Walker Attempts Damage Control And Fails

This sure hasn't been a good day for Scott Walker.

First he dares and double dares the State into taking over the program he can't run. The State then calls him on his bluff, leaving him look like the incompetent boob that he is.

He then whines that it isn't his fault. He blames it on the State short-funding the program. In that aspect, he is correct. But, he still can't use that as an excuse, for a number of reasons:

• He knew of the State's historical trend to underfund Milwaukee County services. He knew this because he consistently voted to do the very same thing when he was in the state legislature.
• If he felt that this was such a serious issue, why wasn't he getting in contact with Madison, trying to get the extra funding? Was it because he has no one in his corner outside of a few in Waukesha and Washington Counties? Or was it because he was too busy on his own junkets to Washington, D.C. to say goodbye to Bush? Or was it that he was just too gosh darn busy campaigning to actually be bothered with doing his job?
• This call center had been fully funded to have 25 full time workers in it. The money was there. He willfully chose not to fill those positions, thereby artificially causing the crisis himself. He is the only one that had that responsibility. The County Board gave him the funding to do it. There was enough time to do it. He just refused to do it. And I am still waiting for him to explain what he did with the money that should have gone to filling those positions.
• Any shortage from the State pales in comparison to the shortage cause by most of his decisions, including appointing his campaign manager/crony as the head of Economic Development, and having that come up $7 million short.

Not only did the State call him on his bluff, but they treated him with all of the same respect he afforded them. This is evidenced by this little snippet (emphasis mine):

Timberlake announced the state takeover following a series of closed door meetings with county supervisors. The move was prompted by administrative bottlenecks resulting in unfair benefit denials, she said.

"Milwaukee County has demonstrated a sustained inability to successfully provide services to its (poor) customers," Timberlake said in a letter to Walker.

Seeing that his bluff had been called, he tried to rally his lackeys from the County Board to run a decoy maneuver, trying to distract the public's attention from his failure to perform his duties. I don't understand how Walker could believe that a $4,000 trip to represent the County and actually do the County's business could possibly compare to his multimillion dollar flop.

Walker then reaches the desperation point when he makes this laughable claim:

Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker said today the announced state takeover of county public assistance programs had the scent of politics to it.

Walker, a likely Republican candidate for governor in 2010, said Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle was "trying to create an issue and deflect blame for the problems the state has had."

I could do the ridiculousness of this statement more than the comment left by Recess Supervisor in a thread to Owen Robinson's failed attempt to defend Walker:

Walker whores himself around yesterday and talks about what a “terrible partner” the state is in managing these programs and how he’d rather the state take them over. So the next day (a day when you apparently bother to read the MJS website), Doyle gives Walker what he asks for and has Karen Timberlake b-slap Walker upside the head for being an idiot. And you want to sit here and criticize Doyle for being political but not Walker?

Classic! Doyle does what Walker asks him to do and Owen blames Doyle for being political. Doyle was just responding to a terrible, terrible bluff by that college dropout of a County Exec Milwaukee parades around.

Oh, and trust me when I say that nobody in Team Doyle is worried about Scott Walker. He’s a one-issue charlatan from Milwaukee County who got lukewarm to terrible reviews outstate when he tried running against Green two years ago. If the GOP is dumb enough to run Scott Walker, Jim Doyle is coasting into a fourth third. [capper here: R.S. puts up another comment to correct fourth third to third term]

'Nuff said.