called upon to try to explain away the fact that the corporate overlord's darling, Scott Walker, is continuing to sink in the polls and trails his opponent, Mary Burke, by two points.
Schneider tries to do just that by in a column showing some seriously bizarre and disjointed thinking by comparing Walker to Winston Churchill and unions to Nazis. (There apparently isn't a law that the Teapublicans aren't willing to break, even Godwin's Law.)
However, Schneider inadvertently makes an interesting and very telling confession in his propaganda piece:
But without the cacophonous protests, Walker's post-recall gains aren't as visible as they were when he was mixing it up on the public stage every day. Walker's subsequent budget, while containing large income tax cuts, was a fairly quiet proposal, leaving feathers around the state comparatively unruffled. In the absence of angry demonstrations, Walker became just another GOP governor in a Democratic-leaning state that President Barack Obama won by seven percentage points in 2012.In other words, Schneider is admitting that Walker is losing because he cannot run on his record, that he needs an enemy to disparage and use as a distraction. Indeed, in the past week alone, Walker and his supporters have tried to tie Burke to the unions (which is laughable at best), to former governor Jim Doyle and to Barack Obama - all of the usual bogeymen that the right likes to use to fire up their base.
And that is why, according to the Marquette Law School poll released last week, Walker finds himself in a dead heat in his re-election campaign. The race, which currently stands at a butt-naked tie, now has become "Republican in a can" vs. "ACME Democrat."
It's also nothing new. Walker used the unions for his straw man arguments during his first (successful) run for
governor. He did this because he could not run on his record as Milwaukee County Executive. Under Walker's watch, Milwaukee was in a constant state of decline, from county buildings falling apart to the abuse of the mentally ill to depriving the poor of needed services.
As governor, Walker's record is even worse. He has failed utterly in creating jobs and he has all but tanked the economy. Not only has Walker attacked the rights of workers, but those of minorities, women, children and voters. He has attacked the poor by raising their taxes and cutting their life saving benefits. He is in the middle of his second corruption investigation, which recently revealed that he was indeed illegally collaborating with dark money groups to buy his way through the recalls.
Is it any wonder that Walker and his allies are flailing around for an bogeyman that they can use to take the heat off of his own failures?
Schneider said that Walker needs a foil to win in November. I would agree in the sense that Walker cannot win standing on his own record. The question is there a foil big enough to distract from all of Walker's foibles?