“It’s Really Not About Jobs”: Scott Walker Hopes The Public Doesn’t Remember His Campaign Pledge
When it comes to ambitious Republican governors eyeing national office, some notable GOP figures have a problem: job creation remains a top national priority, and their job-creation records are pretty awful.
That’s true of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who’s among the worst governors in the country when it comes to employment, and it’s especially true of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), who’s record on jobs is even worse.
As a candidate in 2010, Walker was so confident about what he’d accomplish, he made his campaign promise quite specific: elect him governor and he’d create 250,000 jobs in his first term. With Walker nowhere near his goal, and Wisconsin unlikely to make up the difference over the next year, the Republican is starting to take a “who, me?” approach to his pledge.
Governor Walker promised Wisconsin 250,000 new jobs again and again while campaigning in 2010. He said he’d accomplish that in his first term as governor. But the latest Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report puts Walker less than a third of the way there. He has less than a year and a half to create nearly 170,000 jobs to keep that pledge.
On Monday in Merrill, he carefully backed away from the specific number.
“My goal wasn’t so much to hit a magic number as much as it was, in the four years before I took office, when I was campaigning, I saw that we lost over 133,000 jobs in the state. I said, ‘it’s really not about jobs, it’s about real people, real jobs like those here, and more importantly, affecting real families all across the state,'” Walker said.
Got that? As a candidate in 2010, Walker said he’d create 250,000 jobs in four years. As a governor eyeing re-election and a presidential campaign, Walker is now saying, “It’s really not about jobs….”
Complicating matters, after a local NBC affiliate ran the story saying, “Walker backs off campaign jobs pledge at Merrill stop,” the governor’s office urged the station to take the story off its website.
Scott Walker, in other words, hopes the public doesn’t remember his 2010 promise, and hopes news organizations won’t remind them.
Also note, when asked about his poor record on job creation, the Republican governor has struggled to come up with a defense. In April, he blamed protesters who opposed his union-busting efforts in 2011, as if his policies were their fault.
While serving as governor and running for a second term, Walker is also co-writing a book with Republican pundit Marc Thiessen, a Washington Post columnist and former President George W. Bush speechwriter.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, August 30, 2013
“Targeting Tuners”: If You’re Not Singing Along With Scott Walker, You’re Under Arrest
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is an exceptionally ambitious career politician who loves the sound of cheering crowds in the presidential primary states where he hopes to be a 2016 contender.
But he does not care for the sound of dissent.
In fact, dissident voices bother the conservative Republican governor so much that he has ordered state police forces to begin arresting Wisconsinites—from 85-year-olds to young moms with kids—who dare to join a long-established noontime “Solidarity Sing Along” at the state capitol in Madison. In this summer of protest, crowds have gathered at state capitols nationwide—from women’s rights activists in Austin to “Stand Your Ground” foes in Tallahassee to voting rights champions in Raleigh. There have been mass arrests, especially during the “Moral Monday” protests in North Carolina.
But Walker has distinguished himself by targeting tunes.
The singing, which traces its roots to the mass protests against Walker’s anti-labor initiatives of February and March 2011, has been a steady presence in the capitol for two years. But, this summer, the governor’s cracking down. So far, seventy-nine Wisconsinites have been arrested and ticketed, and dozens more are likely to face charges for singing songs like “Which Side Are You On?” and “On Wisconsin” without following a new set of permitting rules developed by the governor to limit the right to assemble.
It is hard to understand why the governor is so perturbed.
He’s not often in a position to hear what’s going on in the capitol.
Unless, of course, the voices of the singers are loud enough to carry to states like Alabama.
The governor, who makes little secret of his 2016 presidential enthusiasm, is spending this summer traveling to states that are likely to play a role in naming the Republican nominee who will pick up where Mitt Romney left off. He’s already been to Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Nevada, New York, Tennessee and Texas. And he’ll be back in many of those state this fall to hawk his upcoming book, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge (Sentinel/Penguin), which he’s written with Marc Thiessen, who previously served as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. The conservative Washington Examiner says that “according to those familiar with it, might as well come with a ‘Walker for America’ bumper sticker.”
But before he distributes the bumper stickers, Walker is spending his off-year summer vacation on the partisan dinner circuit.
When seventeen singers were arrested Friday at the state capitol, Walker was in Denver keynoting the fourth annual Western Conservative Summit.
Soon he’ll be off to Alabama for the annual Republican Party summer dinner.
He’s already been to the first primary state of New Hampshire and the first caucus state of Iowa.
Walker’s certainly seems to be running.
But he’s not getting much traction.
Against prospective Republican contenders, according to a new TheRun2016 poll, Walker finished eighth with 2.1 percent support among possible Iowa Republican Caucus participants.
There are a lot of explanations for why Governor Walker, despite a very high national profile, attracts so little support. But some of the burden the governor carries undoubtedly has to do with his image as a “divide and conquer” politician who is determined to crack down on teachers, public employees, conservationists, local officials and anyone else who isn’t using his songbook—even going so far as to have grandmothers, veterans, teachers and mothers with children arrested for carrying a tune in the capitol—but who is not very good when it comes to managing his state, maintaining great schools, building a strong infrastructure or creating a climate that encourages job creation.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, July 29, 2013
“A Matter Of Life And Death”: Leave It To Scott Walker To Turn Medicaid Expansion Into Medicaid Contraction
Several red states are turning down Medicaid expansion — only Scott Walker (R-WI) is actually using Obamacare as an excuse to cut Medicaid.
Wisconsin’s Badgercare health care plan is one of the best in the country. Families qualify for comprehensive coverage if they earn up to 185 percent of the federal poverty level.
So when the Affordable Care Act offered all 50 states a chance to expand their Medicaid programs to cover all the working poor who earn too much for Medicaid but make up to 133 percent of the poverty level, what did Governor Scott Walker decide to do?
He put forward a plan to drastically cut Badgercare.
If Walker gets his way, his state’s plan will only cover residents who earn 100 percent of the poverty level or below – $11,490 a year for a single adult.
Tens of thousands of Wisconsites will be forced from completely subsidized health care to the federal insurance exchanges, where they can purchase private plans with a subsidy. To do this, Walker has to give up federal funding that would cover 84,7000 residents, which would lead to a $119 million cut to his state budget.
“But a detailed analysis of the plan by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau finds that many of the people now receiving state Medicaid coverage would likely not buy the more costly insurance through the federal program,” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
“As a general rule, they’re going to be really strapped to do it,” Jon Peacock, research director of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, told the Journal Sentinel. “They won’t scrape together the money unless they really need it.”
The Bureau estimates that 7 percent will not buy the coverage. Peacock thinks that’s overly optimistic.
A new UW Madison study shows that Badgercare – which was expanded in 2009 — reduces hospitalization and improves management of chronic disease.
Even Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) admits that Walker’s plan could send thousands to emergency rooms for care, driving up the cost of care for all residents. The legislature is considering additional payments to hospitals to make up for the costs of the uninsured.
Medicaid expansion is a great deal for the states. The federal government will fund 100 percent of the initial expense; that decreases to 90 percent over the next decade.
Rand Corporation just released a study that underlines the cruelty of rejecting expansion. “States rejecting the expansion will spend much more, get much, much less, and leave millions of their residents uninsured. That’s a lot of self-inflicted pain to make a political point,” according to The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas.
“This is not a small issue,” writes The Guardian‘s Michael Cohen. “In fact, it is a matter of life and death.”
Cohen points to a New England Journal of Medicine study that shows increased access to Medicaid results in fewer deaths. A recent study in Oregon found that Medicaid eliminated economic hardships brought on by health problems and dramatically improved mental health.
What Walker is doing is even worse than his more than two dozen Republican colleagues who are rejecting expansion. He’s taking health care away from the working poor, knowing that doing so will cost his state money, well-being and even lives.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, June 4, 2013
“Surrounded By Hacks”: Scott Walker Hires Torture Apologist To Ghostwrite Campaign Book
Looks like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is going to try to be president now. Robert Costa reports that Walker is “collaborating on a book with Marc Thiessen, a former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush.” It’s not like a sci-fi robot murder mystery that takes place in the distant future on Ganymede, either: It is an I would like to be president sort of book, “with stories about his family, his values, and his rise to power.” It will probably be boring.
But just because it will be a boring book doesn’t mean that its existence isn’t interesting.
Thiessen is a very poor Washington Post opinion columnist who wrote a book in which he strung together a series of distortions in support of the thesis that torture is great. Before the book and the column gig, he was a speechwriter for George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. (Before that, Thiessen spent six years as a spokesperson and “policy adviser” to unreconstructed white supremacist Sen. Jesse Helms, which is another thing that should effectively bar him from participating in civilized society.)
Thiessen likely got the job because he’s written a bunch of columns lauding Walker as a leader at the forefront of the “GOP revolution.” In 2012, he called for Romney to select Walker as his running mate, writing, “Barack Obama is afraid of Scott Walker.” (Thiessen also wrote that a victory for Walker in his then-imminent recall election “would make Walker the instant front-runner for the GOP vice presidential nod.” Walker won, and did not become a front-runner for the vice-presidential nod.)
The book is clearly more about national ambition than it is part of Walker’s 2014 reelection campaign. He does not need help with name recognition in Wisconsin, and Thiessen has no connection to the state at all. Walker also just went to CPAC and plans to visit Iowa and give a speech to one of their thousands of random GOP groups this spring. He’s a Midwestern governor, roughly half of his state approves of him, and the conservative activist base loves him. It would almost be stupid if he didn’t give running for president a shot.
Walker’s decision likely got a bit easier this month, when the three-year investigation into the unusual amount of illegal campaign activity carried out by some of his appointees and fundraisers concluded without Walker facing any charges or specific allegations of wrongdoing. Six individuals connected to Walker were charged with crimes. Two of his aides each separately looted a fund intended for a picnic for veterans and their families. Timothy Russell, who worked closely with Walker in various jobs for a decade, was sentenced to two years in prison.
Walker’s repeated appointment of Russell to various positions suggests that a Walker administration would be, like the Bush administration, full of political hacks whose only qualifications for their posts will be either ideological certitude or fundraising ability. His hiring of Marc Thiessen is evidence that he has no strategic or moral issues with the Bush administration’s foreign policy. For a party that’s desperate to reform its image without changing a thing about its policies, he’s as good a candidate as any. He just better make sure his book doesn’t accidentally express any opinions about immigration reform.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 25, 2013
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