◼ In 2011, tens of thousands of government employees and others, enraged by Gov. Scott Walker’s determination to break the ruinously expensive and paralyzing grip that government workers’ unions had on Wisconsin, took over the capitol building in Madison. - George Will/Human Events
With chanting, screaming and singing supplemented by bullhorns, bagpipes and drum circles, their cacophony shook the building that the squalor of their occupation made malodorous. They spat on Republican legislators and urinated on Walker’s office door. They shouted, “This is what democracy looks like!”
...Having become the first U.S. governor to survive a recall election, he is today serene as America’s first governor to be, in effect, elected twice to a first term. When he seeks a second term, his probable opponent will be a wealthy opponent who says her only promise is to not make promises. This is her attempt to cope with an awkward fact: She will either infuriate her party’s liberal base or alarm a majority of voters by promising either to preserve or repeal Act 10.
Walker is politely scathing — a neat trick — of Mitt Romney’s campaign, especially of Romney’s statement that “I’m not concerned about the very poor” because “we have a very ample safety net.” The imperative, Walker says, is to “help them escape the safety net.”
“Outside the Washington beltway,” he says pointedly, “big-government liberals are on the ropes.” No incumbent Republican governor has lost a general election since 2007. Since 2008, the number of Republican governors has increased from 21 to 30, just four short of the party’s all-time high reached in the 1920s. He thinks Republican governors are in tune with the nation. If re-elected, he probably will test that theory.
