, all about one thing: advancing the career and the interests of Scott Walker. He combines ruthless ambition with a fine sense of seeking the main chance.
Walker didn’t take the same route as, say, Ted Cruz — who’s smart for about any value of “smart” that matters. Instead he dropped out of college 40-some credits short of graduation and began to work on building a political career. He lost his first race for Wis. Assembly at the ripe young age of 22 (that would have to be shortly after dropping out of school), to Gwen Moore, but won the next time he tried, at age 24 after he moved out to a more conservative suburban district.
That was 1992. He’d still be a back-bencher in the Assembly but for the fact that he spent a lot of time in those years getting recognition from the power brokers in the state GOP as a talented and loyal operative. When his big chance came in 2002, he left the Assembly and was carried into the County Executive job in a special election, by the local branch of the Tea Party (yes, before there even was a Tea Party “Citizens for Responsible Government” was the Milwaukee branch of what became the TP). The reason for the election was a financial scandal organized by the endless fuckery of the Democrats who then controlled the County Board.
Two things stand out about Walker’s career: his own ambition, and lack of talent among the Democrats. They created the conditions where he could rise to power and they have no idea how to put that batch of toothpaste back into the tube.
Where Walker is weak is that he’s spent all his years grooming himself to be ready for the next step up the ladder. He’s neither wise nor learned (in fact, as everyone knows, he’s a dropout) so he surrounds himself with sycophants who will deny, cover, and compensate for his weaknesses and tell him that he’s a really smart guy. He will have a hard time, in the space of less than a year, getting up to speed on foreign policy. On the other hand he’s put together a very effective campaign organization and developed a program that resonates among white voters. He’ll have all the money and more that the needs to run a campaign. “What would President Walker do?” is not an idle question to be asking.
Barack Obama isn’t going to be on the ballot in 2016.
Willard Romney ran a Southern Strategy campaign.
And, it worked – he won 60% of the White Vote.
And, it didn’t even matter- electoral college or popular vote wise.
You’re going to tell me that Scott Walker can win more than 60% of the White vote?
And, that he has some miraculous appeal to non-White voters?
No. It’s too early to go running around with our hair on fire and that’s one of the reasons. Another reason is, even if that were not the case it would not do much good. Our beliefs to the contrary, there’s really very little we can do to change the outcome of the 2016 election.
However, I will say that I have personally seen Walker assemble an organization and a platform that has white people willing to crawl over broken glass to vote for him. What he put together here is (or at least was — until the enthusiasts realized that they were not immune to the consequences they thought would only be visited on someone else) a mass reactionary movement. To that end, he’s been aided by a Democratic Party that in the last election nominated a business-friendly, very wealthy, highly-connected candidate who nobody in the electorate had much passion for at all.
You can make up your own mind whether there’s an analogy to be found there.
Unlike Romney, Walker does not begin from a position of elite noblesse oblige. Walker is more of a class-resentment kind of a guy. More George Wallace than George Bush, if you will. He won’t run Romney’s campaign and he won’t write off 47% of the population as “takers”.
What I’ve seen of Walker has made me less willing to believe that past experience is a good predictor of future results, or that demographics are destiny. And less willing than to be willing to be complacent about our chances.
Thanks for the explanation. So he came to power in part because there was a weak Democratic candidate bench in Wisconsin. Perhaps the national Democratic party can figure out before it’s too late that you don’t have viable candidates if you don’t have viable local and state organizations. If you don’t get anyone elected to office,then, by golly, one day you will look around and find a veritable paucity of youngish candidates to groom for bigger things.
What’s happened in Wisconsin happened much faster in Red States like mine, but I’d say Walker has made huge strides in turning back the clock in ways that hurt the working class. Limbaugh has long been supportive of Walker as being the only candidate with a real record of accomplishment. Right there, one has a crystallized view of how a GOP president will govern in the 21st century. Will make GWB seem like a veritable genius, and moderate to boot.
Go look at the graphs from the Wonkblogthat Digby posted yesterday on her site:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/06/how-do-you-like-your-real-americans-now.html
“In my view, a corporation is not a person. A corporation does not have First Amendment rights to spend as much money as it wants, without disclosure, on a political campaign. Corporations should not be able to go into their treasuries and spend millions and millions of dollars on a campaign in order to buy elections.”
That’s considered equally kooky to comparing Obamacare to the Nazis. I wouldn’t listen to anything that person says.
Well that’s part of it. The other part (and the two are connected) is that the Wisconsin Democratic Party couldn’t organize a sleepover for a bunch of third-grade kids.
That’s true but in addition to this issue of “the bench” that we always focus on, you also have to be developing internal leadership as well. Good internal leaders can, over time and in the face of difficulties, find good candidates. Without the internal leadership, though, the whole structure soon falls apart.
It has been said here that elections are about winning the argument. I think Scott Walker is sort of filter in the Republican sewer that collects crap from the Republican right making him perfect for the Republican side of the argument. Bernie is perfect for the progressive side. I really like Bernie’s idea to debate Republicans like Scott Walker during the primary season. We’ve never really had a progressive side of the argument before. Once the truth is out money won’t matter even for Hillary.
I’d love to see Bernie against Walker in the general to give the country a clear choice. Our owners will not permit it. At best we will see Walker against Clinton so the country can choose social agendas between two corporatists. HRC is such a chameleon that we might not even see that.
What if we don’t ask our owner’s permission?
They own the news and 99% of the population can’t think – some by choice, some by lack of education- so they vote the way the News Media pitches it to them. You know, like “the only difference between Al gore and George Bush is that Bush is likeable and Gore is wooden”.
The difference is what Bernie is saying is already agreed to by a majority of people cutting across party lines and is in complete opposition to all Republican positions. If he can confront the Republicans on these issues he wins because the people won’t suddenly disagree with themselves. Once someone tells you the truth and you know it’s the truth you can’t ignore it no matter how much money they spend trying to get that genie back in the bottle. If Bernie wins this we better have good progressive down ticket candidates ready in every state.
I hope you are right, but my life tells me to bet against logic and sanity from the American people.