Sunday, June 21, 2015

When boxed in, Walker defaults to words, then retrenches

He knew he was looking the calculating shallow Gov. Shoulder Shrug on the confederate flag uproar, so despite a very soft record on racial matters, Walker tried to diffuse the situation and spin it in his favor with some thoughtful words about race and unity.

Label me unimpressed.

Then I remembered another occasion when he was taking heat - - Mary Burke was polling well during the 2014 gubernatorial campaign and Walker was getting stung on his uncompromising position of women's reproductive rights.

The solution: Walker aired a a campaign commercial appropriating the language of the pro-choice movement, which he abandoned immediately after winning the election and has since thrown his support to even harsher restrictions on Planned Parenthood and their clients.

Or when Walker again appeared somewhat moderate when he curried favor with the Operating Engineers Union, winning its support in the 2014 election by saying he would not push the so-called right-to-work, blue-collar wage-suppressing bill  - - only to sign the measure his party's legislators rushed through after the election.

The takeaway: trust Walker at your risk, and expect no action in support of carefully spun words.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of the Susan B. Anthony List, told the Weekly Standard that Walker explained to her that in the ad [supporting decisions by a woman and her doctor] he was 'using the language of the other side to support our own position' and that people who said he was trying to paint himself as more pro-choice than he was were quoting him 'out of context'."

See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/scott-walker-tells-anti-choice-leaders-he-didnt-mean-what-he-said-about-abortion-being-betwe#sthash.t4YIH0jG.dpuf

Also here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/20/can-scott-walker-convert-the-christian-right.html

"Dannenfelser said he defended his use of the phrase 'leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor' as a way of co-opting pro-choice rhetoric for the pro-life cause. 'To the extent that we use the other side’s rhetoric to undermine their positions, we’re better off,' Dannenfelser added. She said she was impressed with Walker’s way of talking about abortion. 'It’s the whole style of communication and content of communication that you want to see moving into a presidential cycle that will make it different from 2012,' she said.

Sounds like in speaking to this conservative group in May, Walker gave a pretty overt defense of lying to get elected, by presenting it as a smart political strategy (“using the language of the other side"). And that's admired. Go figure.

People still think they can trust Walker because he looks them in the eye and mildly and reasonably says words they want to hear. Many of us in Wisconsin, including past supporters and political allies, now know better.

my5cents said...

Yes, Walker is a word wizard. That's what he's been practicing his whole life. You have to dissect every single word he says and analyze the context in which he says it and then reanalyze it in the context of what else he might mean. It ends up a huge question mark anyway. You find yourself saying, huh, quite a lot. What he says may sound like one thing to you and the opposite to the guy standing next to you. Not much if anything he says really means what you are hearing. Gives a person chills to event think he could be in charge of the most powerful country in the world. Brrrrrr!

Anonymous said...

I see that our esteemed Governor has now come out in support of SC getting rid of the Confederate battle flag.

Withdrawing your support for the flag is also called a no brainer. Now, that fits him like a glove.

Also, he had to give back $3,500 to a white supremacist group. Tee hee.

MadCityVoter said...

Read his words again -- all that he said was that he supported Gov. Nikki Haley's position. As far as I can tell from Walker's own words he would have been equally o.k. had she stuck with her initial position that the flag was staying where it was. He said nothing that might jeopardize his standing with the white racist dog whistle/"Southern heritage" vote. That's the Lead From Behind strategy in a nutshell.