QA & My conversation with Gov. Scott Walker Such an honor to speak with Wisconsin s stalwart governor, who has taken everything the left could throw at him and remains standing, and whose conservative policies are wonderfully reforming his blue state to the betterment of all, proving once again that conservatism works every time it s tried: RUSH: Governor Walker. WALKER: Hey, Rush. How are you? RUSH: I m fine, and I appreciate your flexibility here, I know how busy you are. Let me get right into this. I don t want to embarrass you here at the beginning with my accolades and praise, but I ve just got to say some things to you. We re in a situation nationally where the country is under assault from the opposite Party and the President. I think traditional American values, the American economy, our capitalist system, it s all under assault. You ve also been under assault. They tried to destroy your career and as much of your life as they could in order to stop you. You are the governor of one of the bluest blue states in the country, yet you have persevered with exactly what you promised. You ve persevered with what s in your heart, your beliefs, your philosophy, and you ve triumphed. In doing so, you have really shown the way back, not only for the Republican Party, but for the country. You have demonstrated how we can get out of this mess. I have frankly been surprised at how little attention your achievements have gotten from within the Republican Party and the conservative media. That s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you to highlight this, and let as many people outside the Beltway and the state of Wisconsin know what you have done. It really is profound, when I stop and think of every attempt that was made to take you out politically. It would have been easy for you to cite your family and walk away, saying, I don t need this. But you didn t. And I just wanted to thank you. I for one have a deep appreciation for what you have put up with and what you have accomplished, and I really hope it s been noticed within the Party. I hope that it can serve as a guidepost and you as a role model for other people, not just in elective office, but in our media as well, showing that it can be done. You have shown conservatism works. It can be done, and it triumphs, and it helps everybody. And I think it s great. In your state of the state address last month, you said We re not making it harder to get government assistance. We re making it easier to get a job. And you have. Do you feel a sense of exhilaration, or do you see this as simply what you ve just got to get through every day at your job, and you deal with whatever comes your way? WALKER: On the question and the larger point you made: yes, we just did what we said we were going to do. I often laugh that politics is one of the few occupations where you make news just by keeping your word, but unfortunately it is the exception, not the norm. We set out to do the right thing, because that s how I campaigned. That s what I told people I was going to do, and then I set out to do it. Our interest in doing it wasn t to get national accolades; it was because I firmly believe it will actually help the people in my state. My two sons are 18 and 19, and I wanted to make sure they and 6
every other young man and young woman grew up in a state at least as great as the one I grew up in. That was why we did what we did. As to the question about not making it harder to get government assistance, but easier to get a job: I always thought that was the American dream. That no matter who you were, it didn t matter what your background, didn t matter what class you were born into, it didn t matter what you did for a living, what was great about being in America, unlike any other country in the world, was that you could do or be anything you wanted but it took hard work and determination. The opportunity was going to be as equal as possible, but the outcome was up to you. That s what I want to do. I want to make an equal opportunity for people in my state, and then let their hard work and determination allow them to live the American dream, free of the constraints of the state government. RUSH: Let me contrast that with the latest from Democrats in Washington, who are now talking about how liberating it is to not have a job. It s not fair that people should be forced to have a job in order to get health care. Nancy Pelosi says job lock is keeping people in jobs they hate just for health care; we re liberating people from having to work, since now they can get health care. It s the exact opposite of what you just stated and what you believe. What s your reaction? WALKER: I think the left has become more and more disconnected from the average American. Not just Republicans or conservatives but the vast majority of people, other than hardcore liberal Democrats, still firmly believe that there s a dignity that comes Politics is one of the few occupations where you make news just by keeping your word. from work, and there s a dignity from controlling your own life and your own destiny. I preach consistently that we Republicans and conservatives, as a movement, need to show that we re the ones who stand up for people s ability to control their own lives. We re the ones who understand that freedom and prosperity don t come from the mighty hand of the government. Dignity does, indeed, come from work, and we should be the ones making it easier to get into the workplace, easier to start a business, easier to control our own lives and our own destinies. When I was first sworn in as governor, I moved the swearing-in ceremony from the east gallery, which was historically done in front of Bob La Follette s bust. He was Wisconsin Governor 1901-06 and the founder of the modern progressive movement. I chose the north gallery, where the state constitution was. I said freedom and prosperity come from the ability of people to control their own lives, and that was based in the constitution. It s the frugality clause: It is through frugality and moderation in government that we will see freedom and prosperity for our people. Not political moderation, but moderation in the size and scope of government. That was something I invoked in January of 2011, and I ve tried to live it ever since. RUSH: You ve written a book, Unintimidated: A Governor s Story and a Nation s Challenge, which everybody in my audience should read, because you catalog all the awful threats made against you, your family, and Republican legislators as you went after the public employee unions on collective bargaining. The left drew a line in Wisconsin. They threw everything they had at you. Did any of it surprise you, the viciousness of it, or how far they were willing to go? WALKER: In some ways I was prepared. For eight years I was the first and only Republican ever elected to be the county executive in Milwaukee County, and I knew from my experience there. It didn t take any donor or any group to tell me of the challenge I d be up against, because I constantly took on the public employee union bosses, the big government union bosses out there. I knew I d get pushed, but I just had no idea how large it would be. I thought I d go from a county-level pushback to a statewide pushback. I had no idea that within a week the big guns would come in from everywhere. First, bussed in from Chicago, then from New York, and New Jersey, and D.C., and Nevada, and Gov. Scott Walker elsewhere. Because not only was this happening in Wisconsin, the home of the progressive movement, the place that started collective bargaining, in a city filled with public employees in state and local government, where the university was just a few blocks away with folks who were leftover protestors from the 60s and 70s. It really became a national issue because they knew, God help them, that if we could do it in Wisconsin, there was no doubt it could happen anywhere else across the country. So they threw everything they could at us. That surprised me not only in the terms of the size and the scope, but the viciousness. Many people said to me, You need to let people know the how, why, and what really happened. Some of the stories I highlight in the book were really vicious, vicious threats against me and my family, senators, my administration, others. At one point a letter came to my wife that talked about how Wisconsin had never had a governor assassinated, and maybe she should get ready for that. It talked about where my wife worked, where my kids went to school, where my father-in-law lived. It threatened not just me, but their livelihood and their lives. And in the end, part of the reason why we called the book Unintimidated is because things like that failed to intimidate me or my family 7
and they failed to intimidate the Republican lawmakers, and the legislature, and even down to the small business owners and everyday people who said, We re not going to be intimidated by out-of-state bullies. We re going to stand up and put the power back in the hands of the people. RUSH: Your wife even asked you in the midst of this, Scott, why are you doing this? And you ve said that question changed your approach. WALKER: It did. No doubt about it. That was a wake-up call for me. In this case the mistake I had made was, I think, a good-intentioned one. I was so eager to fix things after I came into office, so frustrated with the problems we faced, that I didn t talk about them, I just came in and fixed them. Because Rush, as you know, most people, particularly in Washington, but the same is true in many cases in our state houses, so often talk about things, but never fix them. I wanted to make sure I got right to fixing them. Well, the But also the demeanor was important, not just with death threats, but when I had people stand out in front of my home not the governor s residence, but my home thousands of protesters, and when I would have people interrupt me at one public session after another. The worst case was probably during the Torch Run that law enforcement does, a very wonderful annual occurrence that I ve done for 15 years for the Special Olympics in my state. When I was standing outside the capitol, hundreds of these protesters dressed up as zombies marched in front of me and the Special Olympic athletes. For a moment I thought about calling them out and going key was, and my wife showed it to me with her question, I needed to do both. Talking shouldn t be used as an excuse not to take on the big issues, but I needed to talk about them, explain them, tell people exactly what was at stake, and why we needed to make these changes. And once we started doing that, the tide started to change. People said, You re darn right we need to do that. RUSH: You re talking to people in the state that didn t vote for you, in addition to people who wanted to support you. You re talking to people who are inclined to be your enemies. What turned out to work best in reaching the people you wanted to reach to make sure they understood why and what you were doing? WALKER: Discipline and demeanor were two key elements. We had to stay on message, because so many in the media constantly wanted to take us off message. They wanted us to take the bait, and go off in other directions. Instead, we kept coming back to our core message, which was really a simple question: Who do you want in charge the big government union bosses, or the hardworking taxpayers? Once that started to resonate, and people realized, This guy s standing up, and look at the abuse he and his allies and the legislators are taking, and they re doing it because they re standing up for us, the hardworking taxpayers, that s when we started to win. off on them. Thankfully, my inner voice said no. I talked to the athletes. I didn t in any way get distracted by the protesters. The next day, a video went viral that showed the protesters interrupting these Special Olympic athletes. If I had gone after them, it would have looked like yet another confrontation between me and the protesters. Instead, it revealed the protesters for who and what they were, just gutless, willing to interrupt even a Special Olympics event. It was moments like that that started to make people in our state say, These people aren t like us. We may disagree on things, but we don t act like that. That s not how we act in the Midwest, at least. I think that was a turning point. Once people saw that no matter what the opposition threw at us, we weren t going to be drawn into it, we weren t going to stoop to their reactions, they started listening to our substance, and over time enough of them said, I may not have done it exactly the way he did, but in the end, it s working, and it makes sense. RUSH: Now Governor, I m going to catalog your policy achievements here in just a second. That s coming next. But I want to set that up with this. I m not trying to pit you against other Republicans here. I m genuinely curious about this. You could have Photos on pages 8, 9 & 10 2014 AP/Wide World Photos 8
come into office saying what a lot of Republicans today are saying, We must stop the partisan rancor. We must learn to cooperate. We must reach across the aisle. The people of Wisconsin want us to work together. A lot of Republicans think that s the ticket. A lot of Republican candidates, even Presidential candidates, think that somehow is the magic way to get people who are not voting for Republicans to vote for them, as they go out and talk that way. If you had said, when you came into office, We must stop the partisan rancor, we must learn to cooperate, reach across the aisle, people want us to work together, the Democrats would have left you alone, because they would have assumed they would have beaten you. They would have taken you off message. They would have heard you saying that it was time to give up what you really believed. But you didn t do that. You hung in. And to me, you have made yourself a role model for other Republicans who want to win elections. Have any and I m not asking for names or anything Republicans sought you out for advice or asked you, How did you do this, Scott? You turned a blue state around. You survived this assault. They re assaulting all of us. Have any of them come to you and asked how you did it, so they could, too? WALKER: Sure. We ve had elected officials and many, many candidates around the country ask about that. I talked to [Michigan Governor] Rick Snyder about what he was doing after Unintimidated that the pathway to win the center isn t to move to the center, it s to lead, because most people who are undecided or persuadable voters aren t necessarily looking for a candidate they agree with on every issue, they want people who are willing to do what they said they re going to do, and boldly lead. RUSH: Amen. One could characterize your stance as being on offense and the people who are focused on getting along as being on defense, and I know where it comes from. For years Republicans have been told that most Americans think they re mean, extremists, racists, bigots, and all the rest, and they ve got to prove that they re not. They think the best way to prove that is to show that they like the Democrats, that they can get along, and that they re not what the allegations against them say they are. That puts them immediately on the defensive. The consultants, whoever are advising these guys, have them believing that the spirit of cooperation is all the American people want, when you just nailed it. They just want problems solved, particularly when they voted for people based on articulation of policy during a campaign. They want to see that put into action. And you did it and you ve shown it can be done against longer odds than a lot of Republicans face, by the way. I don t know of anybody in the Republican Party, modern era, who has been up against George Bush maybe the relentless attempts to destroy him as you were up against. They knew, God help them, that if we could do it in Wisconsin, there was no doubt it could happen anywhere. Gov. Scott Walker the voters, in a referendum in Michigan, gave him a clear and open signal when they shot down an affirmation of collective bargaining in their state s constitution. That opened the door for him to move forward on right-to-work. We talked about what we did and how we did it, having very similar Midwestern states. To your larger point, Rush, I firmly believe that people s frustration, particularly with Congress now, is not that they can t get along, but that they don t get anything done. There s a difference. Playing nice with each other and working together on things, if it s a good thing, can be great. Getting through 9/11, and being united as a country, was a wonderful thing. But all too often in Washington, some of the getting along has been ignoring things like the national deficit. I think most people are just frustrated that far too few people of either Party are willing to stand up and do something about it. My firm belief is what people want more than anything particularly in times of crisis, and our state faced, like our nation faces today, both an economic and a fiscal crisis is leadership. They want people to stand up and tell them what they re going to do, and then set out to do that. That s ultimately what folks are yearning for. I also believe that s what wins elections. I said in And you ve just shown the way. Now let s look at what you ve done. You probably want to credit your policies, not yourself, but I don t know how you leave yourself out of the equation. Your policies have been so successful that the state of Wisconsin, in the midst of this Obama economy, is running a $912 million surplus. The Wisconsin State Journal said this was unexpected, but you expected it, right? You knew your policies were going to produce a surplus. WALKER: Oh, we saw it, for sure. We ve already cut taxes a billion and a half dollars. By the time we re done with our most recent plan, it will be over $2 billion in tax cuts since we took office in January 2011. We streamlined the bureaucratic process, and what we enforce is about common sense, and not just about bureaucratic red tape. We ve reined in frivolous and out-of-control 9
lawsuits. We changed the overall climate so that we re customer friendly, making the government responsive to employers and consumers in our state. It s a total 180-degree shift from where we were before, particularly putting more money in the hands of employers and consumers. Just as under Ronald Reagan s very successful tenure as President, we believe that if you put more money back in the hands of the people, the people will respond much better than the government ever could. So we knew there would be a surplus. We knew it would continue to grow, and it s precisely why now I m arguing that the vast majority of that go right back into the hands of the taxpayers, so we can continue to make it easier to afford to live in our state. RUSH: So you ve got $912 million surplus. For the discussion, let s round it up, a billion dollar surplus, and you re proposing what, a $500 million tax cut? WALKER: Yeah, $400 million in property tax plus another $100 million in income tax. That s on top of the $650 million I did just about six months ago in our budget. Then I m taking $320 million and setting it aside for changes in withholding, which means we re going to put more money, starting April 1, into people s paychecks. That s something that doesn t require any change by the legislature. So in total it will mean, from April 1 on, over $800 million more back in the hands of the hardworking taxpayers of our state. We believe that will further generate better revenues, because it will create a better economy. RUSH: You made a point of saying that this all happened not because of gimmicks, accounting tricks, or playing games with the budget, but this is genuine, and it derives specifically from policy. So can these kinds of surpluses or this kind of revenue generation occur every year? WALKER: Absolutely. It s kind of like a small business reinvesting most of the earnings in the company, to innovation, to new capital purchases, new employees. In this case, we re investing it to the taxpayers, both as consumers and as employers. We believe that investment will continue to grow. As you mentioned, we re in good standing. We have a rainy day fund that is seven times greater than it ever was before we took office. We have the only pension fund in the country where the state pension system is fully funded. We have a bond rating that continues to be positive. And we have a pension and debt ratio that s one of the lowest and the best in the country. When it comes to the economy, the unemployment rate is now three points lower than it was four years ago. In my predecessor s term Jim Doyle, a Democrat we lost more than 133,000 jobs, lost more than 27,000 businesses. During my three years in office we ve gained more than 100,000 jobs, and added more than 13,000 net new businesses in our state. Our job growth last year, from April to through the end of December 2013, was the fastest private sector job growth since 1994. RUSH: This is just astounding. So many people say, This stuff can t happen in America any more. We re so in debt. We are so overextended. These kinds of results can t be produced. You can show your results to them. You did it. Your pension system is the only one in the country that s 100 percent funded. How is that possible? WALKER: It s what happens when you put your faith in the people. I think back to [February 6], the birthday of Ronald Reagan, who inspired me and others in my generation. Two days before he was elected in 1980, I turned 13. So I am someone who literally came of age under Ronald Reagan s tenure. He not only drew me to be a conservative and a Republican, but probably more importantly, what really attracted me to Ronald Reagan was his eternal optimism, his belief in the American people, and his belief that the American people would triumph over anything or any power that the government or any other external force could lay on us. As tough as times have been, and as excessive as government at the state and the federal level has been in the past, I have just such a firm belief in the people in my state and ultimately in this great country, that if you empower people to have a greater role in controlling their own destiny, they re going to be that much better. One of the things that frustrated me to no end in this last presidential election was I thought not only did we have an unbelievable chance to win, but we had one of the greatest opportunities to define the difference between the left and the right. Simply put, I believe that the President and his allies measure success in government by how many people are dependent on the government, by how many people are on Medicaid, and unemployment checks, and food stamps. We, as conservatives, should measure success in government by just the opposite, by how many people are no longer dependent on the government. RUSH: Right. WALKER: And as much as people talk about the dependency 10
RUSH: Exactly. I m watching the exit polls come in, the first wave that counts, 5 o clock, and I knew that when I saw this that if this was true, we were finished. This exit poll question showed that 54 percent of the people who voted still blamed Bush for the economy. WALKER: Yeah. RUSH: The Republicans never told the story of what Obama was doing. They let him get away with campaigning against the results of his own policies, as though it wasn t him causing it. They were just afraid to. There s a racial component here that they don t want to go up against. You ve got something they don t have. You ve got success. You ve got real-world results to back up your philosophy. You re not just talking theory to people. I really, really hope that the Republican hierarchy looks at what you ve done, and listens to your advice, reads your book, and seeks your counsel on this, because you ve shown the way. There s no other way to describe it. You have shown the way back. WALKER: For the Republicans to win anything goes back to what I said last year after my recall. Someone asked, Can Mitt Romney win? I said, Yes. But in a state like mine, which is at best a battleground state, to win you have to show that the R next to your name doesn t just stand for Republican, it stands for reformer. Unfortunately, the counsel Romney got was that you shouldn t say anything. So the Obama campaign was able to define him as though the R next to his name stood for rich guy who only cares about rich guys. People are hungry for reformers who are going to put the power back in their hands, and we shouldn t be apologizing for it. Gov. Scott Walker creeping to that 50 percent mark, the optimism I have is that I still believe that in America today, because I see it every day in my own state, the vast majority of people who are temporarily dependent on the government don t want to be. We just need to empower them to show that they, too, can live the American dream. We should show them that conservatives are the ones who are the defenders of that dream, as opposed to those on the left, who want that dream tied into a permanent dependence on the government. RUSH: You just nailed something, your assessment of what didn t happen during the Presidential campaign that could have. Why is there a reluctance, on the part of the national Republican Party, to make this contrast? Look at Obamacare, for example. Here you ve got, from the get-go, a majority, and it s been a growing, expanding majority of people who oppose it. You look at the 2010 midterms, and you had the foundation, the birth of the Tea Party. You had people opposed to the debt, opposed to the spending. That was a ready-made constituency for the Republican Party to connect to, because the 2010 midterms were a pure rejection of Obama and his policies. There weren t any Republican issues on the ballot. There wasn t a Republican candidate on the national ballot. It s midterms. And yet the Republican Party nationally seems unwilling to draw this contrast between themselves and today s Democrat Party. You did it in Wisconsin, and you just identified that as something that should have happened in 2012, and didn t. Why don t they? WALKER: There s no doubt about it. About a year, year-and-a-half before the 2012 Presidential election, I heard a Republican consultant from Washington say something that I think sums up what I hear too often from those coming out of Washington. He said, and he obviously was joking: The best thing for us as Republicans would be to announce a nominee for President about two days after the Presidential election. His point was that to win he felt all we needed to do was make it a referendum on Barack Obama, and that hitting in the weeds about who the Republican was and what he or she stood for wasn t as important as just making this all about Barack Obama. I think that was a huge mistake. I think there were too many Washington-based consultants who felt all they had to do was make it a referendum. They got hung up on this mindset that the election was all about that great quote from Reagan, Are you better off today than you were four years ago? But the mistake was, that was the closing argument in the Reagan campaign. That wasn t the entire argument. The much greater argument was the difference between what a Reagan Presidency would be versus the policies of Jimmy Carter. The same thing should have happened in 2012, and it didn t. RUSH: Right. WALKER: What we have to do is stand up and fight that battle, and make the case to the voters in Wisconsin and anywhere else across the country that we are the ones who are going to reform the government, we are the ones who are going to reform things state by state, and across this country. People are hungry for reformers. They re hungry for people who are going to put the power back in their hands, and we shouldn t be apologizing for it. That s what we stand for, and there are still a vast majority of Americans who are center-right believers. They just need to know that we actually believe in it, and more importantly that we have the courage to act on it. When we do, we win. RUSH: I couldn t agree more. Governor, God bless you, seriously, and thanks so much for your time here. I will, of course, be ballyhooing this, plus your book, on the radio, because this is important. It s nice to talk to you again. WALKER: My pleasure. It s an honor to talk with you today, and I appreciate your interest and hard work. Thanks, Rush. n 11