Walker Mouths The Right's Script: Make Him Own It

Most politically-active people I know believe Scott Walker is following advice/orders from a coterie of ideologically-motivated consultants and staffers as he terminates collective bargaining, rewrites rules, derails programs and cuts funding to advance a right-wing agenda embraced from talk radio studios to The John Birch Society to Tea Party Central.

His latest outrage: the quiet elimination by Executive Order of a thirty-year-old program assisting female and minority building trades apprentice workers that the non-union, so-called ABC builders openly opposed.

But let's not focus so intently on the roles played in Walker's new administration by think tanks, Republican apparatchiks and Tea Party Internet cheer-leading that we forget to assign to Walker 100% of the responsibility for his actions.

He may turn out to be little more than a tool, a witting role player in a national movement - -  replaceable elsewhere by his funders when State Senate recalls this year drain his power, and his personal recall ousts him in 2012 - - but for now we have to keep up the pressure and make sure he owns the political and legal consequences of the damage he is doing.

That means denying him allies and any psychological lift in the April 5th elections for Milwaukee County Executive and State Supreme Court by electing Chris Abele in Milwaukee and elevating JoAnne Kloppenberg to the Supreme Court.

The right-wing machine that hauled Walker across the finish line in November with 52% of the vote know what's at stake.

That's why they are putting Walker and conservative State Rep. Jeff Stone, the tea partiers and talk radio choice for Milwaukee County Executive together at a Milwaukee fund-raiser for Stone this afternoon at the private University Club for $100-$3,000-a-ticket.

There are ads to be bought, right now. That event should raise a six-figure sum in two hours.

And it's why the Wisconsin Club For Growth framed things this way in its Wednesday, March 23rd members' update::

"The Left hopes to use the April 5th election to land a sucker punch that disables conservative reform. If liberal environmentalist and state bureaucrat Joanne Kloppenberg is elected to the state Supreme Court, the balance will tip and Wisconsin will again have a court majority willing to make up any excuse to reverse the actions of the Republican governor and legislators just elected.

"Conservative Justice David Prosser is under attack in ads designed to inflate leftist turnout in a spring election where turnout is invariably low and easy to manipulate. Two weeks ago Jesse Jackson led the mob surrounding the state Capitol chanting, “Come alive, April five.” Rev. Jackson’s many admirers will act on that advice.    

"People looking ahead to 2012 and eager to do battle with Barack Obama should make no mistake, they’re going head to head with him right here, right now."