Scott Walker, having no other immediate job prospects, recently announced he was launching a new career as a public speaker. The first person I thought of was Lee Sherman Dreyfus, the only Wisconsin Republican governor in history to use the office as a stepping stone to a successful career in after-dinner entertainment.
I knew Lee Dreyfus, and Scott Walker is no Lee Dreyfus. Walker’s nasty, mean-spirited Republican Party also bears little resemblance to the state Republican Party Dreyfus took over with an upset, grassroots, populist, primary victory in 1978 over Congressman Bob Kasten, the party’s endorsed candidate for governor.
The term “populist” obviously has lost all meaning these days after being used to describe both democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and racist demagogue Donald Trump. But Dreyfus was the original recipe, a non-politician chancellor of the UW-Stevens Point who campaigned joyously, attracting attention with student members of his university’s marching band.
In 1978, Dreyfus beat Democrat Martin Schreiber, the lieutenant governor who had the top job a year and a half after President Jimmy Carter appointed Gov. Patrick Lucey ambassador to Mexico. Dreyfus was the media’s favorite kind of politician, regardless of party. He was always accessible and endlessly quotable. Dreyfus’ background was in broadcasting as a communications professor who managed a university radio station at Detroit’s Wayne State University and later WHA-TV at the UW-Madison.
Working Across Party Lines
Dreyfus sometimes called himself as “a Republicrat.” The worst fears of rightwing Republicans were realized when Dreyfus worked with the Democratic legislature in 1982 to pass legislation making Wisconsin the first state in the nation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing and public accommodations. But Dreyfus also was a fiscal conservative. In his campaign, he attacked Schreiber for having a large budget surplus and promised to return it to taxpayers. His successful line was: “We didn’t tell them to keep the change.”
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Then, just as quickly as Dreyfus had burst onto Wisconsin’s political scene, he was gone. Dreyfus surprised his own party by announcing in the spring of 1982 he’d never wanted to be a career politician and wouldn’t seek a second term. He worked for a year as CEO of Sentry Insurance in Stevens Point, but then he spent the rest of his life doing what he really loved, entertaining audiences as a public speaker. His wife, Joyce, ran his personal speaker’s bureau, booking appearances around the country.
Obviously, the end of Walker’s political career wasn’t nearly as voluntary. Neither has Walker ever been known as a riveting public speaker or even a particularly interesting one. Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” created a comic video mashup of presidential candidate Walker in various venues telling that long story about how little he paid for his sweater at Kohl’s. Fallon wondered how egregious someone’s sins had to be to get stuck next to that guy on an airplane. Certainly no one ever would confuse Walker for an upbeat political speaker like Dreyfus who could appeal to both Republicans and Democrats. By the end of his brief presidential campaign, Walker had enough difficulty appealing to Republicans.
Walker filled the same, very specific niche in Republican politics as his friend Paul Ryan. As the Republican Party moved to the extreme right, bland and boring worked very well for them. They put innocent, boyish faces on increasingly reprehensible Republican policies. They specialized in dog whistles and code words to mask their party’s ugliest appeals to society’s most disturbing fringes.
Going Hard Right
Then Trump suddenly upended Republican politics by discarding namby-pamby euphemisms and openly providing cheering rightwing crowds with hardcore, racist, anti-immigrant porn. Walker’s low-key, innocuous persona was virtually invisible in two presidential debates before he dropped out.
Like Ryan, Walker temporarily attempted to separate himself from Trump, saying he was dropping out of the presidential race so the strongest possible alternative to Trump could emerge as a more respectable Republican nominee. Also, like Ryan, when Trump shocked everyone—including himself—by winning the presidency, Walker immediately started sucking up. Now, he’s already declared his first job as a renowned public speaker will be to chair Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign in Wisconsin.
We know it can difficult for someone in his 50s unexpectedly thrown into the job market, especially without a college degree. But public speaking may not be a realistic long-term career path for Walker. As quickly as possible, his wealthy political sponsors who received enormous financial windfalls during his two terms as governor should create a phony-baloney job for him.
Walker’s prospects could be much worse. He could be a federal employee going without pay indefinitely with no end in sight until an irrational president can figure out how to back down from an outrageous political promise to his most gullible supporters to spend billions of dollars on an enormous, worthless memorial to hatred of immigrants.
