Walker's embrace of Foxconn is, well, situational

Walker's running his very own Foxconn campaign con.

I'd predicted in a Sunday posting that he would distance himself from Foxconn when making his re-election announcement, and, sure enough, the word "Foxconn" did not pass Walker's lips at his campaign kickoff.

Which was duly noted in subsequent reporting:

...Foxconn might not be the kind of positive political development it was thought to be when Walker and President Donald Trump announced the deal over the summer, said Marquette Law School Poll director Charles Franklin. 

"I can see wanting to emphasize the larger economic points of low unemployment and record number employed," Franklin said. "But to not include a single sentence mentioning Foxconn suggests that there is a perceived downside to Foxconn now that was not apparent in the initial announcement and messaging."  

Interesting, however, that on the taxpayer-paid WEDC web site's "newsroom" index there's one Foxconn story posted there from Site Selection magazine about how the company came to Wisconsin, and "Bagging the Big One" mentions Walker's name 14 times.

“The eagle has landed, it has spread its wings, and it is taking off again,” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said at the ceremony announcing the game-changing Foxconn investment at the famed Milwaukee Art Museum on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Publicly, it was reported that the entire site selection process took about four months. But Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker says he began laying the groundwork for this breakthrough deal six years ago. It began with overhauling a public policy system that had been engineered to serve the needs of a 20th-century economy, not a 21st-century one, he said...

“The overriding factor — the one that separated us from our competition — was the fact that we were ready,” Gov. Walker told Site Selection. “We changed our business climate. We cut our tax burden. We wiped out almost all the tax liability for a manufacturing project like Foxconn’s. We became a right-to-work state. We adopted regulatory reform. Some states were just not ready. I had been working on this six years ago.”  

So let's just say, at least right now, that Walker's relationship with Foxconn is, well, complicated.