How Scott Walker Keeps Winning: An Interview by Joseph Rago (A Major Lesson for the GOP and the RINOS)
http://online.wsj.com/articles/joseph-rago-how-scott-walker-keeps-winning-1415405344?mod=hp_opinion
Wisconsin governor Scott Walker on his brawls with public unions and the key to conservative governance in a state with populist liberal traditions.
‘Wow. First off, I want to thank God for his abundant grace and mercy. Win or lose, it is more than sufficient for each and every one of us,” Scott Walker said, taking the podium on Tuesday night at the Wisconsin state fair grounds after being re-re-elected for governor. It was a curious register, given that Mr. Walker’s religious faith, even though his father was a pastor, has never seemed central to his economic and political identity. But then maybe the intervention of a higher power is as good an explanation as any for the commanding victory that unions and liberals went all-out to prevent.
Mr. Walker suggests a more secular reading: “People actually saw, they saw with their own eyes,” he says. “Once they got past the myths and the half-truths and sometimes the outright falsehoods, they could see in their own families, in their own homes, they could see in their own workplaces and towns and cities and villages and counties that life was better.” In a word, despite the political convulsions of his first term, his reforms worked, and voters rewarded him for the results.
In a wide-ranging phone interview from Madison on Thursday night, Mr. Walker sounded exhausted but joyful after his third statewide election since 2010. The governor laid out how he thinks center-right reformers can succeed among Democratic-leaning bodies politic—Wisconsin hasn’t broken for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984, when he was in high school—and why he doesn’t think the same trend is inexorable in like-minded states in 2016.
The race Mr. Walker won this week was close-run and became a referendum on his first term. His opponent, Mary Burke, a former executive of Trek Bicycle Corp., ran as a not-Walker. The governor calls her “almost the bionic candidate,” in the sense that her intelligence, business experience, gender and noncommittal up-the-middle platform were focus-group-tested as the perfect foil for his agenda and his track record of the past few years.
In June 2012, Mr. Walker became the only governor in American history to survive a recall election—initiated to reverse his enormously controversial 2011 budget-repair bill, Act 10, which limited the collective-bargaining powers of public-employee unions, as well as automatic dues collection and health and pension benefits. Big Labor and national Democrats returned this year to avenge their loss, though the irony was that Ms. Burke declined to relitigate Act 10 or even take a coherent position. The election turned on competing accounts of economic progress under Mr. Walker, such as job creation and rising household incomes.
Surveys indicated that Mr. Walker and Ms. Burke were statistically tied through the summer and most of the fall, though Mr. Walker observes that “those polls consistently showed that the opinion of the state in terms of right-track/wrong-track was still very positive. A solid majority felt the state was headed in the right direction.” He was confident that he would receive those votes in the end.
Act 10’s collective-bargaining reforms allowed the state to balance the budget, and counties to restrain or even reduce the property taxes that had increased 27% over the decade before Mr. Walker. But the legislation also improved Wisconsin in ways that “wouldn’t seem quite as obvious,” he says. By eliminating tenure and seniority work rules, “we can hire and fire based on merit and pay based on performance, we can put the best and brightest in our classrooms—and voilà, graduation rates are up. ACT scores are up, now second best in the country. Third-grade reading scores are up. The left certainly doesn’t acknowledge this: Our schools are better.”
Mr. Walker also believes that the national intervention on Ms. Burke’s behalf—including visits from President Obama , first lady Michelle Obama (twice), Bill Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka —backfired. “Our opponent, you know she’s aligned with these Washington-based special interests, particularly the unions. I’m aligned with the hardworking taxpayers of Wisconsin,” he says, recapping his closing argument.
In an anti-Washington year, that may have made the difference: He won independents by a 10-point margin as some 56.9% of registered voters came to the polls this year, the second-highest share in the nation.
Mr. Walker also inspires acute loyalty among Wisconsin Republicans, and he has built a remarkably durable political coalition to overcome the state’s Democratic tilt. He won 52.2% of the vote in 2010, 53.1% in 2012, and won 52.3% to 46.6% against Ms. Burke. He prevailed in 59 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties four years ago, 60 two years ago and 56 this year, winning the same 54 all three times. Though you’d never know it from the media coverage, Mr. Walker’s support runs deeper than the antipathy of his opposition.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) attributes this loyalty in large part to the ruction over Act 10, a period that he recalls as “unbelievably vicious.” Mr. Walker notes that thousands of state protesters occupied not merely the capitol building in Madison but picketed his private family residence in Wauwatosa.
Yet Mr. Walker says that as he commuted the 75 miles on I-94 during that time, “handmade, hand-painted signs started to pop up out in the fields, these big four by eights, that would say ‘We Stand With Walker.’ You’d see one, and the next day you’d start to see some more, and so on, and eventually you’d see them not just in the fields, but then in the cities and little towns. It was a visible reminder of how intense people felt.”
Mr. Walker returns for his second term with larger Republican legislative majorities in the assembly and senate. “I said throughout the campaign that anyone who wants a job should be able to find a job,” and he will outline a pragmatic agenda to lower the cost of doing business, reduce the tax burden and promote “learn more to earn more” skill training. Mr. Walker pushed through both corporate and individual tax cuts last year, amounting to about $1.9 billion. Yet Wisconsin’s top personal income-tax rate is the 10th highest among the states and per capita state and local tax collections rank 12th, according to the Tax Foundation.
Republicans are often instructed that tax cutting, especially the rates on marginal income, is tapped out as a political issue, and that the GOP must find other methods to appeal to the middle class. “Boy, I don’t buy that at all,” Mr. Walker says. “Like the Midwest I come from, we respect quality in government, but we want a good deal for it.”
Mr. Walker has also been one of the few GOP governors to manage ObamaCare’s take-the-money-and-run Medicaid bribe competently. His Democratic predecessor opened the program to twice the poverty line, but lacked the funding to cover the flood of new patients. Mr. Walker reduced eligibility to 100% of poverty but also took everyone off the wait list. “Silly me, I actually thought Medicaid was meant for poor people,” he says.
Another politician from the Great Lakes region often says that when you die, St. Peter won’t ask you what you did to keep government small but he will ask you what you did to help the poor. “It’s probably not fair to ask the son of a preacher to use biblical metaphors,” Mr. Walker says. “My reading of the Bible finds plenty of reminders that it’s better to teach someone to fish than to give them fish if they’re able. . . . Caring for the poor isn’t the same as taking money from the federal government to lock more people into Medicaid.”
Mr. Walker’s advice to the new GOP majority in Washington is to craft its own “positive reform agenda” that gives voters a reason to choose Republicans, rather than merely vote against the status quo. Regardless of what President Obama will support, Mr. Walker urges national Republicans “to set the table for what I hope will be a conservative presidential candidate who can finish the connection.”
There is no point now in asking Mr. Walker if he will try to be that candidate, but he has obviously devoted some thought to the matter. He liked Mitt Romney personally and thought he would make a good president, but thinks he erred by making the 2012 election a referendum on Mr. Obama. Mr. Walker says he “pleaded” with the campaign to use Wisconsin as an example of how economies can improve with the right policies, instead of “coming into states like mine and telling voters how awful it was” and placing the “blame on President Obama, when I just spent $37 million in the recall election telling people how much better things were.”
Mr. Walker adds: “Not just here in Wisconsin, I think any number of us as governors can offer something to point to—‘Hey, this isn’t just talk, this isn’t just theory, look what we did to transform our states.’ Focus on the R, for Reformer, not just for Republican.”
Neither does Mr. Walker see the larger, younger, more diverse electorate of presidential elections as a lock for Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I think we can make inroads against that old, tired, worn-out, top-down, government-knows-best approach, because people in these battleground states want to be inspired,” he says. He points to an exit poll showing that 18- to 24-year-olds broke for Ms. Burke only 49% to 48%, which he attributes in part to his tuition freeze for the University of Wisconsin campuses.
In his victory speech, Mr. Walker went on to develop a “Wisconsin versus Washington” theme that notably differed in tone from his previous speeches and could be a prelude to a White House run. As a conviction politician with a substantive record and a chain of victories, Mr. Walker could be a formidable candidate. He has “put the state back on the right path and shows what we need to do in America,” says Sen. Johnson.
The challenge for Mr. Walker as a potential candidate and president would be broadening his appeal beyond regionalism, and persuading independents that he is not the radical monster of liberal caricature. Achieving the second goal, but maybe not the first, would be made easier because he is decent and affable in that familiar Midwestern manner.
But Mr. Walker is also notably redefining the progressive political tradition in Wisconsin, which was the birthplace of collective bargaining for public unions, in 1959. The progressivism that stretches from Robert La Follette to Sen. Tammy Baldwin has always emphasized protecting the common man from special interests, usually meaning business. Mr. Walker’s pitch is that government excess has emerged as the new threat. Though La Follette’s politics were “the polar opposite end” of Mr. Walker’s, the governor says that he belongs to “that proud tradition of people who are aggressive and not afraid to take on big challenges. I actually think I’m a progressive too, I think I fit in that tradition.”
In any case, Mr. Walker says he jokes with his wife that he is “kind of on a two-year campaign cycle”—he won a special election for Milwaukee county executive in 2002, the regular election in 2004, contemplated a gubernatorial run in 2006, and then the latest string of 2010, 2012 and this year. It may be that, in 2016, he’s due.
Mr. Rago is a member of the Journal editorial board.
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