Trolling for support from neighboring Republicans, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker this week made another of his interminable presidential campaign stops (he hasn't yet formally declared, but for months now his quest for the presidency has kept him largely outside the state). Walker crossed the Mississippi and visited Minnesota, stepping into the jaws of an economic dragon that has bitten into his favored policies and chewed them right up.
While he was among the gophers, Wisconsin's worst excuse for a badger defended his economic record by relying on one huge whopper of a lie. You want cheese on that lie, governor? Let’s review.
While Walker’s Wisconsin wallows around 40th among all states in job growth, and while according to a Pew study its middle class is shrinking faster than any other state, Minnesota is going great guns. The only apparent difference? Progressive political policies enacted by controlling Democrats in Minnesota actually work, contrary to the trickle-down, austerity-driven and wholly wishful policies of Walker, whose fellow Republicans completely control the Wisconsin legislature.
Confronted with this reality by the Minnesota locals and some Wisconsin Democrats who trailed along as a kind of informal truth squad, Walker defended himself, saying things are just plain excellent in Wisconsin. Well, that’s not even close to the truth, but that’s not the big whopper we’re talking about. The big whopper was when he told reporters this:
"You've had the advantage of other than a two-year period of having Republicans in charge of at least one part of government for some time. Before we came into office, for many years there was a Democrat governor, a Democrat assembly and a Democrat Senate." Uh, no.Actually, since 1982, Democratic governors have held Wisconsin’s top office for 12 years. Republicans in that same span occupied the governor’s office the other 21 years. Yet "for many years" Wisconsin, according to Walker, was badly ruled by an invisible, non-existent Democratic governor. Meanwhile, Republicans gained majority control in both of Wisconsin's state’s legislative houses in 1995. In 2009, fourteen years later, the Democratic Party finally regained legislative control, just in time to aid a Democratic governor in combating the enormously destructive effects of the Great Recession.
But the Democratic hegemony was short-lived. The Republicans took back control of both houses just two years later, along with Walker's election to the governorship. And the slow but marked progress the Democrats had made in climbing back out of the recession immediately went by the boards, job creation statistics falling back along with a continued slide in wages. It's been that way consistently in the ensuing four years of the Walker / GOP hegemony.
The upshot is that this guy Walker, who now presents himself as the solution to the entirety of American governance, does so by living in a bubble of patently obvious unreality. As any honest review of his record makes abundantly clear, Scott Walker is really just good at two things: Dissembling, and scapegoating.