Posted on 04/16/2014 8:00:32 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
Literally minutes after Gov. Scott Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch officially announced their re-election campaign Tuesday, a Hillary Clinton front group rolled out its attack machine against the Republican governor and potential 2016 presidential hopeful.
American Bridge, backed by big-money liberal donor George Soros, “welcomed” Walker and his “failed job creation promise to the Wisconsin governor’s race.”
The liberal “research and communications organization committed to holding Republicans accountable for their words” by employing liberal spin, made its first sortie an all-out assault on Walker’s jobs record, criticizing the governor’s failure to date to hit his ambitious pledge that the state would create 250,000 jobs by the end of his first term.
Walker’s official campaign launch made one thing very clear: The political war is back on in Wisconsin.
And liberals again are ready to pump in big money and national resources to take down the man who reformed Wisconsin’s public-sector collective bargaining system, among one of the most active public policy reform agendas since the progressives “Fighting” Bob LaFollette.
Walker is fighting back, answering the question Ronald Reagan asked an economically fatigued nation in 1980.
“We’re better off than we were four years ago, but there is more work to be done,” the governor said in his announcement. The tax-cutting governor chose Tax Day to officially jump into the race.
“In the past, April 15 was a day we didn’t have much to look forward to in Wisconsin. But this year, we have hope for the future. This is a new beginning for our state. Wisconsin is back on, and our best days are ahead of us,” Walker said.
In three-plus years, the iconoclastic governor has not presided over a state economy that has created 250,000 jobs. He has, to date, missed his mark.
But the incumbent brings to his re-election bid an impressive resume of accomplishments, including an economy that has added more than 100,000 jobs after the worst recession to Wisconsin and the nation in a generation. With that, Walker can — and does — point to the addition of thousands of new businesses starting up on his watch.
The reason for that business boom, conservatives assert, is Walker and the Republican majority pushing for regulatory and tax reforms that have changed the attitude of business, long burdened with some of the highest tax rates and regulations in the country.
While his opponents have protested his state budget reforms, Walker can lay claim to filling a massive $3.6-billion budget hole that he and his fellow Republicans inherited from the man he replaced, Democrat Gov. Jim Doyle and the ruling Democrats in the state Legislature. Wisconsin lost more than 130,000 jobs in the Great Recession, on Doyle’s watch, and thousands of businesses shut down.
Walker and his supporters have said Wisconsin wasn’t going to dig itself out of the deep economic hole overnight, just as President Obama and his backers have said of the slowly recovering U.S. economy. But to Walker’s vitriol-spewing opponents, there’s a difference between Wisconsin’s plodding recovery and the nation’s oft-anemic growth.
Look for that double-standard to be richly applied by the left in the months ahead.
But it is hard to dispute the roaring return of strong state revenue at the state level. Walker and the Republicans have presided over a budget running $900 million ahead of expectation, and he has signed GOP-led legislation amounting to some $2 billion in tax relief, including $750 million in income tax cuts and $500 million in property tax reductions.
“Since taking office, we made the tough decisions past leaders chose to ignore, and they are paying off for the people of Wisconsin,” Walker said in his campaign announcement.
But the left, which paints Walker’s signature Act 10 as gutting Wisconsin’s government collective-bargaining system, plans to put a lot of skin in this game.
Michael Podhorzer, political director of the AFL-CIO, in February said the nation’s labor unions look to spend at least $300 million going after Republicans in this fall’s elections.
Much of that spending is expected to be dropped on four industrial battlegrounds — Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, traditional union strongholds. Big labor also wants Florida.
Of greater interest, perhaps, are states such as Wisconsin, which features a very viable and, to the left, threatening presidential candidate in Walker.
“It’s about survival,” Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and chairman of the AFL-CIO’s political committee, told the New York Times.
“What’s happened didn’t just hurt public-sector unions, it hurt the entire labor movement,” Saunders said of Walker’s law that rolled back the power of public-sector unions in Wisconsin.
But Walker and his lieutenant governor are battle-tested. They survived a furious recall challenge in 2012, led by big labor and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, with a lot of national money in the mix.
Walker’s main challenger is Madison millionaire liberal Mary Burke, basically anointed by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Burke, a former Trek Bicycle executive, secretary of commerce under Doyle and a member of the ultra-liberal Madison Metropolitan School Board, has plenty of campaign vulnerabilities. Her biggest problem now is that relatively few voters know who she is.
Wisconsin is well-acquainted with Walker. Voters, for the most part, either love him or hate him.
The latest Marquette University Law School poll showed Walker’s favorability rating remained at 49 percent, and he was seen as unfavorable by 47 percent of respondents.
Not so much for Burke, who was viewed favorably by 19 percent and unfavorably by 22 percent of the poll’s respondents. The majority of those polled have little or no idea who the Democrat candidate is.
Burke was running 7 percentage points behind Walker in the Marquette poll, conducted in March. The poll of 801 Wisconsin registered voters was conducted by cell phone and landline March 20-23, and it had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.
Burke lags farther behind in a recent St. Norbert College poll, which found Walker up 55 percent to Burke’s 40 percent. The poll, of 400 Wisconsin residents, had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent.
John McAdams, political science professor at Marquette University, said Burke needs to get known fast or she could face an exodus of money.
“That was the complaint from Barrett’s people, that the national people weren’t backing him,” McAdams said of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, who ran unsuccessfully against Walker in the recall campaign. “What they were doing was looking at their internal polls and the public polls and saying, ‘This is not a good use of our money.’”
You can count on Walker’s backers introducing Burke and her political record to Wisconsin voters in the coming months, and she will be connected to Doyle’s troubles.
“Four years ago, the debate in Madison revolved around the size of tax increases, but now we’re discussing tax cuts and government reform,” said Brad Courtney, chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, in a statement Tuesday. “We’ve come a long way, but we still have so much more to do.”
I forgot the link: http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/03/video-scott-walker-supports-path-to-citizenship-for-illegals/
One of the comments asks if Walker says what people are trying to assert he is.
If Cruz gets in, everyone else can go home or get on Cruz control.
I think if Cruz get in Sarah Palin will take a pass since her priorities are the same as Cruz’. A Cruz-Palin ticket would result in a landslide win. Neither of them are afraid of going after Hillary.
Conservatives? where are they?
Once again, giving citizenship to illegals is the ultimate amnesty.
But even more than that Walker says he wants however many people from Mexico who want to immigrate here to be allowed to do so legally. He’s an open borders guy, as long as the immigrants walk through his wide open front door.
That is the absolute death of this country.
I hear ya!
Ted Cruz actually authored a bill allowing temporary residency first and then permanent residency.
That is legalization.
Yeah, Cruz isn’t great on illegal immigration.
But the other prospective candidates—especially with Walker’s wide open front door border—are even worse.
Thanks for your post. I will have to study all of them.
If they exist, pictures need to be posted again and again of the damage the union thugs did to the State House protesting Walker’s take-down of the unions. The damage from the duct-taped signs is what I’m thinking about.
“Scott Walker advocating path to citizenship? Not so fast
During the Politico interview, Walker complained about a broken immigration system, and said the U.S. should reduce the barriers to legal entry for people who want to come here and “live the American Dream,” saying, “we should be welcoming those people with open arms.”
Then Walker was asked if he supports a bipartisan approach to give illegal immigrants now living here a kind of provisional status – not necessarily citizenship — to remain in the country.
“I don’t know if that’s exactly (the answer) but there’s got to be some way,” said Walker. “For people waiting to come in our country legally, we’ve got make sure that they get in first, that they get their status first, because they’ve been following the rules, and playing by the rules. After that, if there is a way to set up a process so that you enable people to come in and have a legal pathway to do that, that’s something we’ve got to embrace. Whether or not it’s that specific bill or not, I think there’s some nuances to that.”
While Walker talked about a “legal pathway,” he said nothing about “citizenship.” (Some Republicans support a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants but not citizenship.)
Walker also argued that there was too much focus on resolving the status of illegal immigrants and not enough on fixing the legal immigration process to allow more people into the U.S., especially to meet the demand for high-skilled and other workers.You can read a transcription of the relevant parts of the interview here.
Because of the way his comments were reported, Walker was asked again about the citizenship issue in an interview two days later with the Journal Sentinel.
“For the undocumented 12 million that are already here, have you said that you’d support finding a way for them to become citizens?” the governor was asked.
“I haven’t gone into the details of that. What I said in that (Politico) interview and I’ve said in others is we’ve got to balance that, and find a way to fix — my focus is less on a way of dealing with those here — that doesn’t mean it’s not a part of it —but my focus has been on, first and foremost, we’ve got to fix what I think is a broken immigration system just for those that are seeking legal passage.”
Walker was asked: “But you haven’t taken a position on whether the people that are already here should have a conditional pathway to citizenship?”
His answer:
“No. Again I think long term that’s going to be a part of it but I think there are too many people here in Washington who are leapfrogging over everything else and trying to get to that right away. We fundamentally don’t have a system ... to legitimately deal with people who want to come — in fact, I think you would greatly reduce if not outright eliminate the number of people who come in illegally if we had an effective, time-effective particularly, system of dealing with legal immigration.”
Read more from Journal Sentinel: http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/193843901.html#ixzz2zL7YkYd3
Follow us: @JournalSentinel on Twitter
But he says that’s part of the long-term solution, only that he hasn’t gone into the details of it.
Also, he has said he wants everyone who wants to come here, whether they are from Mexico or Germany or wherever, to be able to come here legally. Additionally, as he has said here, if they come and behave themselves, there should be a way for them to gain citizenship as well.
That means, he’s for allowing essentially everyone on the planet to move to the US and if they stay out of legal trouble then become citizens—just as he wants the illegals already here to be able to do.
Please take this in the way that it is said, you are a troll or purposefully mistaking what he said. Either way you are someone I’m going to watch, and have others do the same..
The immigration issue isn’t a minor problem and won’t be solved in an interview, and you know it..
I am neither a troll nor purposely or inadvertently misstating what he said. If I had, you would instead be pointing out where I have misstated his stated position.
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