“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
“The Scott Walker Of New Jersey”: Why “Moderate” Chris Christie Is Just As Conservative As The Kochs
Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) is a “moderate” the same way Moe from the Three Stooges was an academic: only in comparison to the other Stooges.
While his amicable embrace of President Obama during Hurricane Sandy and willingness to actually sign a bill related to firearms will give his 2016 GOP primary opponents fodder for attack ads, the governor doesn’t have to inflate his severely conservative credentials.
Christie is the Scott Walker (R-WI) of New Jersey, one of the bluest states in the union. His agenda is nearly indistinguishable from that of Wisconsin’s controversial governor, with a nearly identical dismal performance when it comes to job creation.
“From the time he took office at the beginning of 2010 to March of this year, the state’s performance on the measures tracked by Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States puts it 45th among the states,” Bloomberg‘s Christopher Flavelle reports. Wisconsin is ranked 43rd on the same scale. The Bureau of Labor Statistics currently rates Wisconsin 33rd in job creation. New Jersey is 38th.
The real difference between Walker and Christie isn’t their beliefs or their below-average success at creating jobs. The difference is Christie knows how to pose as a moderate. Walker’s dominant appeal is as an ideologue. Christie’s strength is he’s a politician.
But today’s Republican Party loves ideologues and is suspicious of those like Christie who just want to win.
After being shunned by CPAC and being branded the “King of Bacon” by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), New Jersey’s governor has embarked on an apology tour that began with him endorsing the Koch-loving Republican nominee to replace Frank Lautenberg in the U.S. Senate, Steve Lonegan – who will be trounced by Democrat Cory Booker so hard that Christie wasted millions of taxpayer dollars to make sure he wouldn’t be on the same ballot as Newark’s mayor. Next Christie will meet with some of the party’s biggest funders in the Hamptons.
Here’s five reasons why any questions they have about his loyalty to the conservative agenda can be answered by simply pointing to his record.
War On Unions
“Unions are the problem,” Christie said at a town hall earlier this year. And that’s been the subtext of much of what he’s done since he took office. He’s taken pride in calling his state teachers’ union “thugs” and celebrated his battles with public sector workers by posting them on his You Tube channel.
One of his biggest “accomplishments” as governor was to pair cuts with a suspension of collective bargaining for public sector workers.
Like Walker, he was able to crush resistance to his policies and take what he wanted from workers. And like Walker, the result was downtrodden public servants and a weak economy.
Tax Cuts
As he’s cut public spending, Christie has continually proposed Bush-like tax cuts that would mostly benefit the rich, even though New Jersey’s rich already enjoy a lower tax burden than the state’s working-class families.
He’s done this, even though his tax cut would create a deficit.
The governor also cut $1 billion from education to help pay for $2.3 billion in tax breaks for businesses, more than doubling in one swoop the amount of breaks corporations had received in a decade.
On a federal level, Christie supports the Ryan budget.
“It calls for a reduction in taxes that, if implemented, would likely give a disproportionate share of benefits to the wealthy,” The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn explains. “It calls for radically reducing discretionary spending, so that it is less than 4 percent of gross domestic product by 2050. And it calls for transforming Medicare into a voucher system.”
Starving Infrastructure
Like Scott Walker, Chris Christie immediately made news by canceling a large infrastructure project that would have brought jobs to his state and eventually relieved traffic and pollution.
The governor’s explanation for rejecting the federal funds turned out to be dubious and flawed. The New York Times‘ Kate Zernike explains:
The report by the Government Accountability Office, to be released this week, found that while Mr. Christie said that state transportation officials had revised cost estimates for the tunnel to at least $11 billion and potentially more than $14 billion, the range of estimates had in fact remained unchanged in the two years before he announced in 2010 that he was shutting down the project. And state transportation officials, the report says, had said the cost would be no more than $10 billion.
Mr. Christie also misstated New Jersey’s share of the costs: he said the state would pay 70 percent of the project; the report found that New Jersey was paying 14.4 percent. And while the governor said that an agreement with the federal government would require the state to pay all cost overruns, the report found that there was no final agreement, and that the federal government had made several offers to share those costs.
Christie’s true goal was to keep the funds the state had allocated for the project in order to prevent an increase on the gasoline tax that would have broken a promise. He also got to publicly reject the president, which is how you get ahead in the Republican Party.
Women’s Health
When people compare a potential Christie candidacy to “Rudy” Giuliani’s 2008 effort, they forget that Christie is avidly anti-choice — the first anti-abortion-rights candidate ever to be elected governor of New Jersey.
As governor, Christie has joined Scott Walker and Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) in an effort to starve Planned Parenthood, the organization that provides basic reproductive health care to millions of women.
Christie demanded $7.5 million in cuts to women’s health care, resulting in clinics treating 33,000 fewer patients in a year, explaining that the money was needed to balance the budget. Democrats have given him several chances to restore the cuts but he’s refused, citing costs.
Of course, spending $12 million on a special election so he wouldn’t be on the same ballot as Booker was no big deal to the cost-cutting governor.
Singlehandedly Stopping Same-Sex Marriage
Same-sex couples in New Jersey know there’s only one reason they can’t enjoy the benefits of marriage: Chris Christie.
Not only has he vetoed a bill legalizing equal marriage, he’s vowed to veto any future bill that lands on his desk and called the Supreme Court’s decision to throw out Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act “inappropriate” and “insulting.”
Christie feigns moderation when he says that marriage should be on the ballot. What’s more cynical than believing that a person’s rights should be up for a vote?
When you’re a far-right Republican who has to win in a blue state, these are the kinds of things you end up saying.
And on this issue, Christie is to the right of David Koch.
Despite this, the governor has the Koch mark of approval.
“Five months ago we met in my New York City office and spoke, just the two of us, for about two hours on his objectives and successes in correcting many of the most serious problems of the New Jersey state government,” David Koch said, at a secret Koch brothers conference in 2011. “At the end of our conversation, I said to myself, ‘I’m really impressed and inspired by this man. He is my kind of guy.’”
By: Jasaon Sattler, The National Memo, August 21, 2013
“It’s All Academic Governor”: Chris Christie’s Debate Phobia Won’t Win Him GOP Support
“We are not a debating society. We are a political operation that needs to win.”
Thus did Chris Christie offer one of the most pregnant statements yet in the ongoing Republican argument over the party’s future. At the risk of sounding like one of those “professors” the New Jersey governor regularly condemns, I’d argue that these 15 words, spoken at a Republican National Committee meeting in Boston last week, raise more questions than they answer. Here are a few.
How do you decide on a winning strategy without debating it first? What is wrong with debating differences on policy and philosophy that people in political parties inevitably have? Don’t the voters expect to have some idea of what a party and a candidate believe before they cast their ballots — and doesn’t that imply debate? Doesn’t the phrase “political operation” risk implying that you are seeking power for power’s sake and not for any larger purpose?
There is also this: Isn’t Christie himself engaged in an important debate with Sen. Rand Paul over national security issues? There’s nothing academic about that.
One of two things is going on here: Either Christie knows he’ll need to have the debate he claims he wishes to avoid but doesn’t want to look like he is questioning fundamental conservative beliefs, or he really believes that the “I can win and the other guys can’t” argument is enough to carry him to the 2016 Republican presidential nomination he shows every sign of seeking. The latest signal came Friday when, under pressure from pro-gun activists, he vetoed a weapon ban he once advocated.
His target audience, after all, is an increasingly right-wing group of Republican primary voters who are unforgiving of ideological deviations. The last thing Christie needs is the sort of debate that casts him as a “moderate.”
Let’s stipulate that Christie is far less “moderate” than either his fans among Democrats and independents or the hardest-core conservatives seem to believe. Simply because Christie was nice to President Obama after Hurricane Sandy — at a moment when New Jersey needed all the federal help it could get — lots of people forget how conservative the pre-Sandy Christie was.
In 2011, he went to the summer seminar sponsored by the Koch brothers in Colorado, heaped praise on them and said, among other things: “We know the answers. They’re painful answers. We’re going to have to reduce Medicare benefits. We’re going to have to reduce Medicaid benefits. We’re going to have to raise the Social Security age. We’re going to have to do these things. We’re going to have to cut all type of other government programs that some people in this room might like. But we’re gonna have to do it.”
If I were on the right, I’d be taken with Christie’s skills at making conservative positions seem “pragmatic” and “practical.” Candidates who are perceived as dogmatic or highly ideological rarely win elections.
But here’s the problem: You can’t run as a pragmatic candidate if your party won’t let you. For Christie to win, he will have to convince the grass-roots Republicans who decide nominations that the party’s steady march rightward is a mistake.
Surely Paul, Ted Cruz and others among Christie’s potential opponents won’t let him slide by without challenging him hard — yes, “debating” him — about what he really stands for. Christie needs something more substantial than “You guys are losers,” even though he would relish saying it.
Mitt Romney’s experience in 2012 is instructive. He was a relatively pragmatic governor, especially on health care, and could have been a more attractive candidate than he turned out to be. Yet the dynamics of a Republican primary electorate that is short on middle-of-the-roaders pushed Romney away from his old self and toward positions that made him less electable. Faced with opponents to his right, he was reactive and drifted their way. In the end, it wasn’t clear who Romney was, other than the candidate who spoke derisively about the “47 percent.”
Those who understand how a “political operation” works know that genuine pragmatism requires a defeated party to engage in rethinking, not just repositioning. Bill Clinton laid out a detailed program and a set of arguments as a “New Democrat.” George W. Bush spoke of “compassionate conservatism” and challenged at least some of the most reactionary positions held by congressional Republicans.
Winning reelection this November by the biggest possible margin will buy Christie time. But eventually the debating society will beckon. He’ll have to be very clear, if not professorial, about the argument he wants to make.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 18, 2013
“Ideology Is For Losers”: GOP Caucus And Primary Voters Are Only Going To Tolerate Chris Christie If He’s The Means To Their Ends
The more you listen to Chris Christie, the more you have to wonder if he’s the political equivalent of a catchy Top 40 song: sounds pretty good for a while, but gets tedious and even abrasive after you’ve listened to it twenty or thirty times.
Here’s a report on Christie’s most direct rap yet about the Republican Party’s future, at a closed RNC meeting, per CNN’s Peter Hamby:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie planted himself firmly in the Republican Party’s establishment wing Thursday with a pugnacious speech calling on his party to focus on pragmatism rather than ideology and crippling internal debates.
“We are not a debating society,” Christie told a lunchtime audience at the Republican National Committees summer meeting in Boston. “We are a political operation that needs to win.”
The speech marked Christie’s first-ever appearance at a meeting of the RNC.
Christie’s remarks, relayed to a reporter by GOP officials who attended the closed-press event, were interpreted by many here as another jab at Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a potential rival for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.
Christie and Paul tangled earlier this summer after the New Jersey governor criticized Paul’s libertarian-tinged worldview as “esoteric” and “intellectual,” drawing a series of pointed rebukes from Paul and his allies.
“I am in this business to win. I don’t know why you are in it. I am in this to win,” Christie said at the RNC luncheon.
“I think we have some folks who believe that our job is to be college professors,” he said. “Now college professors are fine I guess. Being a college professor, they basically spout out ideas that nobody does anything about. For our ideas to matter we have to win. Because if we don’t win, we don’t govern. And if we don’t govern all we do is shout to the wind. And so I am going to do anything I need to do to win.”
By most accounts, Christie’s remarks were met with enthusiasm by the nearly 200 state GOP chairmen, staffers and party insiders who attend these quarterly meetings to plot election strategy and hunt for business.
Now there’s zero question “electability” is going to be Christie’s strong suit if he does run for president in 2016. He probably won’t have to keep reminding Republicans of that; they do read polls, even if they like to ignore the ones that tell them stuff they don’t want to hear. And he sure won’t have to remind the kind of people he was talking to at the RNC meeting, who probably spend a perilous amount of time imagining the power and money they will command if Republicans do seize total power in Washington.
If he’s smart, he’ll just stipulate that, and try to burnish his own conservative ideological credentials, just as his “pragmatist” predecessors John McCain and Mitt Romney did before their successful bids for the presidential nomination. Conservatives are not in the mood to be told their “ideas,” or their fantasies of a nation where unions don’t exist and “job-creators” walk tall and those people stop being able to trade votes for federal benefits, are a lot of egghead vaporizing. The critical bulk of Republican caucus and primary voters are only going to tolerate Christie if he’s the practical means to the ends defined by people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan. If he has contempt for those ends, then all the favorable poll numbers in the world won’t save him. But you get the sense that contempt is one emotion Chris Christie has a real hard time disguising, and that could be his undoing.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal August 16, 2013
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