Pierce writes: "On May 16, 2012, I wrote this about Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. At the time, Walker was facing a recall election after a year in which 100,000 people regularly camped on his front lawn."
Scott Walker. (photo: Getty)
15 July 15
In which coward Scott Walker makes his campaign for president official tonight.
n May 16, 2012, I wrote this about Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. At the time, Walker was facing a recall election after a year in which 100,000 people regularly camped on his front lawn.
I predict that he will have an "exploratory committee" set up in Iowa within the month, and he will suddenly discover a deeply held desire to spend a lot of time in places like Nashua and Manchester. Make no mistake: If he hangs on, he will be the biggest star in the Republican party. Chris Christie yells at all the right people, but has he ever faced down the existential threat that schoolteachers and snowplow drivers brought to bear on Walker? Marco Rubio? Has he withstood the wrath of organized janitors and professors of the humanities? If Walker wins in June, it wouldn't take very much effort at all for Fox News and for the vast universe of conservative sugar-daddies and their organization to decide that Walker should be the odds-on choice for 2016...It's not idle speculation to say that a lot more is riding on this than who gets to be governor of Wisconsin. This is the first real fight of the 2016 presidential election.
That all becomes official in Waukesha tonight, when Walker formally kicks off his campaign. I know some things have changed. Walker's bungled a bit on the stump, and the campaign flyer that passes for his 2015 budget has pissed off both parties in Wisconsin, a state about which he cares very little at this point. And it seems that the rise of Donald Trump -- and, to a lesser extent, the presence of Jeb (!) -- has cost Walker in the national polls and has shaved his lead a bit in Iowa, where he really must win. But he is still formidable enough, as the elite political press is already engaged in whitewashing his record for him. Here are two profiles -- an old one from the National Journal and one that appeared on Monday in Tiger Beat On The Potomac. You will note that in neither piece does the phrase "the Koch Brothers" appear, and you will also note that the penny-ante corruption that has surrounded every campaign Walker ever has run is soft-pedaled in NJ and absent completely from TBOTP. Hey, why should Chris Christie be the only Republican running for president while under criminal investigation? And Rick Perry's indicted, so he's still in the lead by that important metric. Step up your games, people.
(My favorite part of the National Journal profile is how the nearly unbroken strain of petty grifting that has sent so many of his aides to the sneezer is merely Walker's unfortunate habit of trusting the wrong people: In interviews with dozens of Wisconsin Republicans, none of whom would speak on the record when asked about Walker's weaknesses, one consistent criticism leveled at the governor is that he has not, over the years, surrounded himself with good people. That's just too, too adorable for words.)
Since his approval rating in Wisconsin is headed south, and since he can't point to having accomplished much there except winning three elections, and since the budget he just signed demolishes Wisconsin's public universities while bestowing more goodies on the extraction industries, Walker's entire campaign is going to consist of how he stood up bravely to schoolteachers and firemen and elderly grandparents back in 2011 and 2012. This man can stand up to ISIL because he was able to beat back hordes of angry guidance counselors. We are going to hear about alleged death threats -- and a lot about the one that allegedly threatened to gut his wife like a fish -- and about how he bravely went to work each day. (You should keep in mind that at least one of those stories that he peddles is pure moonshine.) And then there's that business about the "teacher of the year" that Walker uses to make the case that the wreckage he's made of public education in the state is really the construction of a palace. (Go Warriors!) Nothing the man says can be trusted. If you work for him, and you are instructed to do something ethically dubious, rest assured that you're on your own when it hits the fan. But Walker's invocation of his own courage as a campaign trope is perhaps the most fraudulent thing of all. Because, throughout his career, Scott Walker has been nothing if not a political coward.
During the protests back in 2011 and 2012, he hid in his office. A hundred thousand of his constituents were there on his lawn and he declined to hear what they had to say. He used a tunnel to get back and forth to the state capitol. He empowered the Capitol police to roust legitimate demonstrators from a building that had a proud history of open protest and open political activism. He lit the capitol's Christmas tree in the early morning hours in a closed ceremony instead of opening the proceedings to the public. In January, a Wisconsin appeals court ruled that many of the tactics that were used against the demonstrators -- and, in particular, against the Solidarity Singers -- were unconstitutional. This was what Unintimidated Scott Walker hid behind while he was dismantling progressive democracy in the state where so much of it was born and selling the state off wholesale to whoever wanted to buy a chunk. And, last week, when it was discovered that there had been slipped into the budget an item that would have gutted the state's open-records law, one of the last remaining elements of progressive government in Wisconsin that Walker hasn't shredded, the state exploded in bipartisan outrage. True to form, Walker and his people tried to fob the responsibility off on the Republicans in the legislature until Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald blew the whistle on who really was to blame. Unintimidated! Leadership!
Walker has spent his time as governor cosseted by (until very recently) a docile legislative majority and insulated by millions and millions of dollars of out-of-state money. If he were any deeper in someone's pocket, he'd be covered in lint.
In 1897, in a small town called Mineral Point in Wisconsin, the governor of the state came to give a speech about the state's economy. His name was Robert LaFollette, Sr.
These corporations, not content with taking royal tribute daily from the private citizen, shift upon him the chief support of the government. The same disregard for the rights of others, and of all obligations of the state is shown in a determined resistance to bearing a just share of the burdens of taxation. Corporations exacting large sums from the people of this state in profits, upon business transacted within its limits, either wholly escape taxation, or pay insignificantly in comparison with the average citizen . . . Owning two thirds of the personal property of the country, evading payment of taxes wherever possible, the corporations throw almost the whole burden up on the land, upon the little homes, and the personal property of the farms. This is a most serious matter, especially in the pinching times the people have suffered for the last few years. . .
It is LaFollette's legacy that Walker has made his mission to dismantle root and branch on behalf of the modern plutocrats who have funded his remarkable rise in the country's politics because, if they can do it in Wisconsin, they can do it everywhere. It continues tonight, in comfortable Waukesha, where Scott Walker will announce that he is running for president. He has spent his entire political life punching down and leaving the people who do his dirty work twisting in the wind when they get caught. Christ, what a mess this can make of democracy.
