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Jennifer Rubin picks Scott Walker as the Distinguished Pol of The Week.
… But this week special praise goes to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker who won his third race in four years, once again standing up to Big Labor and withstanding an influx of out of state money. As Betsy Woodruff wrote, “While Walker was repeating the same simple pitch throughout the state, national labor organizations were running ads targeting the governor and [Mary]Burke was hobnobbing with the president and first lady in the state’s two most liberal cities, Madison and Milwaukee. If Burke bet on this being an anti-incumbent election cycle, Walker bet on its being anti-Washington. And he bet right.”
Walker has perfected the pitch to middle- and working-class voters, fashioning himself as their advocate against elites, Washington bureaucrats and liberal special interests. His rhetoric is simple but direct and effective, serving to accentuate his Midwest roots and blue-collar ethos.
Every prominent politician these days is evaluated as a prospective presidential candidate. Walker may lack foreign policy know-how or charisma, but his skill and competency in his present role are evident. He is an excellent governor who was able to show results from his reforms. And he is a model campaigner for Republicans trying to break through in purple and blue states. And for that we can say, well done, Gov. Walker.
Walker was also the subject of the WSJ Weekend Interview. Hearing how he addressed the headquarters crowd election night, you would think he just participated in a Passover Seder. And remember, he is the only potential 2016 candidate without a college degree. We’ve had enough of government by A students. We need drop-outs and C students.
‘Wow. First off, I want to thank God for his abundant grace and mercy. Win or lose, it is more than sufficient for each and every one of us,” Scott Walker said, taking the podium on Tuesday night at the Wisconsin state fair grounds after being re-re-elected for governor. It was a curious register, given that Mr. Walker’s religious faith, even though his father was a pastor, has never seemed central to his economic and political identity. But then maybe the intervention of a higher power is as good an explanation as any for the commanding victory that unions and liberals went all-out to prevent. …
… The race Mr. Walker won this week was close-run and became a referendum on his first term. His opponent, Mary Burke, a former executive of Trek Bicycle Corp., ran as a not-Walker. The governor calls her “almost the bionic candidate,” in the sense that her intelligence, business experience, gender and noncommittal up-the-middle platform were focus-group-tested as the perfect foil for his agenda and his track record of the past few years.
In June 2012, Mr. Walker became the only governor in American history to survive a recall election—initiated to reverse his enormously controversial 2011 budget-repair bill, Act 10, which limited the collective-bargaining powers of public-employee unions, as well as automatic dues collection and health and pension benefits. Big Labor and national Democrats returned this year to avenge their loss, though the irony was that Ms. Burke declined to relitigate Act 10 or even take a coherent position. The election turned on competing accounts of economic progress under Mr. Walker, such as job creation and rising household incomes.
Surveys indicated that Mr. Walker and Ms. Burke were statistically tied through the summer and most of the fall, though Mr. Walker observes that “those polls consistently showed that the opinion of the state in terms of right-track/wrong-track was still very positive. A solid majority felt the state was headed in the right direction.” He was confident that he would receive those votes in the end. …
Before the election, Victor Davis Hanson posted on the campaign the Dems could not run.
… Foreign policy?
Consider the failed Russia “reset,” the bugout from Iraq, the “leading from behind” in Libya, the Benghazi scandal, the Iranian soon-to-be bomb, the smearing of Israel, the special relationship with a thuggish Erdogan, the dissolving Middle East, the eroding NATO, and an ever more bullying China. No Democrat will run on something like, “I fully support the Obama foreign policy initiatives and the brilliant work of Secretaries Clinton and Kerry.” Foreign policy, then, cannot be a campaign issue, in the positive sense of defending the status quo. No Democrat even made the attempt.
How about bigger and competent government?
No Democratic congressman would wish to campaign on, “Obama made government work for you — just look at the new and dynamic IRS, VA, ICE, GSA, NSA, and Secret Service.” “Not a smidgen of corruption” is not a viable campaign theme. No candidate even tried that.
Why don’t Sens. Landrieu, Pryor, and Udall play up their support for the Obama economy?
We did not see a candidate commercial like the following: “I was instrumental in keeping interest rates at zero percent for six years. I made sure that we borrowed another $7 trillion and oversaw the $1 trillion stimulus. We kept GDP above 1% and unemployment below 7%.” Apparently avoiding a depression is not felt to be an economic renaissance, and thus not a winning message.
How about Democratic ads trumpeting new big-ticket government initiatives? …
Remember “Julia?” Kevin Williamson says she lost last week.
A funny thing happened in the “war on women” — Mia Love and Joni Ernst won, Wendy Davis and Sandra Fluke lost. The representative who will be the youngest woman ever to have served in Congress, Elise Stefanik, is a Republican who won a formerly Democratic seat — not in Oklahoma or Texas but in New York. Senator-elect Ernst is a 21-year veteran of the Army Reserve and National Guard who served overseas during the Iraq war; Representative-elect Love, a daughter of Haitian immigrants who came to the United States fleeing the Tonton Macoutes, is a former city councilman and mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah.
The difference could not be more dramatic: The Democrats’ vision of an American woman’s life was best expressed in the Obama campaign’s insipid “Julia” cartoons, in which a faceless, featureless woman at every crossroads in her life turns to the federal government, as personified by Barack Obama, for succor and support. From negotiating a salary to managing her pregnancy, Julia cannot do anything for herself — at every turn, she is reminded that she enjoys political patronage “under President Obama,” in the campaign’s psychosexually fraught and insistently reiterated phrase. So much for the Democrats. And the Republican women of 2014? They helped fight wars and made new lives for themselves on foreign shores. They were women who ran for office on policy platforms, not on their uteruses. …
Peter Wehner comments on the GOP wave.
… There are plenty of reasons for Republicans to be buoyed. They have very impressive people, including people in their ’30s and ’40s, at every level. Of the two parties, the GOP seems to be the one of greater energy and ideas. The Democratic Party, and liberalism more broadly, seems stale, aging, and exhausted. And of course the GOP has now strung together massive, back-to-back midterm wins. But it’s still worth keeping in mind that Republicans had spectacular showings in 1994 and 2010–and they were defeated by rather large margins in the presidential races two years after those wins. The danger is that a victory like the one Republicans experienced on Tuesday creates a false dawn, a sense of false confidence. Winning midterms elections is important; but midterm elections are different than presidential elections. The GOP still has repair work to do and things to build on. But progress is being made–and the results of this week’s election are the best evidence of that fact.
WSJ’s Allysia Finley says “teacher’s unions flunked their mid-terms.”
… Reformers like Republican Govs. Rick Snyder in Michigan, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Nathan Deal in Georgia and Sam Brownback in Kansas did cut through a torrent of negative union ads and prevailed.
Teachers unions this election provided an object lesson in how to lie with statistics by lambasting school reformers across the country for “cutting” education spending. According to one ad, Mr. Brownback signed the “largest single cut to education in Kansas history.” Florida Gov. Rick Scott stood accused of taking a $1.3 billion sledgehammer to schools, and Mr. Snyder of slashing $1 billion from education.
Yet in Kansas, total per pupil spending has increased to $12,960 from $12,283 since Mr. Brownback was elected in 2010, despite a $412 per pupil decline in federal aid. Mr. Snyder has increased education spending by $660 per student over his four-year tenure, while Mr. Scott has increased annual state funding for schools by 20%—nearly $2 billion—over the past four years.
The teachers unions also whacked Mr. Scott for expanding private-school scholarships for low-income kids, eliminating tenure, and linking pay to performance for new teachers. “Florida’s private-school voucher programs are a risky experiment that gambles taxpayers’ money and children’s lives,” Florida Education Association vice president Joanne McCall warned in a local newspaper op-ed. “Voucher schools are largely unregulated.”
So far as we know, there have been no reports in Florida of death-by-voucher. …
More on the union losses from the Washington Post. There was an interesting contest in CA where two Dems squared off for state schools superintendent. The reformer was narrowly beaten by the old pol in a race that served as a metaphor for the problems facing Democrats throughout the country.
… And in the white-hot battle in California for state schools superintendent, the union’s choice, Tom Torlakson (D), was narrowly reelected, beating back Marshall Tuck (D) by 52 percent to 48 percent.
While both are Democrats, they differ over the best way to improve public education, reflecting a schism within the national Democratic Party. Torlakson pushed for more investment in public schools, does not believe student test scores should be used to assess teachers, and said charter schools need more oversight. Tuck supports expansion of public charter schools, argued for more accountability for teachers and said California’s teacher tenure laws are an obstacle to improving schools.
The down-ballot contest generated $30 million in spending, three times as much as the race for governor, with money pouring in from around the country. Torlakson received heavy support from teachers unions while Tuck had the backing of billionaire philanthropists such as Bloomberg, the heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. …