by Scott Walker
Teachers like Kristi weren’t the only ones confronted with union intimidation. The Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, a 527 group backed by union allies, sent intimidating letters to Wisconsin voters, listing their neighbors and whether they had voted in recent elections. The letter declared: “The chart shows the names of some of your neighbors, showing which have voted in the past. . . . After the June 5th election, public records will tell everyone who voted and who didn’t.”8
Businesses got threatening letters as well. After Act 10 passed, the Wall Street Journal reported on one letter from AFL-CIO Council 24 field representative Jim Parrett9 addressed “DEAR UNION GROVE AREA OWNER/MANAGER.”10 It read:
It is unfortunate that you have chosen “not” to support public workers’ rights in Wisconsin. In recent weeks you have been offered a sign(s) by a public employee(s) who works in one of the state facilities in the Union Grove area. These signs simply said “This Business Supports Workers Rights,” a simple, subtle and we believe non-controversial statement giving the facts at this time. . . . [W]e’d ask that you reconsider taking a sign and stance in support of public employees in this community. Failure to do so will leave us no choice but do [sic] a public boycott of your business. And sorry, neutral means ‘no’ to those who work for the largest employer in the area and are union members.11
The threat was not “subtle” at all. Neutrality was not an option. Tow the union line, or we’ll ruin your business.
Another threatening letter was uncovered and posted online by conservative radio host Charlie Sykes. It came from Jim Palmer, head of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, and was signed by representatives of the Professional Fire Fighters, the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 311, the Dane County Deputy Sheriffs Association, and the Madison Professional Police Officers Association, among other organizations. It read:
The undersigned groups would like your company to publicly oppose Governor Walker’s efforts to virtually eliminate collective bargaining for public employees in Wisconsin. While we appreciate that you may need some time to consider this request, we ask for your response by March 17. In the event that you do not respond to this request by that date, we will assume that you stand with Governor Walker and against the teachers, nurses, police officers, fire fighters, and other dedicated public employees who serve our communities. In the event that you cannot support this effort to save collective bargaining, please be advised that the undersigned will publicly and formally boycott the goods and services provided by your company.12
The message was clear: Take your time and think it over—but not too much time. If you do not agree to support us by a certain date, we will do everything in our power to destroy your business and take away your livelihood.
Worst of all, the threat was coming from representatives of the police and firefighters responsible for protecting the business receiving the letter. Recipients would be excused if they wondered whether they would get a quick response to calls for help from police and firefighters if they failed to respond or put anti-Walker signs in their windows. As Sykes put it, the message seemed to be: “That’s a nice business you got there. Pity if anything were to happen to it if, say, you didn’t toe the line and denounce Governor Walker like we’re asking nice-like.”13
It was sad that the unions had stooped to threatening hardworking Wisconsinites to support them. “Having lost their fight in the legislature,” the Wall Street Journal declared, “Wisconsin unions are now getting out the steel pipes for those who don’t step lively to their cause.”14
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As word of the success of our education reforms spread, property tax bills started arriving in mailboxes throughout Wisconsin in early December. Since 1998, property tax increases in Wisconsin had become as dependable as winter snow—rising by 43 percent.
But this year, the tax bills contained an early Christmas present: Property taxes went down for the first time in over a decade.15
Without our reforms, property taxes would have risen by an average of $700 over the course of the biennium for the average taxpayer. Instead, thanks to Act 10, they declined on a median-valued home.
Suddenly, voters saw that not only were their kids’ schools the same or better and that local services had not been decimated, but now they also had more money in their pockets. As the Wall Street Journal put it, “The unions said such policies would lead to the decline and fall of civilization, but the only things that are falling are tax collections.”16
The first day of school, and now the arrival of property tax bills, had changed the political dynamic in Wisconsin.
Yet despite the good news and the ads we ran, my standing in the polls did not rise. The fight over Act 10 had bitterly divided our state in ways no previous political debate ever had. To this day, there are people who no longer speak to each other because of it. Wisconsinites were happy with the results of our reforms, but many were still angry about how we got there.
Some of my advisers argued that I should apologize to the state. I could not do that. We had done the right thing. Apologizing would have been dishonest. Moreover, it would have dispirited those who were standing with us because we stood on principle. I was not going to do it.
Still, I became convinced voters needed to hear directly from me. They needed to hear me explain why we did what we did, how our reforms had helped our state turn a corner, and that Wisconsin was better off despite all the rancor—that this divisive fight had not been for nothing.
So I decided to speak directly to the people of our state. We cut a series of ads in which I looked straight into the camera and explained the changes we made and how they were working.
On January 3, we ran the first ad called “Results.” I said:
Hi, I’m Scott Walker. When I ran for governor, I promised to rein in spending, eliminate the deficit and hold the line on taxes. And you know what? That’s exactly what we did. We had to make some tough decisions, but thankfully, we wiped out a $3.6 billion dollar deficit without raising taxes. And because government workers are now contributing to their health and pension benefits, like most people do, we saved the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and kept thousands of teachers, firefighters, and police officers on the job. In the three years before I took office, Wisconsin lost 150,000 jobs, but now, well, employer confidence is up, and since the start of the year, Wisconsin has added thousands of new jobs. Instead of going back to the days of billion-dollar budget deficits, double-digit tax increases, and record job loss, let’s keep moving Wisconsin forward.
The effect was nearly instantaneous. On December 19, 2011, our internal polls had showed me losing the recall by an eleven-point margin, 54-43 percent.
By January 23, 2012, after three weeks on the air with the new ad, we pulled ahead for the first time, 47–46.
It was not because I was so eloquent or persuasive. Had I put up the exact same ads three months earlier, they would have bombed. Only after people in Wisconsin had seen with their own eyes, and felt with their own wallets, that our reforms were working—only then were they ready to listen to me explain why we had done what we had done.
After that, the debate over collective bargaining was essentially over. As the campaign progressed, collective bargaining faded as the driving issue—even for Democrats. In 2010, the Obama administration recruited Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett to run against me, and now he was running again for the Democratic nomination in the recall election. But the unions now opposed him. Why? Because while Mayor Barrett promised to do everything in his power to restore collective bargaining, he would not promise to veto any budget that failed to repeal Act 10. The unions’ handpicked candidate, former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk, did promise such a veto. Since the GOP would likely still control at least one legislative chamber after the recall, her veto threat promised another bruising showdown over collective bargaining that no one in Wisconsin wanted.
Barr
ett also said he would keep public employee contributions to health care and pensions at the new, higher levels we had set, while Falk promised to open the issue up again in restored union negotiations.17 There was very little support in Wisconsin to restore public workers’ benefits to their generous, pre–Act 10 levels.
So the unions burned millions of dollars on the Falk-Barrett primary—money they could have instead held in reserve to use against us. In the end, Barrett defeated Falk by a whopping 58-34 percent. The twenty-four-point margin showed that even Democrats were not relishing another legislative showdown over Act 10.
Another remarkable thing happened on primary day. I faced no real opponent in the GOP primary (save for a fake Republican the protesters ran against me to make sure GOP voters did not cross over to vote in their primary). Yet when the votes were tallied, I still received more votes than Barrett and Falk combined. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called it “an unexpected turnout bomb.”18
What made it all the more amazing was that we had done almost nothing to turn out our voters. Our supporters came to the polls because, after enduring the protests and occupations, it was their first chance to have their say on the matter. Republicans did not come down to Capitol Square to demonstrate their support for our reforms with drums and bullhorns; they demonstrated their support at the polls instead.
The turnout showed that our base was not just excited, they were champing at the bit for the chance to make their voices heard.
Our reforms had energized GOP primary voters, while Democratic primary voters rejected the union’s handpicked candidate who promised to make the campaign a referendum on Act 10.
But the best evidence our reforms had worked was this: Once Mayor Barrett had secured his party’s nomination, he essentially stopped talking about Act 10 altogether. As the Wall Street Journal put it, “Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett has made his campaign chiefly about jobs, women’s rights, the environment, community safety, and especially an investigation into the conduct of aides who worked for Mr. Walker when he was Milwaukee County executive. Mr. Barrett is running on everything except the collective bargaining reforms.”19
There was a reason for that: The polls had shifted in our favor. Back in March 2011, a Rasmussen poll showed that voters opposed attempts to “weaken the collective bargaining rights of state employees” by a margin of 52 of 39 percent.20 Now, in May 2012, the numbers had flipped. A Marquette University Law School poll21 found that Wisconsin voters favored “limiting collective bargaining for most public employees” by a margin of 55 to 41 percent. A Reason-Rupe poll found that more than 70 percent supported our changes requiring public workers to contribute to their pensions and pay more for their health care premiums.22
Indeed, 57 percent said we should not have exempted police and firefighters.
Even among those who opposed me, collective bargaining was not the driving issue. As Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard reported, “A recent poll of Wisconsin Democrats found that just 12 percent of those surveyed said ‘restoring collective bargaining rights of public employees’ was the most important reason to remove Walker, behind three other choices.”23
A May 13, 2012, strategy memo from Democratic Party chairman Mike Tate titled “Strategic Plan to Defeat Scott Walker” did not so much as mention collective bargaining. Indeed, a Democratic Party spokesman told the left-wing journal Mother Jones that the “Democrats’ anti-Walker strategy will center on two key issues: the secret ‘John Doe’ investigation targeting Walker aides and what Democrats calls [sic] Walker’s ‘war on women.’”24
In other words, we had won the collective bargaining debate and turned public opinion around.
During the last few months of the recall campaign, I would get up in front of crowds at rallies and ask, “Does anyone remember what this recall was all about?”
Collective bargaining had been the reason for the recall. But now our reforms were so popular that my opponent did not even dare to mention them.
Mayor Barrett may not have wanted to talk about our reforms, but I relished the chance to do so. I welcomed the chance to talk about how Act 10 was helping us balance the state budget while improving education and local government. I welcomed the chance to talk about how our reforms were lowering property taxes and leaving more money in the pockets of our citizens. I welcomed the chance to talk about how, when given a free choice, tens of thousands of our citizens had chosen to leave the unions and keep their dues. I welcomed the chance to talk about the layoffs we had avoided because of our reforms and the jobs we created by improving the business climate in our state.
I welcomed the recall. I was ready to make our case.
CHAPTER 20
P.O.T.U.S. Is M.I.A.
When the protests began, it seemed like every Democratic politician, union activist, and B-list celebrity had made an appearance in Wisconsin. But now, with recall day fast approaching, there was one politician whose absence was becoming more glaring by the day—someone who had promised to stand with the unions but now was nowhere to be found:
President Obama was missing in action.
In December 2010, soon after my election, I traveled to Washington for a meeting with the other new governors. At Blair House, I met President Obama for the first time and we went right to the heart of the issue that divided us: the Packers and the Bears. Eventually, we found an issue on which we could agree: wanting to defeat the Vikings.
Not long after that meeting, the Packers won the NFC championship against—you guessed it—da Bears. When President Obama came to Wisconsin for a stop at Orion Energy Systems on January 25, I was waiting for him at the bottom of the steps with a gift—a Packers jersey that read “Obama 1.”
As he bounded down from Air Force One and spotted the jersey, the president grinned and said, “I knew you would rub it in, Walker.”
It was the last time we would see him in Wisconsin for a while.
The following month, I turned down a chance to attend a meeting of the National Governors Association and a dinner at the White House. With fourteen senators hiding outside the state and holding up the people’s business, I didn’t think it was the right time for me to travel to Washington. But that did not stop the president from taking a shot at me during a lunch with the assembled governors. My friend New Jersey governor Chris Christie called to tell me about it. “It does no one any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified or their rights are infringed upon,” Obama declared.1
The president also took a shot at me during an interview with a Milwaukee television station calling our reforms “an assault on unions.”
Some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin, where you’re just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally seems like more of an assault on unions. And I think it’s very important for us to understand that public employees, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends. These are folks who are teachers and they’re firefighters and they’re social workers and they’re police officers. They make a lot of sacrifices and make a big contribution. And I think it’s important not to vilify them or to suggest that somehow all these budget problems are due to public employees.2
Of course, we had not “vilified” anyone. If anything, I had bent over backward to avoid criticizing public workers. Moreover, we were giving our public workers in Wisconsin a much better deal than President Obama gives most federal workers in Washington, D.C.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had once said that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted in the public service.”3 And ever since 1978, when President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Civil Service Reform Act, collective bargaining for federal employees has been severely limited. Today, federal workers cannot bargain for benefits or wages, and cannot be compelled to join a union or pay union dues. I don’t recall President Obama suggesting that they were being abused in any way, o
r lifting a finger to right this supposed injustice. To the contrary, Obama unilaterally froze their pay4—and he didn’t have to get permission from a union steward to do it. If limiting collective bargaining in Wisconsin constituted an “attack on unions,” then why didn’t the president champion giving collective bargaining powers to workers at the federal level?
I responded with a written statement:
I’m sure the President knows that most federal employees do not have collective bargaining for wages and benefits while our plan allows it for base pay. And I’m sure the President knows that the average federal worker pays twice as much for health insurance as what we are asking for in Wisconsin. At least I would hope he knows these facts.
Furthermore, I’m sure the President knows that we have repeatedly praised the more than 300,000 government workers who come to work every day in Wisconsin.
I’m sure that President Obama simply misunderstands the issues in Wisconsin, and isn’t acting like the union bosses in saying one thing and doing another.
After that, we did not hear a thing from the White House or the president until the eve of my recall election the following year.
But the president had been doing more than just weighing in. POLITICO reported on February 17, 2011—the same day President Obama made his comments to that Milwaukee TV station—that the president’s campaign group, Organizing for America, was
playing an active role in organizing protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to strip most public employees of collective bargaining rights. . . . OfA Wisconsin’s field efforts include filling buses and building turnout for the rallies this week in Madison, organizing 15 rapid response phone banks urging supporters to call their state legislators, and working on planning and producing rallies, a Democratic Party official in Washington said.5
On the OfA blog, regional field director Jessie Lidbury wrote, “We have one thing to say right now: to our allies in the labor movement, to our brothers and sisters in public work, we stand with you, and we stand strong.”6