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“Contempt For The People”: The Real Problem With What Scott Walker Said About ISIS

Scott Walker is learning that when you want to play in the big leagues, things move pretty fast. And when you’re a governor without foreign policy experience, sometimes you can get a little tripped up trying to show how what you’ve done in your state prepares you for dealing with international challenges. So today Walker getting criticism for saying, in his speech to CPAC yesterday (it was actually in the Q&A session) that he can handle terrorists the same way he handled public sector unions in Wisconsin. Even some conservatives criticized him for it, but what’s alarming isn’t that he “compared” a bunch of Wisconsinites to ISIS, which of course he wasn’t trying to do. What’s alarming is that he thinks that you need the same skills and approach to dealing with unhappy constituents as you do with terrorists.

Here’s what he actually said:

“I want a commander-in-chief who will do everything in their power to ensure that the threat from radical Islamic terrorists do not wash up on American soil. We will have someone who leads and ultimately will send a message not only that we will protect American soil but do not take this upon freedom-loving people anywhere else in the world. We need a leader with that kind of confidence. If I can take on a 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”

Then later he tried to walk it back:

“Let me be perfectly clear: I’m just pointing out the closest thing I have to handling this difficult situation is the 100,000 protesters I had to deal with,” Walker told reporters. Asked if he regretted the statement, he said, “No.”

“You all will misconstrue things the way you see fit,” he said. “That’s the closest thing I have in terms of handling a difficult situation, not that there’s any parallel between the two.”

I doubt there are many limits to Walker’s contempt for people who want to bargain collectively, but obviously he didn’t mean to say they’re like terrorists. What he did mean to say, I’m fairly certain, is that he can bring the same kind of uncompromising toughness to combatting ISIS that he brought to his successful attempt to crush the public sector unions. The unions were his enemy then; ISIS will be his enemy if he gets to be president.

And this is what we need to explore, not only with Walker but with all the Republican candidates. They’ll all be eager to tell you that on this problem, Barack Obama is weak and indecisive, whereas if you’re sufficiently tough, the problem can be solved. But you know who was tough, uncompromising, and brimming with the “confidence” Walker cites? George W. Bush. When it came to terrorists, you couldn’t get much tougher than that guy. Heck, not only did he invade two countries, he even started a program to torture prisoners. Super-tough, am I right?

But you may have noticed that when Bush left office, there were still terrorists. Al-Qaeda had been transformed from a centrally-run organization into a network of franchises, all of which are potentially dangerous. And then out of the ashes of the Iraq War grew ISIS. For some unfathomable reason, toughness wasn’t quite enough to solve the problem.

So that’s how I’d pose the question to these candidates if I had the chance: You talk a lot about being strong and tough and showing resolve, and “sending messages” of strength and toughness and resolve, but George W. Bush did all those things, and yet the problem remains. So what do we do now?

 

By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, February 27, 2015

February 28, 2015 Posted by | Foreign Policy, ISIS, Scott Walker | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“The Most Terrifying Of All”: Is It Time to Be Afraid of Scott Walker?

One of the silver linings Democrats were looking for on Tuesday was the possibility that some particularly nasty Republican governors might be shown the door. The most repellent had to be Maine’s thuggish Paul LePage, who due in large part to an independent candidacy will enjoy four more years to embarrass and immiserate the people of that fine state. Far more consequential, however, was Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Having survived a close shave, Walker can now board a train of destiny leaving Madison and heading all of 300 miles southwest to Des Moines.

Of all the potential GOP 2016 candidates, Walker may be the most terrifying. Yes, it would be a calamity of apocalyptic proportions if Ted Cruz were to become president, but we all know that’s never going to happen. Walker, however, is a much more credible candidate. Ed Kilgore has some insightful thoughts:

But it’s hard to think of any of the domestic government priorities of today’s conservative movement—from election suppression to rolling back abortion rights to undermining entitlements to erosion of collective bargaining rights to an entire economic strategy based on making life easy for “job-creators”—on which Walker hasn’t distinguished himself, against enormous resistance. In many respects (as I argued in a TNR essay about Walker in 2011), Scott Walker is exactly what you get if you take southern Republicanism in all its sordid glory and apply it in a frosty and unfamiliar environment. So the man is going to have an instinctive appeal to conservative activists everywhere, and has an electability argument few can make.

It’s true—Walker could stand up in a Republican debate, look around at his competitors, and say, “All these guys say they hate labor unions, but who’s done more to hasten the death of collective bargaining than I have?” then repeat the argument on any number of issues. So one could certainly see him catching fire in the primaries.

But as Ed says, Walker isn’t exactly brimming with charisma. With prior GOP nominees, even the ones who lost, you could understand why they might have some plausible appeal to the general electorate. Mitt Romney was a handsome, can-do business leader with a record of working with the other party. John McCain was a mavericky maverick. George W. Bush was a good-natured fella who wanted to be “compassionate.” But Walker? He’s all hard edges and ideological search-and-destroy missions, leaving bitterness and anger in his wake even when he wins.

Of course, if you aren’t in Wisconsin you’ve only seen so much of him. Maybe in the long slog of a primary campaign, he’d reveal depths of complexity and charm that aren’t yet apparent. But let’s hope not.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 7, 2014

November 13, 2014 Posted by | GOP Presidential Candidates, Republicans, Scott Walker | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Workers Are At The Mercy Of Markets”: The Great Recession Shifted Bargaining Power To Employers

The questions hanging over Labor Day 2014 are whether and when the United States gets a pay raise. Ever since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the job market has been in a state of heartbreaking weakness. But the worst seems to be over. As Janet Yellen, chair of the Federal Reserve Board, recently noted, monthly increases in payroll jobs have averaged 230,000 this year, up from 190,000 in 2012 and 2013. The unemployment rate dropped to 6.2 percent in July from 7.3 percent a year earlier and a peak of 10 percent in October 2009.

Gains are also reflected in cheerier (or less gloomy) popular attitudes, says public opinion expert Karlyn Bowman of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. A year ago, Gallup found that 29 percent of workers feared being laid off; that’s now 19 percent. (Millennials are exceptions; their unemployment fears rose slightly.) In March 2010, 85 percent of Americans judged jobs “difficult to find,” a Pew survey reported. In July this year, the figure was 62 percent. Although confidence hasn’t returned to pre-recession levels, there’s been a genuine improvement in mood, says Bowman.

What’s missing are wage increases. Since late 2009, hourly earnings have risen at an annual rate of about 2 percent, but when corrected for inflation, “real” wage increases vanish, reports the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. The EPI says that median hourly wages were actually 0.4 percent lower in the first half of 2014 than in 2007. Using a different inflation adjustment (the “deflator” for personal consumption expenditures instead of the consumer price index) produces a 1.7 percent gain over the same period, says Scott Winship of the Manhattan Institute. Either way, wages are basically flat.

We should do better.

The Great Recession shifted bargaining power to employers. With jobs scarce, “workers just take what they can get,” says economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank. Companies have controlled costs through layoffs, skimpy wage increases and greater reliance on independent contractors, jobs which often pay less and provide fewer fringe benefits. The unwritten post-World War II labor contract — in retreat since the late 1970s — finally expired. That contract presumed that large companies would provide workers with stable jobs and “real” annual increases in wages and fringe benefits.

Forget it. Wage increases aren’t guaranteed, and longtime workers are regularly dismissed. “There really is no security in the labor market,” says former Fed economist Stephen Oliner, now at AEI. On the labor market’s edges, firms like Uber (an on-call transportation company) and TaskRabbit (an online service that allows customers to solicit bids for specific jobs) have created digital markets for freelance workers. The temporary jobs provide cash and flexibility — but not much certainty or security.

Too many workers have chased too few jobs, weakening wages. But now the pendulum may be swinging in workers’ direction. Some economists contend that it already has. Two bits of information are routinely cited: the unexpectedly fast fall in unemployment; and the rise in reported job openings to 4.7 million in June, more than double the recession low and slightly higher than the pre-recession peak.

The worry is that the growing supply of openings and the shrinking pool of available workers might trigger an inflationary wage-price spiral. This concern seems premature. Other economists, including Yellen, have argued that there’s still substantial labor market “slack” (surplus workers wanting jobs), keeping a lid on wage gains. Their evidence seems stronger. Consider the U-6 jobless rate (U-6 includes the officially unemployed, discouraged workers and part-timers who want full-time jobs). In July, it was 12.2 percent, down from a monthly peak of 17.2 percent, though still higher than 2007’s 8.3 percent, before the recession.

But suppose we are nearing an inflection point, where worker supply and demand are in closer balance. That certainly wouldn’t be bad. Workers’ bargaining power would improve with tighter markets: markets where businesses have to pay a bit more to keep employees; where younger workers might have competing job offers; and where someone could quit with a reasonable expectation of finding another job. (Note that unions aren’t a plausible alternative to markets because they represent only 7 percent of private workers. The minimum wage suffers from a similar scale problem.)

A wage explosion seems unlikely; companies were too traumatized by the Great Recession to let costs get out of hand. Even in 2007, wage increases — unadjusted for inflation — were running only at about a 3.5 percent annual rate.

What’s ultimately at stake is the Great Recession’s lasting effect on labor markets. Are they in the process of reverting to their modern role, promoting steadier employment and higher living standards? Or has there been a major break from the past, ushering in a harsher, more arbitrary system whose outlines are still faint? On this Labor Day, the verdict is unclear.

 

By: Robert Samuelson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 31, 2014

September 1, 2014 Posted by | Great Recession, Labor Day, Wages | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Cheese Head Guv’s Sleazy Past”: Scott Walker, One Of The Most Divisive Governors In The Country

Tens of thousands of protesters make for much better television than court documents, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be paying attention to Scott Walker’s scandal-plagued re-election bid this year—even if it is unaccompanied by the hoopla of his 2012 recall election. In that year, Walker was able to best a weak Democratic candidate in an election where some voters backed him because of concerns about whether a recall was appropriate, and not because they supported his union-busting legislation.

This year, the most recent poll has Walker trailing the Democratic nominee, Mary Burke, by two percentage points among likely voters, and the embattled GOP incumbent has faced new allegations that he illegally coordinated outside spending during his recall election with groups like the Wisconsin Club for Growth. But while the 2012 recall excited liberals across the country (it seemed at times during that election that MSNBC’s Ed Schultz had moved to the Badger State), this year liberals can barely muster a shrug.

Part of this ennui, as Noam Scheiber at The New Republic points out, is that it’s not in anyone’s interest to make a big deal about Walker, despite the fact that he might be running for president in a couple years. After losing to him in 2012, liberals have a kind of political PTSD when it comes to Wisconsin, and are afraid of raising the stakes in the campaign.

Plus, Burke is a relatively moderate former business executive, which makes her a good candidate for a general election, but not exactly the best one to excite the progressive base. And without shots of hordes of protesters like the kind that swarmed the state capital in Madison two years ago, the campaign becomes far less compelling for television, and is thus unlikely to receive much national coverage.

The outrage that Walker is provoking is of a less exciting variety this time around. In 2012, there were teachers and small-town government workers made furious by Walker’s efforts to quash collective bargaining rights for public employees. In 2014, however, there is far less uproar over Walker potentially violating campaign finance laws to encourage corporations to give unlimited donations to the Wisconsin Club for Growth—and only the Wisconsin Club for Growth. In an email to a consultant for that group who also served as an adviser to the governor in 2011, a Walker aide emphasized that the incumbent wanted “all the issue advocacy efforts run thru one group to ensure correct messaging.”

These efforts are further illustrated in an email that Kelly Rindfleisch, a former Walker aide, sent the governor before a fundraising trip in 2011, which told him to “stress that donations to [Wisconsin Club for Growth] are not disclosed and can accept corporate donations without limits.”

Rindfleisch, who has since been convicted of misconduct in office as a result of one of the many investigations surrounding Walker, added that the governor should stress to donors that he could accept corporate contributions that wouldn’t be reported.

A national Democratic consultant familiar with the race took pains to point out what a big prize Walker would be for the left. The Wisconsin governor “is very vulnerable, in a very dangerous spot for an incumbent and the fact that he hasn’t committed to serve out his next term means that what happens in Wisconsin is likely to have an effect on ’16.” But most importantly for Democrats, knocking off Walker would be a major consolation prize if they lose control of the Senate in 2014.

With prospects of holding on to a majority in the Senate uncertain, Walker offers Democrats an enviable scalp to wave in November. After all, he has been one of the most divisive governors in the country, and serves in a key swing state. Plus, Walker evokes so much anger among parts of the Democratic base that would lessen the bite of potential losses in national races.

Although some national progressive groups are starting to focus on the race—Democracy for America announced Thursday that it was backing Burke to “put a stop to the flow of extreme right-wing legislation that has been poisoning” Wisconsin under Walker—the attention is still far less than in 2012, when outside Democratic groups flooded the Badger State with money. The result is that Walker still has a significant fundraising advantage heading into final two months of campaigning.

The question, though, is whether the incumbent can hold on and win in the swing state. Because while Walker may savor the absence of protesters demonstrating against him, his poll numbers are still worse than they were in 2012.

 

By: Ben Jacobs, The Daily Beast, August 28, 2014

August 30, 2014 Posted by | Scott Walker, Wisconsin | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Rand Paul Is Wrong”: Why The GOP Should Be Moving Backward, Not Forward

Rand Paul says he wants a “new” Republican Party.

“I think Republicans will not win again in my lifetime for the presidency unless they become a new GOP, a new Republican Party,” the senator from Kentucky and all-but-announced 2016 presidential contender said last week.

Paul’s not talking cosmetic changes. He says the GOP must undergo “a transformation, not a little tweaking at the edges.” He wants the party to start talking about dialing down Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs,” with an acknowledgement that “it’s disproportionately affected the poor and the black and brown among us.” He wants the party to defend basic liberties. And he reminds his fellow partisans that serious conversations about “big government” must deal with the looming presence of the military-industrial complex.

Paul’s points are well taken—up to a point.

But if he’s serious about making the Republican Party viable nationally, he’s got his directions confused.

This talk of a “new Republican Party” is silly.

If the GOP wants to get serious about reaching out to people of color, defending civil rights and civil liberties, and addressing the military-industrial complex, it doesn’t have to become “new.” It has to become old.

It must return to the values that gave it birth and that animated its progress at a time when the party contributed mightily to the advance of the American experiment.

The Republican Party was, after all, founded by abolitionists and radical immigrants who had fled Europe after the popular revolutions of 1848. They dismissed existing parties that compromised America’s founding promise of equality, and secured the presidency for a man who declared that “Republicans…are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.”

The Republican Party became the home of the trust-busters and progressive reformers who laid the groundwork for a New Deal that borrowed ideas from not just Democratic platforms but from Republican agendas. It served as the vehicle of Wendell Willkie, who promoted racial justice at home, supported unions and outlined a “one-world” internationalism that sought to assure that a United Nations, rather than an overburdened United States, would police the planet in the aftermath of World War II. And it ushered into the presidency one Dwight David Eisenhower, who would finish his tenure with this warning:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Indeed, if talk turns to changing the Republican brand into one that might appeal to the great mass of Americans—as Rand Paul suggests it does not now do—it must abandon the dictates of the Wall Street speculators, hedge-fund managers and right-wing billionaires who have defined its agenda toward such extremes.

Where to begin? Why not consider what made the party so appealng when it re-elected Eisenhower in 1956?

In that quite competitive election year, when the Republican ticket carried every state outside the Deep South except Missouri, the party platform declared, “We are proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs—expansion of social security—broadened coverage in unemployment insurance—improved housing—and better health protection for all our people. We are determined that our government remain warmly responsive to the urgent social and economic problems of our people.”

The Republicans of 1956 decried “the bitter toll in casualties and resources” of military interventions abroad, promoted arms reduction, supported humanitarian aid to struggling countries and promised “vigorously to support the United Nations.”

On the domestic front, the party of Lincoln pledged to:

· “Fight for the elimination of discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry or sex.”

· “Assure equal pay for equal work regardless of sex.”

· “Extend the protection of the Federal minimum wage laws to as many more workers as is possible and practicable.”

· “Stimulate improved job safety of our workers.”

· “Strengthen and improve the Federal-State Employment Service and improve the effectiveness of the unemployment insurance system.”

· “Protect by law, the assets of employee welfare and benefit plans so that workers who are the beneficiaries can be assured of their rightful benefits.”

But, recognizing that the government could not protect every worker in every workplace, the Republican Party declared its enthusiastic approval of trade unions and collective bargaining. Noting that “unions have grown in strength and responsibility, and have increased their membership by 2 million” since Eisenhower’s initial election in 1952, the party celebrated the fact that “the process of free collective bargaining has been strengthened by the insistence of this Administration that labor and management settle their differences at the bargaining table without the intervention of the Government.”

Eisenhower’s Republicans promised that a GOP administration and Congress would direct federal dollars toward the construction of schools, hospitals and public housing. The party pledged to fight for “the largest increase in research funds ever sought in one year to intensify attacks on cancer, mental illness, heart disease and other dread diseases” and to provide “federal assistance to help build facilities to train more physicians and scientists.”

And, of course, the Grand Old Party made a commitment to “continue to seek extension and perfection of a sound Social Security system.”

Eisenhower was no left-winger. Many Republicans who came before him (arguably Willkie, certainly Robert M. La Follette) were more liberal, as were a few (George Romney and John Lindsay) who came after him. The thirty-fourth president was, at most, a moderate, who urged the Republican Party to renew its attachment to “the overall philosophy of Lincoln: In all those things which deal with people, be liberal, be human. In all those things which deal with the people’s money or their economy, or their form of government, be conservative.” He spoke always of a balance that respected the power of government to address the great challenges of society while at the same time feared the excesses and abuses that could occur when government aligned with economic elites and industries at the expense of what he described as the nation’s essential goal: “peace with justice.”

Eisenhower closed his presidency with a prayer: “That all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.”

What Willkie, Eisenhower and their allies advocated was sometimes referred to as “modern Republicanism.” But, at its most fundamental level, what they advocated was an old Republicanism, renewed and repurposed for a modern age.

In the roughly fifty years since the party was wrestled from the grip of the “modern Republicans,” it has not become “new.” It has simply abandoned its values, its ideals, its basic premises.

Rand Paul says “you can transform a party,” and he notes, correctly, that “the parties have switched places many times throughout history.” But the transformation that the Republican Party needs—and that the United States needs the Republican Party to make—is not toward something “new.”

It is toward something older, and better, than its current incarnation.

 

By: John Nichols, The Nation, February 18, 2014

February 21, 2014 Posted by | GOP, Rand Paul | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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