A Debate Confrontation Would Be Enlightening”: Walker, Kasich And The GOP’s Midwest Bracket
Republicans won’t win the presidency in 2016 without making inroads in the Midwest. Happily for the GOP, two Midwestern governors are running for their party’s nomination.
Both won reelection in 2014. The one from the state with more electoral votes won with 64 percent of the vote with wide appeal to Democrats and independents. The one from the smaller state got just 52 percent of the vote after a divisive campaign.
The former fought to have his state accept the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. He made his case on moral grounds, arguing that at heaven’s door, Saint Peter is “probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor.”
The latter adamantly opposed expanding Medicaid under the ACA, and his speeches are compendiums of every right-wing bromide party activists demand. “We need a president who — on the first day in office — will call on Congress to pass a full repeal of Obamacare,” this hopeful declared when he announced his candidacy last week. “Next, we need to rein in the federal government’s out-of-control regulations that are like a wet blanket on the economy.” And on he went.
Now: Guess which one is seen as a top contender, and which is dismissed as the darkest of dark horses? Which one was running third behind only Jeb Bush and Donald Trump in the Real Clear Politics poll average as of Sunday, and which one was in 12th place with all of 1.5 percent?
You have no doubt figured out that I’m talking about John Kasich of Ohio, who is expected to announce his candidacy on Tuesday, and Scott Walker of Wisconsin. It’s telling about the contemporary Republican party: Kasich would probably be the better bet in the general election but barely registers in the surveys, while Walker has the better chance of winning the nomination.
It’s preposterous to see Kasich as anything but a conservative. He was a drill sergeant for Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution in the 1990s. When Kasich was chairman of the House Budget Committee, “60 Minutes” produced a segment about him titled “The Axman Cometh.” As governor, Kasich pushed big tax cuts that included repealing the estate tax. (The Republican obsession with protecting large fortunes is beyond me.) He also took on the unions with what was known as Senate Bill 5 to end collective bargaining for public employees.
And it’s on the labor question that the Kasich and Walker stories diverge, in large part because of the accident of state election laws. In Ohio, the unions could put Bill 5 directly to the voters, and they repealed it in 2011 by a 61-percent-to-39-percent landslide. A chastened Kasich recalibrated.
Walker is best known for a very similar attack on public employee unions, but Wisconsin had no provision for a comparable referendum. The unions felt they had no choice but to organize a recall of Walker. Voters typically don’t take well to recalls that aren’t a reaction to outright skullduggery and corruption. Walker prevailed, and he’s been bragging about busting unions and surviving ever since. Conservatives love him for it.
Kasich, by contrast, reached out to his previous enemies. When he was endorsed by the Carpenters Union last year, Kasich said: “For too long, there’s been a disconnect between people like me and organized labor.” Walker is as likely to say something like this as he is to sing a rousing chorus of “Solidarity Forever.”
When Kasich talks about his time as governor, as he did to my Post colleague Michael Gerson last year, the things he brags about include his work on autism, mental illness and drug addiction. He notes — the Almighty again — that all his constituents “are made in the image of God.”
You can tell Kasich knows he will have to run a rebel’s campaign because he has hired rebellious Republican consultants, including John Weaver, John McCain’s campaign strategist who feuded famously with Karl Rove, and Fred Davis, who specializes in offbeat (and sometimes controversial) political commercials.
Kasich’s poll standing might well exclude him from one or more of the early debates. That would be a shame. Perhaps there should be a Midwest debate bracket. A Kasich-Walker confrontation would be especially enlightening.
“I have a little bit of a different message here,” Kasich said at a Republican Governors Association meeting last year. Indeed he does. It’s probably why he can’t win. It’s also why his party needs to listen.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 19, 2015
“An Edge Of Ruthlessness”: Scott Walker; Uncle Scrooge’s Lackey In Wisconsin
Economically speaking, all 237 GOP presidential candidates are selling the same magic beans.
Everybody knows the script by now: Tax cuts for wealthy “job creators” bring widespread prosperity; top off Scrooge McDuck’s bullion pool, and the benefits flow outward to everybody else, the economy surges, budget deficits melt away, and the song of the turtle dove will be heard in the land.
Almost needless to say, these “supply side” miracles have never actually happened in the visible world. State budget debacles in Kansas and Louisiana only signify the latest failures of right-wing dogma. Hardly anybody peddling these magic beans actually believes in them anymore. Nevertheless, feigning belief signifies tribal loyalty to the partisan Republicans who will choose the party’s nominee.
However, with everybody in the field playing “let’s pretend,” a candidate needs another way to distinguish himself. I suspect that Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, may have found it.
See, Walker won’t just put money back in “hardworking taxpayers’” pockets. Like a latter-day Richard Nixon, Walker will also stick it to people he doesn’t like: lollygagging schoolteachers, feather-bedding union members, and smug, tenured college professors who think they’re smarter than everybody else. If Walker lacks charisma, there’s an edge of ruthlessness in his otherwise bland demeanor that hits GOP primary voters right where they live.
No less an authority than Uncle Scrooge himself — i.e. David Koch of Koch Industries, who with his brother Charles has pledged to spend $900 million to elect a Republican in 2016 — told the New York Observer after a closed-door gathering at Manhattan’s Empire Club that Walker will win the nomination and crush Hillary Clinton in a general election “by a major margin.”
Viewed from a distance, the determination of prosperous, well-educated Wisconsin to convert itself into an anti-union right-to-work state like Alabama or Arkansas appears mystifying. To risk the standing of the University of Wisconsin system by abolishing academic tenure, as Walker intends, is damn near incomprehensible.
Attack one of America’s great public research universities for the sake of humiliating (Democratic-leaning) professors over nickel-and-dime budgetary issues? Do Wisconsinites have the first clue how modern economies work?
Maybe not. But Walker’s supporters definitely appear to know who their enemies are, culturally speaking. Incredulity aside, it would be a mistake not to notice the craftiness with which he’s brought off the transformation. Not to mention that Walker’s won three elections since 2010 in a “blue” state that hasn’t supported a Republican presidential nominee since Ronald Reagan.
Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes don’t mean much by themselves, but throw in Michigan and Ohio, Midwestern states also trending similarly, and you’ve definitely got something.
Act 10, the 2011 law that took away collective bargaining rights for many public employees in Wisconsin (except, at first, for police and firefighters), brought crowds of angry teachers (also mostly Democrats) to the state capitol in Madison for weeks of demonstrations. As much as MSNBC was thrilled, many Wisconsinites appear to have been irked.
In the end, the state ended up saving roughly $3 billion by shifting the funding of fringe benefits such as health insurance and pensions from employer to employee, costing the average teacher roughly 16 percent of his or her compensation. Mindful of budget shortfalls, the unions had proposed negotiations, but that wasn’t enough for Gov. Walker.
For the record, Act 10 was an almost verbatim copy of a bill promoted by the Arlington, Virginia-based American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a think-tank largely funded by, you guessed it, the Brothers Koch.
Four years ago, a documentary filmmaker caught Walker on camera telling wealthy supporters that the new law was just the beginning. “The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public-employee unions,” he said, “because you use divide-and-conquer.”
“If we can do it in Wisconsin, we can do it anywhere — even in our nation’s capital,” Walker wrote in his book, Unintimidated, notes Dan Kaufman in the New York Times Magazine. Elsewhere, Walker has boasted that as president, he could take on foreign policy challenges because, he’s said, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”
Ridiculous, of course, but it plays.
Meanwhile, rueful trade unionists who endorsed Walker in 2010 are crying the blues, because they never imagined that having vanquished the women’s union he’d come after the ironworkers and the electricians in their pickup trucks. Divided, they’ve been conquered.
So right-to-work it is: diminished salaries, job security, pensions, health and safety regulations will inevitably follow.
More bullion for Scrooge McDuck’s pool.
So now it’s the professors’ turn. Walker, a Marquette dropout, has described his new law as “Act 10 for the university.” Tenure’s a dead letter in cases of “financial emergency… requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection.”
So who gets redirected first? Left-wing culture warriors or climate scientists? Hint: Scrooge is a fierce climate-change denier.
Meanwhile, Democrats underestimate Scott Walker at considerable peril.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, June 17, 2015
“Governor Goldilocks”: Scott Walker’s Pitch, To Many Conservative Activists, Is Just Right…..For Now
There was another big GOP presidential cattle call this weekend, at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Oklahoma City. The ostensible star, because he won a straw poll among about a thousand or so of the attendees, was Dr. Ben Carson (achieving a tactical victory over the other candidate who made a visible effort to win the thing, Ted Cruz, handicapped by being stuck in Washington along with Rand Paul for NSA reform/Patriot Act votes).
But by most accounts the candidate who got the most from the event for the least effort was Scott Walker, who finished second in the straw poll without lifting a finger. More to the point, Walker was buzzworthy, per the Washington Examiner‘s Timothy Carney:
1) His strong second-place finish in the straw poll was impressive because he was the only candidate to post double digits without an organized straw poll effort.
2) Pacing the stage, jacketless, in a blue shirt, sleeves rolled up, Walker’s speaking style was easy and comfortable. Some attendees found him too low-key. Most saw his style as confident and assuring
3) What recommends Walker most to Republican voters is his successful battles with powerful labor unions, the media, and the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Walker made these battles — including his recall election victory — the focus of his talk.
4) Walker was able to tick off a long list of legislative accomplishments, touching on all the major conservative policy priorities: cutting spending, cutting taxes, bringing the bureaucracy to heel, defunding Planned Parenthood, expanding gun rights, passing right to work, requiring photo ID for voters and so on.
5) Walker cast his political and policy wins as populist victories over powerful insiders. He described his fight against the government unions as “taking power out of the hands the big-government special interests” and putting it in the hands of ordinary people.
Yeah, well, ordinary people like his friends the Koch Brothers. But here’s how Carney describes Walker’s clincher contrasting his record with that of his GOP rivals:
Walker closed with a pointed critique of his rivals. He said many Washington politicians are good at picking fights, but they don’t win — a clear reference to Cruz’s failed Obamacare shutdown, and Marco Rubio and Paul’s lack of a record. Alternatively, many Republicans, Walker said, are good at winning races, but they never fight for important, tough things — presumably referring to Christie and Bush.
In other words, Walker is continuing to offer an electability pitch based on overwhelming his liberal opponents–at both the ballot box and in the legislature–rather than reasoning with them or cutting deals. Cruz can rage; Paul can make outlandish outreach promises; and Bush and Rubio can offer to sweet-talk Democrats or seduce swing voters. Walker’s pitch, to many conservative activists, is just right.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, May 25, 2015
“An Ad-Hoc Fallback Position”: Immigration; The Only Time The GOP Cares About The Working Class
Last Monday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s Republican governor and a presumed GOP presidential hopeful, kicked the hornets’ nest that is the immigration debate.
He told Glenn Beck’s radio show that America needs to “make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, protecting American workers and American wages,” and that this concern should be “at the forefront of our discussion going forward.”
Walker’s comments are significant because they’re something of a reversal for him, but also because they break with the “legal-immigration-good, illegal-immigration-bad” orthodoxy of the GOP establishment.
Lumping both forms of immigration together as equally questionable makes sense from an economic perspective; market forces don’t care about legal formalities like borders. But it takes near-cosmic chutzpah for Walker to say our first concern should be American wages and workers, given that pretty much every policy move by the Republican Party and the conservative movement seems designed to keep lower class incomes as depressed as possible.
By now, the battle lines on this issue should be familiar. First you get the argument from the center left and right that whenever immigrants, documented or undocumented, come to America, they bring added demand to the economy: They gotta eat, drink, put a roof over their head, get health care, and entertain themselves, just like everyone else. Even as they take on work, they increase the economy’s overall ability to create jobs. So claiming immigrants “take jobs from Americans” is wrong.
This is the view of the economics of immigration from 30,000 feet, and it’s right as far as it goes.
But closer to the ground, the terrain becomes more complicated. The U.S. economy isn’t one big market. It’s actually lots of overlapping markets, with different types of businesses and workers participating in each. And sometimes movement between these markets is easy for those workers, and sometimes it isn’t. So it’s possible for big influxes of low-skill, low-education immigrants to decrease wages and jobs for low-skill, low-education natives. You get more workers in particular markets, so wages go down. Meanwhile, the wealth created by those new entrants flows to other parts of the economy, so jobs in that market don’t increase all that much. And the native workers in those markets can’t easily hop to other markets, so they’re stuck with depressed wages and fewer jobs.
You can click through the links for a fuller examination of this phenomenon. But the short version is that it’s possible the second story is true, even if concrete evidence has been hard to tease out.
What this all boils down to is a problem of bargaining power. If you increase the number of workers in a market, but don’t increase the number of jobs proportionally, employers can play workers off one another, driving wages down. That’s why some Republicans like Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions — whom Walker is apparently taking his cues from — are opposed to increasing legal avenues for high-skill immigrants. Tech workers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals don’t like seeing their incomes reduced either.
But immigration policy doesn’t occur in a vacuum. There are lots of ways we could increase worker bargaining power, especially for low-skill Americans, while still taking in many more immigrants than we do now.
We could break up the work the economy already provides into smaller chunks that can be distributed to more workers, through things like national paid leave mandates, paid vacation, strengthened overtime laws, and a shortened work week. We could get the Federal Reserve to run much more aggressive monetary stimulus, or even fundamentally reform the way that policy operates, so that the boost the Fed pumps into the economy goes straight to the Americans hardest hit by bad economic times. We could ramp up government stimulus spending, the generosity of the social safety net, or both, which would also create jobs. And we could change laws to make unions more powerful, so they’d be ready and waiting to take on new immigrants as members and fight on their behalf.
Full employment should really be the top line goal, and it’s what the first four of those five policy options aim at. (With an expanded social safety net and stronger unions also acting as a backstop for wages when full employment isn’t reached.) When there are more workers than jobs available, bargaining power is going to go down across the economy. But at full employment, the first story about immigration — about how it just grows the size of the pie, and everyone benefits — is most likely to be true, because employers aren’t able to play the new workers off the old ones.
Fundamentally, the U.S. economy faces a two-stage problem: First, the share of national income going to labor is getting smaller, as more and more is gobbled up by people who own capital. Second, of that share going to labor, a bigger portion is going to elite workers, leaving the working class with less and less. That’s the context in which the question of immigration has to be understood. Full employment and increased bargaining power for all workers would solve both these problems — equalizing shares between workers, and getting them a bigger slice of the pie vis-a-vis capital.
In a sane and decent world, we would open our borders as wide as humanly possible. Because letting other people immigrate to America makes their lives better; much better in many cases. And we would rely on all those other policy levers to keep the wages and jobs of immigrant and native-born Americans alike healthy and robust.
The perversity of the whole immigration discussion amongst conservatives and Republicans is that they’ve already rejected all these other options for increasing worker bargaining power. That the elite GOP establishment still wants more immigration even after that rejection should make their goal plain as day: keep capital’s share as high as possible!
But for anyone on the right that still wants to claim they give a damn about working class Americans, trying to limit immigration is a kind of ad-hoc fallback position to keep wages up.
By: Jeff Spross, The Week, April 28, 2015
“Demand A Higher Wage, People!”: The Status Quo Of Wage Injustice And Greed-Driven Inequality Relies On Our Complicity
Chasten Florence was on his lunch break when he decided to join a protest outside a McDonald’s in New York City on Wednesday. To be honest, Florence wasn’t really sure what he was helping protest. But as he lay his body down on the sidewalk at a die-in of low-wage workers demanding a $15 wage and a union, Florence simply explained, “These are my people.”
Didn’t Florence need to eat lunch? Sure, but he could spare five minutes. Working concrete on construction jobs, Florence earns more than $15 an hour and thinks everyone else should, too. “I don’t know how you can raise a household on less,” said Florence. And he’s right. You can’t.
On April 15, workers from McDonald’s, Walmart and other low-wage employers were joined by college students and adjunct faculty, domestic workers and leaders from the Black Lives Matter movement. In all, tens of thousands participated in protests in 200 cities across the United States to demand a $15 minimum wage and a union. The #FightFor15 is unconventional in that, instead of focusing on Congress to raise wages, workers and advocates are pressuring employers and also the general public—trying to foster awareness about dismal wages and working conditions and create a groundswell of support for change.
The nationwide protests were organized on Tax Day, April 15, because 4/15 is a short-hand for the campaign’s wage demands. But it was also meant to highlight the fact that the poverty wages paid by fast food restaurants and employers are so low that many low-wage workers are forced to rely on public assistance benefits to get by. In fact, almost three-quarters of Americans who depend on public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid are members of a family headed by someone who has a job.
In other words, in America today, many people are poor not because they don’t have a job but because they have a job that pays poverty wages. If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as overall productivity since 1968, then the minimum wage would now be $18.50 an hour—instead of $7.25, the current federal minimum wage. In fact, adjusted for inflation, the federal minimum wage has actually dropped. In 2014 dollars, the 1968 minimum wage was equal to $9.54 an hour.
The stagnation of working class wages cannot be explained by a lack of hard work or skills. Low-wage workers have more education than their 1968 counterparts—and yet are still being paid less. And as this graph from Mother Jones shows, while worker productivity has steadily risen over the past several decades, overall wages have not grown at the same pace—even though the income of the top 1% has spiked dramatically.
As taxpayers, we foot the bill for greedy employers who pay poverty wages. For instance, because McDonald’s won’t pay its workers a living wage, taxpayers are paying $1.2 billion per year in food stamp costs and other public assistance just for McDonald’s workers alone. That’s like our tax dollars subsidizing McDonald’s profit—and greed.
Recently McDonald’s announced it would raise wages by $1.00 an hour for workers in its corporate-owned stores, which since most McDonald’s are franchise operations, means the raise will affect less than 10 percent of McDonald’s workers. Beth Schaffer, who works at a McDonald’s in Charleston, South Carolina, and came to New York for the protests, shrugged her shoulders about the raise. After all, every single McDonald’s in South Carolina is a franchise not covered by the $1.00-an-hour increase. “My customers show me more respect than my employer,” said Schaffer. As her tone made clear, that’s not saying much.
As I left the Fight for $15 protest, one of several staged throughout New York on Wednesday, Chasten Florence walked one way back to his construction site and I walked the other way. I passed the tony restaurants of New York’s Upper West Side, on what seemed like one of the first real days of spring, men and women in business suits sitting at tables on the sidewalk, taking in the sun. Most were probably spending more on lunch than the workers at the protest earn in a week. Myself included.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, with wealth and success and enjoying what comes with it. The question is, are we paying enough attention to the costs? I wondered whether the people eating their expensive lunches knew that the bussers taking their plates can barely afford to feed their own families, that the workers at their children’s daycares don’t have health insurance, that the cheap stuff they order conveniently on Amazon.com is definitely comes at a high cost to the workers who make and ship those goods.
The construction worker who joined the Fight for $15 protest didn’t know that much about the issues or the protest demands, either. But he was going out of his way to learn, and to be supportive. “These are my people,” he said. Yes, they’re all of our people. It’s time we all wake up, pay attention, be angry and stand with our fellow human beings to do something about it. The status quo of wage injustice and greed-driven inequality relies on our complicity, whether by silence or ignorance. But it cannot survive if we all stand up together and fight.
By: Sally Kohn,
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