Bill Lueders interviews Scott Walker, December 2012. Photo by Kate Golden/Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
I let Scott Walker get away with it. Not just this one time but as a rule. He is a master of obfuscation and I, as a member of the press, was unwilling to be too impolite.
My question to Wisconsin’s Republican governor, asked at a press conference on February 24, 2011, was about the transparently phony call he had unwittingly taken from a prankster pretending to be billionaire benefactor David Koch, during the height of protests over Walker’s plan to kneecap the state’s public employee unions.
The call by blogger Ian Murphy, an occasional contributor to The Progressive, became huge news, mainly because of Walker’s admission that “we thought about” planting troublemakers among protesters, as the caller had suggested.
Walker had also agreed with the caller’s characterization of then-Obama adviser David Axelrod as “a son of a bitch” (“No kidding, huh?” Walker had replied) and took no issue when urged to “crush these bastards,” meaning protesters. I quoted these words to the governor, asking if he was wrong to have gone along.
He ignored my question and instead gave a canned response to one I hadn’t asked, about planting troublemakers: “We acknowledged that some had brought that up but we didn’t think that was a good idea.” (Actually, he told the caller “the only problem” with this suggestion was that the resulting “ruckus” might raise the pressure on him to compromise.)
I criticized Walker for not answering my question, in a piece I wrote for Isthmus, the weekly newspaper where I worked at the time. But in the crowded conference room, with the chants of thousands of protesters audible through the closed doors, I let him spew his spin.
Perhaps I should have insisted on an answer until I was dragged from the room, shouting, like Al Pacino in And Justice For All. But I doubt even that would have knocked Walker off-message.
By the end of 2011, when I interviewed Walker (then as a reporter with the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism), he had a new take on the Koch call. “It was stupid,” he told me. “Just the fact that I was duped … that I would go off and talk about stuff like that, yeah, it was stupid.”
How smart was it for Scott Walker to portray himself as stupid? So smart that he applied the same spin to his account of the episode in his 2013 book, Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge. Here he claimed to have announced at his first press conference after news of the fake call surfaced “that it was stupid.” This is a complete fabrication; he never said any such thing, as the video of the event attests.
Walker, in his book, portrayed the episode as a gift from God, meant to teach him a lesson. He says he left the press conference in a funk, opened a devotional book, and came across a message about “the power of humility.” Relates Walker, “I looked up and said, ‘I hear you, Lord.’ ”
Let’s review: Walker takes an experience in which he appears foolish, gullible, and vile and refashions it into a political asset, a badge of honor to shore up his presidential ambitions. He is not so much a spin doctor as an alchemist, turning excrement to gold. It is a quality that greatly enhances his prospects for winning the GOP nomination, and possibly the Presidency.
Kate Golden/Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Some things that are commonly said about Scott Walker need to be said here. He comes across as a likeable guy. When you talk to him, he listens intently. He smiles and laughs at the right moments. He doesn’t lose his cool. His friends shower him with praise.
“He’s a man of faith, but he doesn’t wear it on his sleeve,” Brian Fraley, a conservative consultant who’s known Walker for many years, told me in 2011. “He’s nonjudgmental and doesn’t hold anger or grudges. He was raised right.”
Walker, forty-seven, is the son of a Baptist minister father and bookkeeper mother. He touts his frugality, symbolized by his brown-bag lunches of ham-and-cheese sandwiches. His stamina is as boundless as his ambition. He rises early and works late. An analysis of his work calendar in 2011 showed he averaged about sixty hours a week.
But mostly, Scott Walker is an amazing politician, able to deftly sidestep questions and dissemble with apparent conviction. Even some of his foes recognize he has what it takes to become President—but, arguably, nothing you’d want in a person holding that office.
Walker sees his life in grandiose terms. Consider his account of visiting Ronald Reagan’s presidential library near Los Angeles in 2012 and being presented with the Reagan family Bible. He later told an aww-ing audience, “And they brought over a pair of white gloves to me and they said, ‘No one has touched this since President Reagan. It is his mother's Bible that he took the oath of office on. Mrs. Reagan would like you to hold it and take a picture with it.’ ”
As The Progressive reported in March, the museum’s curator said in an e-mail that Walker had asked to see the Bible and was not the first to touch it since Reagan. (The library later backtracked, saying it was Walker’s staff that made the request and that a “simple misunderstanding” led to his belief that Nancy Reagan had personally granted access.)
But Walker’s magical ability to create his own reality runs deeper than that, and it is not only him driving the delusion.
Walker’s many fans in the Republican base laud him as a “straight-shooter,” even as he compiles an astonishing record of documented duplicity, including more than seventy statements deemed “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire” by PolitiFact Wisconsin, which truth-tests political pronouncements. Far fewer of his statements have been found to be true or mostly true.
Walker is hailed as a success despite his conspicuous failure to create jobs, his professed top priority. He added barely half of the 250,000 new private sector jobs he promised in his first term, during which Wisconsin ranked thirty-fifth among states in job creation and dead last in the Midwest, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics. In the first half of this year, state employers issued more layoff notices than in all of 2014.
Meanwhile, Walker’s signature job-creation agency is mired in scandal, for giving out huge sums to deadbeat companies. Senior administration staff pushed for one firm to get more moola even after learning it was in dire straits. But when Walker removed himself as chairman of the imploding agency, one of his GOP legislative allies opined: “He loves Wisconsin so much that he felt that if some of the members on the board feel like the group would be better off if he would not be the chair ... I’d say that's leadership on his part.” What a guy.
Despite such boosterism, Walker’s approval rating in Wisconsin has fallen to 41 percent, with 56 percent of respondents expressing disapproval.
Walker’s teflon is more like titanium. He has managed, through sheer political skill, to craft a public image almost completely unrelated to his public record. Still, the base wants desperately to believe. If Scott Walker the Principled, Accomplished, Straight-Shooting Reformer did not exist, it would have been necessary for conservatives to invent him.
The conference room where Walker held his almost daily press conferences in early 2011, as tens of thousands of protesters flooded the Capitol building and grounds, is also where he ultimately signed the law stripping most public employees of their union rights. On the ceiling appear the words of his predecessor Republican governor, Robert M. La Follette, the founder of this magazine: “The will of the people shall be the law of the land.”
It was here, watching Walker seemingly buck this instruction day after day, that it dawned on me: He is not like other politicians.
Other politicians, faced with the backlash he provoked, would have backed down, accepted some compromises, and declared victory. Instead, Walker held firm, despite pressure from some Republicans to moderate his stand, as Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporters Jason Stein and Patrick Marley documented in their definitive book, More Than They Bargained For.
As the failed effort to block Walker’s anti-union agenda gave way to a recall effort that drew nearly 1 million signatures from among the state’s 5.7 million residents, I set out to understand what makes Walker tick. The result was a three-part Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism series that ran in Wisconsin newspapers in January 2012.
Walker admirers said he “doesn’t try to make everybody happy” and is “not afraid of controversy.” True dat. Foes faulted his “lack of compassion” and refusal to compromise. His mother recalled how when Scott was about eight and the family was living in Plainfield, Iowa, he noticed there was no Iowa flag on the building where city meetings were held.
“He collected money and bought a flag,” Patricia Walker said. “He went around carrying a mayonnaise jar.” Seriously. This happened in Iowa, a key primary state. Is Scott Walker, who has dusted off this story for use on the campaign trail, made of luck?
But my greatest insight into Walker’s character comes from a story he told about raking leaves outside his Wauwatosa home during the thick of the recall. A passing motorist honks and gives him the finger. Moments later, two cars stop and honk. Walker turns to see both drivers giving him the thumbs up sign. Yay!
This tale, whether or not it happened, encapsulates how Walker processes praise and criticism. He’s a glutton for approval, to an alarming extent. It’s what allows him, despite his professed Boy Scout ethics and evangelical wholesomeness, to surround himself with people who break the law and yuck it up over racist e-mails. It’s why he won’t blanch at someone who calls his state’s residents “bastards” or even Rudy Giuliani’s outrageous suggestion that President Obama is not a Christian and does not love his country. (“I don’t know,” was Walker’s take on that.)
On the other side of the equation, criticism flows off Walker like water from a duck. He casually scorns his critics, as in his book’s repeated references to how bad the people protesting him smelled. He not only courts conflict but seems to find it clarifying: The more people turn against him, the surer he is that he is right. Both praise and criticism have the same effect, motivating him to stay the course.
In his book, Walker concedes that the fight over union rights “bitterly divided our state in ways no previous political debate ever had. To this day, there are people who no longer speak to each other because of it.” To him, this is an acceptable outcome.
And yet even this—Walker’s passion for pitting people against each other, as captured on the video where he tells a supporter his strategy on unions will be to “use divide and conquer”—is, in the enchanted realm in which he operates, parlayed into an asset. Check out this paean from a GQ profile last fall that dubbed Walker “America’s most divisive governor”:
“One of Walker’s most commendable traits is his intellectual honesty. The words he typically uses when referring to his political résumé are conservative, aggressive, reformer, bold, unintimidated, and the like. Never does he identify himself as a ‘unifier.’ On the contrary, his two decades in office have been marked by bitter division. The governor now presides over a mild-mannered state bearing a deep ideological gash across its midsection. Credit him: He has done what he set out to do. He pledged to be a doer, not a healer.”
Reasonable people can debate whether sowing bitter division is something to applaud, but clearly Walker is being applauded for it. His supporters love that he stood up to Democrats, to unions, to lefties. He is their bastard-crusher. The question is: Does America need a bastard-crusher-in-chief?
Kate Golden/Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
A somewhat lazy criticism embraced by the punditocracy is that Walker is a flip-flopper. He may be too slippery for this label to stick.
Take immigration. In 2013, Walker called on the nation to seek a “legal pathway” for undocumented immigrants. Early this year, he mouthed the GOP mantra in declaring his aversion to “amnesty.” PolitiFact Wisconsin cut him a break, saying the two statements were not incompatible: “Walker didn’t disavow his 2013 remarks [so] we don’t know whether he has a completely new position.”
Then Walker made it official, declaring on Fox News Sunday on March 1 that “my view has changed” on the issue, based on his conversations with governors in border states and others. He later took an even harder line, telling Glenn Beck that the “foremost” goal of U.S. immigration system should be “protecting American workers and American wages.”
PolitiFact revised its earlier assessment, rating Walker’s new position a “Full Flop,” but adding, “There may still be a bit of wiggle room in his position.”
With Scott Walker, there always is.
Take Walker’s job promise, which he made the centerpiece of his 2010 campaign. He didn’t say he’d try to add 250,000 new private sector jobs; he said “I will” find ways to do so. “Is this a campaign promise something you want to be held to?” Walker was asked at the time. His answer: “Absolutely.”
In 2014, as it became clear he would fail on this promise, Walker concocted a sound byte for why he should not he held to it: “I don’t think the people of this state … are going to penalize somebody for aiming big.”
Walker has also switched positions on Common Core academic standards, from support to opposition, and on federal ethanol mandates, from opposition to support. But he will always be able to bat away charges that he is inconsistent, and on some level he’s right. Walker is, in fact, astonishingly consistent. He invariably says what he calculates is the right political answer—which changes, depending on the circumstances.
Take his pronouncements on right-to-work—making it illegal to require union membership or dues. In May 2012, on the cusp of his triumph in the recall election, Walker said he had “no interest in pursuing right-to-work legislation in this state,” vowing to do “everything in my power to make sure” the bill did not reach his desk.
By September 2014, shortly before he cruised to re-election to a second full term, Walker’s firm opposition to right-to-work had softened to “I’m not pushing for it.” And then, in February, he pledged to sign a fast-tracked right-to-work bill.
His new spin: “I've never said that I didn't think it was a good idea.”
The bill passed, despite strong opposition from unions and even some businesses, and Walker signed it, saying doing so “sends a powerful message across the country and around the world.” Then he immediately began citing it in his fundraising appeals and stump speeches.
No one blows smoke better than Walker. In late 2013, I asked him about a GOP-backed bill to make it harder for the public to challenge public schools with “race-based nicknames, logos, mascots, and team names.” The highly contentious bill had passed the Legislature mostly along party lines after a state Senate session in which Republicans actually left the chamber while Democrats argued against it. Now it was before Walker to veto or allow.
Walker said his contacts with the state’s Native American tribes gave him “great empathy for the concerns they and others have raised about how offensive some of the nicknames and mascots are.” He added: “If it were up to me personally, in any number of these cases, I would find a way to find a more viable alternative to the name or the mascot or the nickname the school had.”
Two days later, Walker signed the bill into law. He laid the groundwork for his reasoning in our interview, when he spoke about “the free speech rights” of school districts “even if I disagree with what they’re saying or how they’re saying it.” The head of the Wisconsin ACLU called the governor’s argument “bogus.” But Walker’s spin, as usual, was masterful.
In Wisconsin, to “pull a Scott Walker” means to govern by surprise. He never said a word about his plan to smash public employees unions until after he was elected and then claimed at a press conference, in response to a question I asked, that his intentions should have been obvious: "If anyone doesn't know what’s coming, they've been asleep for the past two years.”
Walker’s thin basis for this broad claim was that he had pledged to balance the budget and “get this state working again.” Later, in talking to the fake David Koch, he used the term “dropped the bomb” to describe his eventual announcement. He knew no one had any clue what was coming.
But there is no longer any excuse for being duped by Scott Walker. We know enough about how he has governed to make reasonable predictions about what kind of President he would be.
Walker would put ideology above the public interest. In Wisconsin, he turned down $810 million in federal stimulus money for a high-speed rail link between Milwaukee and Madison, forfeiting jobs and economic benefits to other states (“Thanks a billion, cheeseheads,” chided a Los Angeles Times editorial). He is still rejecting federal health-care aid that could save the state up to $345 million over the next two years while providing coverage to 80,000 more people.
He would, like his hero Ronald Reagan, engage in fabulism, mythologizing aspects of his own life (remember Reagan’s apocryphal role in helping liberate Nazi concentration camps?) as well as the world he inhabits. He would employ brinkmanship without bluffing in imaginary battles of good versus evil.
Walker would divide the public by attacking labor and the poor. In Wisconsin, he has poured huge resources into fighting almost nonexistent food assistance fraud and turned his push to drug-test recipients of public assistance into an applause line.
He would continue to curry favor with the gun lobby, as when he ended Wisconsin’s forty-eight-hour waiting period on handgun purchases, over the strenuous objections of groups that work with victims of domestic violence, just days after the shooting deaths of nine churchgoers in the Charleston, South Carolina.
Walker would slash public funding for education, both at the K-12 and university level, and devise ways to funnel money from schools into the pockets of private providers. His most recent state budget does more of both.
He would fight sensible efforts to respond to the urgency of climate change. Walker, a signatory of a Koch Industries-backed pledge to “oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue,” has undermined the development of renewable energy (no new Wisconsin wind turbines have been added since 2012) and sued the federal government over proposed new emissions standards. Walker, observed Scientific American, has “consistently dismissed science and sided with polluters.”
Walker, who is on record as opposing abortion even in cases of rape and incest, would continue to wage war on reproductive choice. He signed bills requiring that women seeking abortions receive a medically unnecessary ultrasound and imposing a ban on abortion after twenty weeks that prioritizes the life of a fetus over the health of the mother.
Walker, as President, would deliver these goods: dishonesty, division, conflict, war, refusal to compromise, failure to achieve economic aims, and endless political posturing. As he wrote in his book, “If we can do it in Wisconsin, we can do it anywhere—even in our nation’s capital
On that, there should be no doubt.
Bill Lueders is associate editor of The Progressive.
Don't miss Bill's compilation, "10 Fun Facts About Scott Walker."
