Eric Tadsen
There are those who are concerned about the potential of Scott Walker as president because of what he believes in. But a worse problem might be that the man believes in nothing.
Walker sheds policy positions like a snake sheds its skin. There’s an effortlessness about it that is chilling. He sounds reasonable on immigration and reproductive rights when a more moderate position suits his reelection campaign for governor of a blue state. Then, with reelection secured, he moves hard right on both issues to satisfy red-meat conservatives in the Republican presidential primaries.
Back in 2010, candidate Walker was open to the idea of high-speed rail until one of his primary opponents, Mark Neumann, went on talk radio and blasted it. The very next day Walker took an uncompromising position against it.
Recently, when asked about an exception for rape and incest in a bill banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, Walker said he didn’t care. He’d sign the bill either way. And when Assembly Speaker Robin Vos laid down a negotiating marker on the state transportation budget, suggesting that the Legislature might cut all borrowing for road building, Walker said he’d sign that too. Never mind that he had just proposed a 30% increase in road borrowing in February. A lot more bonding for roads, no bonding for roads. Whatever.
What has become clear is that Scott Walker governs with a shrug. He just doesn’t care what the results of his policies are as long as they help him fulfill his next political ambition.
The transportation budget is especially revealing and especially relevant at the moment, since it’s one of the primary things standing between us and a completed state budget process. The state faces a growing gap between what the gas tax and other revenue sources generate and the need to repair roads. How that problem gets resolved should be of great interest to a governor. But Walker simply took the easiest way out — he just put it all on the state credit card.
Legislative Republicans, to their credit, realize this is bad public policy and not in the long-run interest of the state. They could probably gather the votes to approve some kind of transportation tax increase if the governor would support it. But instead Walker has shut down that option flatly. A tax increase — even one that helped build infrastructure and which was more responsible than borrowing for it — would not play well in the primaries.
So, when Vos made what would usually be a smart political move by calling Walker on what should have been a bluff, Walker outmaneuvered him, true to form, with a shrug.
Normally people come to the table with competing agendas. Each side wants something. And, in the best-case scenario, each side has the long-term interests of the state at heart. But how do you negotiate with a guy who just doesn’t care?
When you have no center you may be a hollow person but you also make yourself extremely dangerous politically. Virtually every politician I know has had to grapple with moments where what he believed was best for his constituents conflicted with what he knew was good politics. Walker seems to lack that sense completely. He coldly goes with the best politics for the moment, even when that dictates a complete reversal of the position he might have taken the day before.
Of the cast of scary characters running for president on the Republican side, Rick Santorum or Mike Huckabee might be thought of as the scariest. Clear-eyed evangelicals, you could imagine either one of them pressing the nuclear button if they believed the Bible told them it was time to order up Armageddon. But at least we’d all die with the comforting knowledge that it was the result of what one crazy man sincerely believed. Walker might do it if he thought Armageddon might poll well with the survivors.
