not saying I support Christie in any way, only that his initial attraction and claim to fame was his plain-spoken in your face attitude to teachers unions. Similarly, Walkers initial attraction and claim to fame is his standing up to the teachers union and facing down a recall election.
When you go beyond Christie’s (and Walker’s? I don’t really know) “good looks”, you see the ugly things inside.
Going beyond the facade of Scott Walker’s drive against the stranglehold the teachers’ unions had on Wisconsin public schools at all levels, he has governed from center-right, making the state much more business-friendly than it had been in decades, and thus attracting a lot of industry from Illinois just to the south.
My measure of just how effective any conservative or Republican in Wisconsin may be doing, is sort of gauged by how much (or how little) they attract the negative attention of the Capital Times editorial board, based in Madison, Wisconsin.
The CapTimes (Das Kapital-zeitung) used to be an afternoon paper in Madison, but it has since become a twice-weekly insert in the Wisconsin State Journal, also in Madison. The State Journal is a weakly moderate “Republican” paper, at least as likely to endorse a liberal Democrat as a “moderate” Republican. The CapTimes was started as a Progressive paper, back in the days of Bob La Follette, and has never moderated their stand on anything regarding the defense of “state-run enterprises”. They have treated Scott Walker as they would a venomous reptile, slashing and stabbing at him at every turn, and still, they could not prevail.
Anybody the CapTime editorial board hates and berates, I am all in favor of supporting. And anybody they support, is immediately suspect, in my estimation.