by Scott Walker
“Why are these people so upset with you?” Tonette demanded to know. “You got what you wanted. Why are you pushing this?”
I had just assumed that Tonette understood why our reforms were necessary. The fact that she didn’t was a wake-up call to me. If my own wife didn’t see why we needed to change collective bargaining, how could I expect the voters of Wisconsin to see it? I was obviously doing a lousy job of explaining our reforms.
Before we had introduced Act 10, we had methodically gone through every aspect of our plan of action with my cabinet. We had the legislative plan mapped out to the smallest detail. We had prepared for every contingency—even down to having the National Guard at the ready to take over state prisons if corrections officers went on strike. But the one thing we had not done was prepare the people of Wisconsin for the changes we were about to enact.
Usually in government, politicians talk about problems but never fix them. My mistake was, in my eagerness to get busy fixing the problems of our state, I didn’t spend enough time laying out what they were to the people of the state. We did not do enough to help people understand why we had chosen this path, how collective bargaining was hurting schools and local governments, and why reforming it was the only way to get our fiscal house in order. I figured the people of Wisconsin had just elected me to make bold changes, and had sent me to Madison backed by strong Republican majorities in both houses—so they expected us to go ahead take bold action.
I was elected based on a core set of ideas. I promised to balance the budget. I promised to do it without tricks and gimmicks. I promised to do it without raising taxes. I promised to do it in a way that improved the economy and fostered job creation. If I was to keep all those promises, what other choice was there?
I did what I had to do to keep my promises and balance our budget. I remembered how in 2009, when I was Milwaukee County executive, Governor Doyle announced that he was cutting funding for education and local government by 5 percent.1 The governor didn’t give us any tools we could use to make up for the lost aid through efficiencies. I was already struggling to close a $90 million budget shortfall, and trying any reforms I could to save jobs and avoid layoffs. But under collective bargaining, the unions were able to block us from doing so. The result was that other local officials and I had to lay off thousands of teachers and public workers in order to close the budget gap and make up for the lost aid from the state.
When I became governor, and had to make even deeper cuts in aid to schools and local governments, I knew what the effects of these cuts would be on local officials if we did not give them tools to make up for the lost funding. I was determined not to put them in the same position Governor Doyle had put me in a few years before.
If the protests over collective bargaining reform were bad, just imagine the blowback I would have gotten if I had cut a billion dollars from education and local government and had not reformed collective bargaining. If I had cut all that money from schools and local governments without giving them the tools to replace those lost funds, education and local services across our state would have been devastated—and the public would have been outraged. I would have been recalled from office—and rightly so.
I knew I was doing the right thing, but I had not taken the time to explain why it was the right thing to do. I wish that on my first day in office I’d told the taxpayers how, under collective bargaining, school districts were forced to buy health insurance from just one company that happened to be affiliated with the teachers union—and that it cost them tens of millions of dollars more than it had to because there was no competition. The citizens would have told me to go ahead and fix the problem. I wish I had pointed out that because of overtime rules in a collective bargaining agreement, there were bus drivers in the City of Madison who made more than the mayor. If I had explained these things, the people would have said to me: “Fix it.”
But I had not done that. Now the Democrats and union activists were charging that I wanted to take away workers “rights” and my fellow citizens (including my own wife) were asking, “Why has he got these folks all upset?” I had to start making the case for our reforms, or I would lose the citizens of our state.
I started with the citizen closest to me. Tonette is an excellent political barometer for me because she is like a lot of Wisconsin voters—smart and well read but focused on things other than politics. Despite being married to me, her life is centered not on events in Madison but on raising our two sons, her work at the American Lung Association, and her volunteer work with teens and young adults recovering from substance abuse addictions. She is your typical informed voter.
Now here she was, demanding to know: “Why are these protesters in front of our house? Why is this so important that it is worth all this grief to our family?” We talked it over and prayed about it together. Eventually, I convinced her that our reforms were a necessary course of action and worth the pain and grief they were causing our family. That gave me hope. If I could convince Tonette, I could probably convince most of our citizens as well.
Little did Tonette know at the time how much worse things were about to get.
The protests frayed her nerves. One night, Tonette went downstairs to get something. While she was in the kitchen, I opened the door to our bedroom and saw a bat flying around in the air. I yelled to warn her not to come into the room and to ask security to bring up a broom. She did not hear me mention the bat. She was certain that a protester had broken into the house and was trying to kill me. She told me afterward that she was thinking, “Oh my God, they got him. It’s over.” Tonette actually thought that a protestor had attacked me in our own house. That’s how intense it was during these days.
At Christmastime in 2011, our staff put together a book with pictures of the most awful signs the protesters had carried comparing me to Hitler and Hosni Mubarak, and calling for me to be recalled, impeached, and much worse. I smiled as I flipped through the volume, but the pictures brought tears to Tonette’s eyes.
“Now when we’re old and sitting in our rockers, we can look back and remember how one hundred thousand people hated you,” she said.
The experience taught me an important lesson: It is always so much harder to see a loved one attacked than to be the one under attack.
Like most spouses, Tonette is generally more hurt by things said against me than I am. But don’t think for a moment they got the best of her. I’m tough, but Tonette is even tougher.
In the 1980s, her first husband died of kidney failure, and her brother (and only sibling) died of bone marrow cancer. Both had been terminally ill for some time.
Years later her mother, Geri, was diagnosed with a level 4 brain tumor. She left her job to help take care of her mother. Geri made it another two years, but the cancer finally won. Tonette’s aunt Annette died about the same time. They were close because Annette was much younger than Tonette’s father. We were at the hospital when she passed away.
Then Tonette’s father got COPD, a lung disease that causes the airways to narrow over time. Tony lasted about a dozen years. He had to use oxygen and had many visits to the hospital. We took him into the hospital yet again on New Year’s Eve in 2012. He spent a month in the ICU and another month in rehab. Eventually, we moved him into an assisted living apartment near our home in Wauwatosa. Unfortunately, he went back into the hospital on the eve of Easter, and died that Sunday.
The protests and recalls were tough on Tonette, but none of that was as tough as the losses she has experienced throughout her life. She is strong. Her strength, and her wisdom, strengthened me.
Tonette was my rock throughout the fight over Act 10. It was Tonette who showed me I was losing the argument over collective bargaining. And it was Tonette who showed me that if I got out there and explained myself, we could prevail.
But I would have to start making the effort.
CHAPTER 11
“The Power
of Humility, the Burden of Pride”
On Tuesday, February 22, I decided to go over the heads of the press and take my case directly to the citizens of our state. We scheduled a televised fireside address from the capitol. It was a chance to counter the passions of the protesters and personally explain why collective bargaining reform was necessary.
I began by making clear my respect for public workers. “In 1985, when I was a high school junior in the small town of Delavan, I was inspired to pursue public service after I attended the American Legion’s Badger Boys State program,” I said. “Tonight, I thank the three hundred thousand–plus state and local government employees who showed up for work today and did their jobs well. We appreciate it. If you take only one message away tonight, it’s that we all respect the work that you do.”
I then went on to explain why our reforms were necessary:
Now, some have questioned why we have to reform collective bargaining to balance the budget. The answer is simple: the system is broken. It costs taxpayers serious money—particularly at the local level. As a former county official, I know that firsthand.
For years, I tried to use modest changes in pension and health insurance contributions as a means of balancing our budget without massive layoffs or furloughs. On nearly every occasion, the local unions (empowered by collective bargaining agreements) told me to go ahead and lay off workers. That’s not acceptable to me.
Here’s another example: In Wisconsin, many local school districts are required to buy their health insurance through the WEA Trust (which is the state teachers union’s company). When our bill passes, these school districts can opt to switch into the state plan and save $68 million per year. Those savings could be used to pay for more teachers and put more money into the classroom to help our kids.
I also urged the Democratic senators to come home: “Do the job you were elected to do. You don’t have to like the outcome, or even vote yes, but as part of the world’s greatest democracy, you should be here, in Madison, at the capitol.”
It was a good evening, and I felt we had made progress. The speech was broadcast live across the state and made front-page news the next morning. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had a big photo of me delivering the address with a banner headline that read “WALKER STATES HIS CASE.”
But unbeknownst to me, I had done something stupid that wiped out any positive effect.
The morning of the fireside speech, after a week or more of insistent pleas, my staff had arranged for me to take a call from David Koch, the billionaire industrialist who with his brother Charles had founded the conservative grassroots organization Americans for Prosperity. For some reason, I had hesitated taking the call. We were so busy trying to pass the bill, I did not want any distractions from that effort. But my staff finally convinced me by pointing out that Mr. Koch’s company owns Georgia Pacific in Green Bay, which, with more than two thousand workers, was one of Wisconsin’s largest employers. I was told that he was concerned about the impact of the protests on the business climate in the state. Against my better instincts, I took the call.
I had never spoken with Mr. Koch before so I didn’t know what to expect. The call started out seeming fairly normal, but eventually it got odd. At some point it got uncomfortable (like when he made a lewd comment about Morning Joe cohost Mika Brzezinski), and I looked for a way to get off the call. After I hung up, I thought nothing more about it.
The next morning, my staff came in and told me that the caller had not been David Koch at all, but a prankster named Ian Murphy. The call had been taped and posted online and now the national media was all over it.
Murphy was immediately celebrated by union activists for supposedly “exposing” my ties to the Koch brothers and proving that I was doing their bidding. If anything, his call proved the opposite. It showed that I had never spoken to David Koch before in my life. I couldn’t even recognize the guy’s voice. If I had really been doing Koch’s bidding, I would have recognized immediately that it was not Koch on the other end of the line. Instead, I spoke to the fake Koch at length.
Moreover, we were getting killed in the “air war” with the unions vastly outspending us for paid advertising. The situation was so bad that my chief political adviser, R. J. Johnson, called the Wisconsin airwaves a “no fly zone” for us, such was the union saturation. If we had been in league with the Koch brothers, that would not have been the case. The call made Murphy something of a celebrity, and Democrats later enlisted him to campaign against me and build support for my recall. He was later photographed hobnobbing with some of the Democratic senators who had fled the state,1 and Democratic officials appeared with him at union rallies.2 They should have chosen their company more carefully. It emerged that in 2008, Murphy had written a disgusting essay for an alternative paper in Buffalo titled “[EXPLETIVE] the troops,”3 in which he declared: “So 4,000 rubes are dead. Cry me the Tigris. Another 30,000 have been seriously wounded. Boo-[EXPLETIVE]-hoo. They got what they asked for—and cool robotic limbs, too. . . . As a society, we need to discard our blind deference to military service. There’s nothing admirable about volunteering to murder people.”4 Pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the guy.
Still, I was not as mad at him as I was at myself. Listening to my voice on the recording of the call, my heart sank. I came across as pompous and full of myself. I bragged about my television appearances: “We’ve had all the national shows,” I told the fake Koch. “We were on Hannity last night, I did Good Morning America and the Today Show and all that sort of stuff, was on Morning Joe this morning. We’ve done Greta [Van Susteren]. We’re going to keep getting our message out; Mark Levin last night. And I gotta tell you, the response around the country has been phenomenal.” But the worst moment came when the prankster asked about whether we’d considered putting agitators in the crowd. “What we were thinking about the crowd was, uh, was planting some troublemakers,” he said. I did not want to insult Mr. Koch by saying that we would never do something so stupid. So instead, I stammered:
You know, well, the only problem with that—because we thought about that. The problem with—my only gut reaction to that would be, right now the lawmakers I’ve talked to have just completely had it with them. The public is not really fond of this. The teacher’s union did some polling and focus groups I think and found out that the public turned on them the minute they closed school down on them for a couple of days. The guys we’ve got left are largely from out of state and I keep dismissing it in all my press comments, saying ehh, they’re mostly from out of state. My only fear would be if there’s a ruckus caused is that would scare the public into thinking maybe the governor has to settle to avoid all these problems. You know, whereas I’ve said, hey, we can handle this, people can protest, this is Madison, you know, full of the sixties liberals. Let ’em protest. It’s not going to affect us. And as long as we go back to our homes and the majority of people are telling us we’re doing the right thing, let ’em protest all they want. So that’s my gut reaction. I think it’s actually good if they’re constant, they’re noisy, but they’re quiet, nothing happens. Sooner or later the media stops finding them interesting.5
It was a really dumb thing to say. The fact is we never—never—considered putting “troublemakers” in the crowd to discredit the protesters. The unions were doing a good enough job of that on their own with the agitators they were bringing in from outside the state. But I had made it seem like we had. Now the press was all over the “we thought about that” line. Who had suggested it? How seriously did I consider it?
My staff wanted to know what I was going to do in response. My answer was simple: Schedule a press conference and take it on directly.
So I stepped out into the Governor’s Conference Room, where I held daily press conferences, and faced a room full of state and national reporters. I took a deep breath and stepped up to the podium. When the inevitable question came, I acknowled
ged that it was me on the call, and that it was stupid, but that what I had said wasn’t inconsistent with anything I said at the podium every day. Then I opened it to questions, and took my beating.
I got through it, but that press conference was one of my toughest days. I felt like an idiot. Sure, I was upset that my staff had let the call get through to my office, making me look so silly. But ultimately, I was responsible for what I said and how I came across.
Only later did I realize that God had a plan for me with that episode.
In my office is a devotional book on leadership by John Maxwell that I read for its daily message. The day we learned the call had been a prank, we had been so busy that I never had a chance to pick it up. After my press conference, when I had a moment to catch my breath, I opened up the book.
The title for that day was: “The power of humility, the burden of pride.”
I looked up and said, “I hear you, Lord.”
Up to that point the national media had been all over our story. Conservative circles were writing and saying some pretty nice things about my political future. We were getting all sorts of abuse from the protesters and the mainstream media, so the accolades we were getting nationally were certainly encouraging. But it got to the point where I was reading many of the columns each night and getting pretty caught up in it all. Slowly, it was becoming too much about me.
My parents had taught me that the only time you get into trouble in life is when you lose your perspective and stop doing things for the right reasons. That’s why that devotion for February 23 was so important. God was sending me a clear message to not do things for personal glory or fame. It was a turning point that helped me in future challenges, helped me stay focused on the people I was elected to serve, and reminded me of God’s abundant grace and the paramount need to stay humble.