Scott Walker’s 2012 recall election wasn’t the first election I ever covered, but it definitely was one of the most intense.It was what I called Wisconsin’s Long, Strange Trip, linking to our exhaustive coverage of all the crazy:
Police insurrections. Palace guards. Catch a Senator contests. Doctors behaving badly. Massive national solidarity protests which weren’t. Identity theft as political theater. Shark jumping. Legislators who run away to other states. Busbang bangs. Protesters locking their heads to metal railings and pretending to walk like Egyptians. Beer attacks. Canoe flotillas. (alleged) Judicial chokeholds. Tears falling on Che Guevara t-shirts at midnight. Endless recalls. And recounts. Communications Directors making threats. Judges who think they are legislators (well, I’ll grant you that one is common). V-K Day. Hole-y warriors. Cities namedSpeculation and Conjecture. And the funniest blog headline so far:
First They Came For The Right To Retire After 30 Years On Full Salary With COLAs
When Walker defeated the Recall late in the evening of June 5, 2012, it was Oh what a night. and the fireworks website overlay was lit.
Since then, we’ve covered the crazy of the John Doe investigations, most recently a month ago, The rotting corpse of Wisconsin’s John Doe investigation still stinks.
There is no one the left hates more than Walker. I think they hate him more than they hate Trump, because Walker not only has defeated them at the ballot box, he has transformed Wisconsin with a solid conservative agenda.
The Walker obsession will be back again, in November 2018, because Walker is running for reelection to his third term.
The Christian Science Monitor has a lengthy and excellent post not only on the coming war against Walker, but how he has transformed the state, In Wisconsin, will Walker’s reelection bid serve as conservatism’s next test?
As to the Walker transformation, the Monitor writes:
Of all the states Hillary Clinton lost, perhaps none was as shocking as Wisconsin, with its long history of progressive politics.But in retrospect, it shouldn’t have been.While Democrats still outnumber Republicans here overall, that’s not the case among elected officials. From the legislature to the governorship, from the attorney general to the secretary of natural resources, the state is almost entirely controlled by Republicans – who, for the better part of a decade, have been steadily remaking it in their image….Scott Walker won the governorship here as part of a nationwide Republican wave in 2010, and immediately set about turning the state’s finances around, eliminating a projected $3.6 billion deficit without raising taxes, by cutting funding for everything from schools to environmental research.In the process, Wisconsin, one of the first states to introduce income taxes and elect Socialist politicians, has undergone a wholesale reinvention – shifting from a model of government largesse to one of individual responsibility and accountability.
Walker, in the process, broke the back of the powerful teacher’s and other unions, and the national labor movement has no bigger target than defeating Walker.
As to the coming War on Walker the Monitor writes:
Both sides are already gearing up for a huge fight that some say could cost up to $100 million. To many, it’s a proxy war of sorts between those who hold up Walker as an icon of American conservatism and those determined to reassert liberal values in a key state in the Trump Era. Democrats will almost certainly need to win Wisconsin if they have any hope of defeating President Trump in 2020, and taking back the governorship would be a significant first step.“We hope the whole nation will pay attention to Wisconsin because we are a test case of what happens under conservative policies,” says Martha Laning, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin….
Wisconsin’s long, strange trip is not over.
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