Illustration by Sarah Rodgers/ The Daily Beast
Posted on 04/17/2015 3:42:20 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Illustration by Sarah Rodgers/ The Daily Beast
While the rest of the GOP field plays nice, Scott Walker is very much on the attack—and he’s not making many friends in the process.
In the waning days of the 2014 elections, Chris Christie arrived in Ohio to campaign for his fellow Republican John Kasich. At a rally for over 700 people in the town of Independence, the Ohio governor said of his New Jersey counterpart that, “among all the governors, he’s my best friend.” The audience let out a collective “awww.” The two were shown the next day on the front of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, shoulder-to-shoulder, beaming.
A few weeks, later, Christie was back in the Midwest, this time campaigning for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who was locked in a tight re-election battle.
This time though, the reaction was more “ooooooh,” rather than “awwww.”
“Chris is coming because he asked if he could come,” Walkers said when asked about the visit. “We weren’t going to say no. We’re not looking for surrogates.”
The Republican race for the GOP nomination is in its earliest days. And for the most part, the candidates have observed Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment: “Thou Shall Not Speak Ill of Any Republican.”
That is, except for Walker.
Four days after winning re-election last November, Walker took shots at Kasich, who had bucked conservative orthodoxy by pushing through a Medicaid expansion, citing St. Peter and his Christian faith.
“It’s probably not fair to ask the son of a preacher to use biblical metaphors. 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,” Walker said at the time. “Caring for the poor isn’t the same as taking money from the federal government to lock more people into Medicaid.”
Walker has been busy tossing these types of bricks for a while now. When asked about Jeb Bush, for example, he told a New Hampshire interviewer, “To beat a name from the past, we need a name from the future.” At CPAC, Walker told the crowd how he, “the son of a small-town preacher”, visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia as an adult because he never had a chance to go as a kid. “That was a double-knock on Bush, the son and brother of former presidents, who once chaired the National Constitution Center—down the street from Independence Hall,” The Washington Post reported.
In fact, Walker has been knocking his fellow Republicans for years. During the 2012 campaign, he regularly criticized Mitt Romney’s campaign, saying that he was too cautious and needed to show “fire in the belly.” Back in 2013, he was publicly suggesting that the next Republican nominee should be a governor before Congressman Paul Ryan, his fellow Wisconsinite and Romney’s running mate, had announced whether he would run.
As his polls showed his own re-election a toss-up, Walker and his allies went public with criticism that the Republican Governors Association was failing to send enough donations to Wisconsin—even though the RGA, which Christie chaired, had spent $8 million on his re-election, on top of nearly $9 million the group had spent two years prior to help him fend off a recall.
“[Walker] is always in campaign mode—always,” said one Ohio Republican political operative, who added that some Walker allies were reaching out to political operatives in Ohio even before the midterms were over.
An aide to another Republican governor said that, “The Republican class of governors in 2010, I always felt like we were already pretty much working together and on the same team. Walker seemed to view everybody else as a potential adversary.”
Many Republicans see Walker’s willingness to throw elbows as the natural outgrowth of someone who has been climbing up the greasy political pole since he was 22, first as an assemblyman, then as Milwaukee County executive and governor.
“He is an aggressive politician, I don’t think there is any doubt about that,” said Jeff Mayers, editor of WisPolitics.com, which covers the state’s political scene. “If there is an opening he is not afraid to go in there and fill it.”
Mayers said he noted a shift in Walker after he prevailed in his fight with the public sector unions and then became the first governor in history to survive a recall. Those battles, he said, “hardened his edge. He has always been aggressive, but I think he saw then that he could succeed without getting much more than fifty percent of the vote.”
But other Wisconsin politicos say that Walker has long operated at his own political speed.
David Riemer ran against Walker when he sought re-election as Milwaukee County executive in 2004. In that race, the Walker campaign ran ads accusing Riemer of engineering a city pension settlement that cost taxpayers millions of dollars. The pension settlement actually saved the county some $20 million, Riemer said, a fact that the city comptroller and city attorney backed up. According to a newspaper account at the time, Walker refused to pull the spots, even as “he again conceded that the ad’s assertion is not correct as stated.”
“What kind of person admits that they are wrong but won’t change what they are doing,” asked Riemer when reached by phone this week. “His main goal has been to get into higher office and then use that to get into even higher office.”
Other candidates have much been more hesitant to go on the attack. When Jeb Bush was asked, for example, about Walker’s recent flip-flops on immigration, he deflected and deflected until reporters followed him out of a campaign stop and told him that Walker had admitted changing his opinion on the issue.
“He’s changed his views on immigration, yes,” Bush, said, concurring with Walker’s own opinion.
When Marco Rubio was asked about Bush, he declined to criticize him, calling him “a very credible candidate” and praising his fundraising abilities. When Rand Paul entered the presidential race, Ted Cruz called him “a good friend” whose entry into the race will “help make us all stronger.” Mike Huckabee is on the record with high praise for Rick Perry and one-time candidate Mitt Romney.
If any of the GOP contenders seem willing to push back Walker’s comments so far, it is Kasich, who, while he may not be the son of a preacher like Walker, wanted to be a priest when he was a boy and whose parents were killed in car accident by a drunk driver in 1987. Often in profiles, Kasich is portrayed at growing most animated when he is compared to the Midwestern governor who has shot far ahead of him in early state polls.
When, for example, a New York Times reporter mentioned that many people think Walker is more conservative, Kasich, “bolted upright. ‘I think I have the right to define what conservatism is’” he roared, launching an 11 minute defense of his record. And days after Walker’s biblical comments, Kasich tore into Walker while on stage beside him at an RGA event in Washington D.C.
It remains to be seen how much all of this matters, whether Walker will have a head start in defining his rivals or whether he will be seen as a petulant elbow-thrower.
If his rivals don’t like it, though, Dave Carney, a former advisor to Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, said they should “buy a helmet.”
“With the amount of money in this primary, we aren’t going to just see elbows being thrown but knees, fists, and probably ballistic missiles at some point,” he said.
The Left loves it when they can pit their opposition against each other by making them comment on each other.
Just yesterday, a pundit noted that the GOP field hadn't fractured yet, but that it was still early.
Note from this "Daily Beast" OpEd passage: When Marco Rubio was asked about Bush, he declined to criticize him, calling him “a very credible candidate” and praising his fundraising abilities. When Rand Paul entered the presidential race, Ted Cruz called him “a good friend” whose entry into the race will “help make us all stronger.” Mike Huckabee is on the record with high praise for Rick Perry and one-time candidate Mitt Romney.
Scott Walker isn't a declared candidate so he could hardly welcome anyone but he has not been "a jerk." On the contrary, when he is asked about others in interviews he refers to them as "good guys" and as "friends."
Why does Scott Walker keep winning elections while advancing conservative policies? Because he doesn't play by the MSM rules. He will not be sidelined and defined by their gotcha questions -- won't hand them something to club him with. So they will make up their own copy.
The Washington Post played ‘gotcha’ with Scott Walker (and lost)".... Of everything they had opportunity to ask, they chose to ask Walker whether he thought Obama was a Christian. ...Walker refused to give them the answer they wanted....... And so our national press falls yet another rung in their slow, sad, descent into irrelevance. There is a silver lining though: maddening as the interview was to read, it’s abundantly clear Scott Walker will not be presshandled."
Making The News: Scott Walker And The Media"...The media isn’t interested in covering the news; they’re out to make it. Potential Republican candidates need to recognize that either have a “that’s a bullshit question”-esque answer chambered for when they come, or simply ignore them altogether.
Reporters are, at the heart of it, lazy. They get an easy narrative in their heads and try to fit the news into it. If you don’t play along, they will be forced to cover something else, like what a candidate said that matters."....
Just this week Mayor Barrett accused Walker of being responsible for gun deaths in Milwaukee.
It's an hour but by watching it ALL you will have a good idea how Walker is going to campaign and interact with the media and critics.
Walker isn't MEAN, he's just armed with the facts and he knows how to use them.
Wisconsin Gubernatorial Final Recall Debate - 5/31/2012
Wasserman Schultz added: "What Republican tea party extremists like Scott Walker are doing is they are grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back. It is not going to happen on our watch.".....
The race card is being played regularly: The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker "A journey through the poisonous, racially divided world that produced a Republican star"
Wzsherwoman-Twitz is an idiot.
This is why either Walker or Cruz must be our candidate. They are the only ones who have demonstrated an ability to take on the media and go around them to punch a message through to the People.
“He’s just another Tim Pawlenty.”
“He’s a mean, aggressive SOB jerk.”
Make up your mind. I spent three years working in Wisconsin, and such a fanciful attack had never seriously come up during that time.
While I am not well-versed on the county exec race, that was in a Dem district, and Walker won largely because there was corruption on a large scale.
This man, and the legislators who stuck by him and the judges who upheld the law were all given Total War assaults in public, frivolous lawsuits that got rubber stamped in Madison, and through the media relentlessly. After EVERY loss, the bad guys doubled down. And this article has the chutzpah to call Walker a jerk?!
This press whinge is...
Cruz yes. Walker NO.
We need honesty and forthrightness. Ted has been courageous, and he does not shrink from stating his profound disagreements with the Washingon Republican establishment.
Walker, on the other hand, will offer veiled criticism of fellow Republicans on one hand and lukewarm compliments with the other.
Walker is too tied in with Priebus and the rest of the GOPe.
By the way, the same Reagan who issued the 11th Commandment also suggested that President Ford should have worn a helmet when he played football for Michigan.
Still not against Walker. Still am for Cruz.
There you go again: veiled criticism
It is to laugh.
I hear you. However Scott Walker has shown courage under fire. He and his family have been subjected to 4 plus years of unrelenting hatred including death threats from the tolerant left. Also the Journal Sentinel and MIlwaukee DA Chisholm has been on a 4 plus year jihad to bring Scott Walker down. Ted Cruz is who I am with philosophically and is a fighter. These two should be working something out in order to prevent another McCain or Romney
When would you say it becomes “Fish or cut bait time?”
I think the voters went with Kasich the first time because he campaigned as a conservative who would give us less government from above. The second time he was elected, the dem candidate was so flawed that even the cities voted for Kasich.
Kasich is a real bright guy and runs a great campaign. But I just don't think he'd do anything to restore balance to the US and help us "little folk". He governs as a Chamber of Commerce kind of guy.
JMHO
I’m giving money to Cruz and not to any other candidate or Party at this time.
If Walker is the Republican nominee, I’ll be happy to shut up and not to vote for him or any other Republican I don’t trust.
Published March 24, 2015 | On the Record |
“....VAN SUSTEREN: What’s the difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party?
KASICH: Say that again, Greta? I’m sorry.
VAN SUSTEREN: What’s the difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party in your mind?
KASICH: Well, I think the Republican Party says that we need to have solutions that don’t involve government because they can be more specialized. Government sometimes is a blunt object. I think Democrats, not all of them, but many liberals say if we just create more government or pour more money in, we will fix things. There is a partnership between the government and private sector to address some of our problems. Frankly, what is too similar between Republicans and Democrats is they are just all fighting with one another. And they’re even fighting internally.
And, Greta, we are never as strong as a nation when we spend our time fighting. We have got to have more people who are uniters. We can fight for a while but, at the end of the day, like Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill did, you have a drink and you say we are going to have put the country first. That, to me, is most important in terms of getting America back on track again. End the polarization, end the division, and you can do that without losing your principles.”....
There is no cooperating with this Democratic Party and we’re suckers if we do. Cooperating with the Left is an invitation to eliminate the 2 party system.
Its nice to know that the folks over at the Daily Beast are so concerned about the Republican candidates. I am sure they would never try to pit conservatives against conservatives.
Scott Walker is on of my top tier of Presidental candidates...
This makes me more inclined to vote for him. We need someone with sharp elbows.
*snort*
: )
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