After a particularly terrible election, it’s important for Democrats and others who oppose the policies of Republican Gov. Scott Walker to keep focused on the larger picture.
Democratic challenger Mary Burke ran neck-and-neck with Walker until the final days of the campaign despite all the advantages Republicans have turning out voters in off-year, lower-turnout, non-Presidential elections.
Only the final vote counts. But the last thing progressives should do is start abandoning their own agenda. Not only are they right, but history ultimately is on their side.
First, though, let’s dismiss all the excuses. That Burke was a flawed candidate, a non-politician who’d never run a statewide campaign. And that she was victimized by unfair press coverage and Republican smears.
Yes, Burke was a non-politician. That was her strength. Politicians aren’t very popular, you know, and Walker has never been anything else.
Burke focused relentlessly on the issues that matter most to voters and the future of Wisconsin—jobs and the economy—which also happened to be Walker’s biggest failures.
Along the way, she closed the gap between Democratic and Republican fundraising and turned out the most Democratic voters in midterm state election history.
And, yes, media coverage was poor, particularly in the Milwaukee area. But so what? As an outside takeover of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel continues, coverage parroting right-wing websites and tossing around false charges of plagiarism will only get worse and more irrelevant.
The absurd last-minute Republican fabrication—Burke was fired by the highly successful family company she helped build—just confirmed how frightened Republicans were of her candidacy.
So if none of those complaints matter, how did we end up stuck with Walker as governor again? And what’s this big picture that could possibly promise a better future?
Walker’s personally popular, but his policies aren’t
Walker’s always gotten away with putting a benign, Eagle Scout face on really bad policies. But while many ordinary voters find Walker likable, they aren’t particularly attracted to his extreme politics.
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Walker may long for the cruel sweatshops of the 1800s when there was no minimum wage, but most Wisconsinites support raising the minimum wage at least high enough to get full-time workers out of poverty.
They also think Walker is crazy for refusing hundreds of millions of federal dollars to expand health care for people who need it. They know too many people in Walker’s Wisconsin who’ve lost their jobs and health coverage and know they could be next.
People love tax cuts, but they’re still flat broke
Democrats still haven’t found a way to adequately explain to voters just how fraudulent Walker’s tax cuts are.
Across-the-board tax cuts sound like money is being showered on everybody in Wisconsin. Except that ordinary working people never even notice the few hundred dollars they got. It’s not even enough to pay for the car repairs caused by all those potholes in their streets.
Meanwhile, Scrooge McDuck and other wealthy Republican campaign contributors are filling their swimming pools with their tax cuts.
You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Walker may sincerely believe right-wing policies work, but they don’t
Believing in the sincerity of politicians is risky, especially when they claim to believe something that allows them to funnel enormous amounts of public money to their wealthy, corporate benefactors.
But the reason Wisconsin trails most other states in job creation is because enormous tax giveaways to the wealthy don’t trickle down to create more jobs and better wages for everybody else.
Those bonanzas go into tax shelters and investments anywhere in the world where they will make even more money for those who already have more of it than anyone else.
The way to create jobs for ordinary working people and improve their incomes is—guess what—creating jobs for ordinary working people and improving their incomes. Which leads us to:
Walker’s re-election is old news. The next election starts now
Elections aren’t every four years or even every two years any more. They’re continuous.
After the historic election of 2008 made Barack Obama the first African American president in U.S. history, Republicans immediately began opposing every single action by an illegal alien president who’d falsified his own birth certificate as a baby.
Which led to the Tea Party racist backlash campaign of 2010 electing Walker and other extremist, right-wing Republican governors and congressmen.
Which led to the overwhelming re-election of Obama in 2012.
Which led to Walker’s re-election and the Republican Party’s overthrow of the U.S. Senate in 2014.
Everyone knows what comes next.
The long-overdue, historic election of the first female U.S. President in 2016 and Democrats retaking the U.S. Senate by defeating terrible Republican senators first elected in the racist backlash 2010 election, including the extremely embarrassing Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
So who says there isn’t anything to look forward to anymore?
