As he runs, Walker must outrun his record; a primer

[Updated] Walker's race for the GOP presidential nomination requires some daunting political jujitsu - -  running for the highest office in the nation while outrunning his past and spinning away from a disqualifying record.

Here's a short guide to facts that should help anyone who wants to follow that charade:

 1. He's manipulated and disrespected a lot of people, and his civil rights record is unsettling, the ACLU-WI finds.

2. He claims, like a low-key choir-boy, to be "midwestern nice," but facts to the contrary - -  huge K-12 public school cuts, ideologically-inspired surprise attacks on labor and UW higher education, insistence on medically-unnecessary ultrasound tests on women and forced drug-screening on the poor - - and more - - ought to chill you like a Wisconsin winter.

3. He's the only candidate in the race with this troubling trifecta: a half-dozen appointees and associates found guilty of crimes related to investigation still ongoing; a legal defense fund; and a secret communications system that defeated his state's Open Records law - - a law, interestingly enough, which Walker was caught a few days ago surreptitiously trying to gut.

As The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently asked about this "assault on open records" - -

To borrow a phrase: What did Gov. Scott Walker know and when did he know it? Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said Tuesday that Walker's office was involved with creating the exemptions, and Walker's spokeswoman confirmed that. But before participating in Wauwatosa's Independence Day parade Saturday, Walker told reporters that he had "a lot of concerns" about the proposals.

4.  "False" is Walker's most common rating when PolitiFact vets his statements - - and, with the worse "Pants on Fire" rating - - is triple the number of statements rated fully "True." 

PolitiFact also rated his signature, 250,000-new-jobs promise "broken," based on official, jobs-added data:

We rated the promise as Promise Broken in September 2014, when our count showed that employers had added an estimated 146,795 jobs -- about 59 percent of the promised total. Experts said it was mathematically impossible to close the gap in the remaining months of the year.

5.  Walker created and chaired the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., (WEDC) on his favored, private-sector model to replace the existing Wisconsin Department of Commerce, but WEDC has been rocked by scathing audits, repeated scandals, serial resignations by top staff, improper loans and grants, uncollected revenues, broken and ignored state statutes, and allegations of cronyism and political influence. One example, among many.

6. Wisconsin, with a $7.25/hr. minimum wage Walker which will not raise, and trickle-down tax breaks he created that failed to kick-start our state's stalled economy, now rates last in middle-class wage shrinkage among all 50 states and 35th in jobs added, data show.

Bottom line: read up on Walker (one heavily-documented posting, here) as his race for office and away from the facts gets underway.

Don't add yourself to that long list of the manipulated and disrespected catalogued in item #1.