Unintimidated

by Scott Walker

  In 2012, Republicans did a lousy job of presenting a positive vision of free market solutions to our nation’s problems in a way that is relevant to people’s lives. The problem was not that Republicans ran on principles and failed; it was that Republicans failed to run on our principles.

  CHAPTER 24

  “We’re Still Here”

  After the elections of 2012, things became remarkably quieter in the capitol. As law enforcement told us, the money had run out for the professional agitators, so they moved on to other states and other causes.

  Around the state things calmed down too, which is good for most people regardless of their politics. Most Wisconsinites took a deep breath and got back to work. It was a relief to go to public events and not have mobs trying to disrupt the simplest of programs. It was nice to get back to some sense of normal.

  In January 2013, I delivered my State of the State Address. I told the assembled legislators:

  Two years ago, when I first stood here as your new governor, Wisconsin was facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, property taxes had gone up 27 percent over the previous decade, increasing every year, and the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent. Today, Wisconsin has a $342 million budget surplus, property taxes on a median valued home went down in each of the last two years, and the unemployment rate—well, it’s down to 6.7 percent. We’re turning things around. We’re heading in the right direction. We’re moving Wisconsin forward.

  Outside the chamber, in the capitol rotunda, a small group of protesters had gathered, a dim remnant of the former occupation.

  They chanted, “We’re still here!”

  Yes, they were. But so was I.

  The protesters failed to achieve their objectives. They failed to stop Act 10. They failed to take back the senate. They failed to drive me from office. They failed (so far) to overturn Act 10 in the courts. About all they had achieved was to drain millions of dollars out of the pockets of Wisconsin taxpayers.

  The costs of the protest were staggering:

  Clean up and repairs to the capitol and capitol grounds required about thirty-five hundred to four thousand hours and cost an estimated $269,550.

  The cost for law enforcement at the capitol was $7,819,665.1

  The cost of paying the fourteen Democratic senators who abdicated their constitutional responsibilities while hiding out across the border in Illinois was $589,820 for the twenty-two days they were away.

  The cost of the 2011 senate recall elections was $2.1 million.2

  The cost of the 2012 recall elections was $14 million.3

  Added up, the fight against Act 10 had cost Wisconsin taxpayers a grand total of $24.8 million.

  And that does not include the tens of millions of private money the unions spent on the protests and recalls. The irony is, after spending all that money and putting our state though eighteen months of turmoil, not only did they fail to stop Act 10, they actually helped us achieve our objectives.

  First, the protests unified wavering Republicans in the legislature and allowed us to pass our reform package largely intact. There were certainly a number of wavering senators in the Republican caucus. All our opponents needed was for three Republicans to vote against the bill. But instead of identifying and targeting the Republicans they thought could be peeled off, the unions attacked them all.

  Republican senators arriving for work were cornered by angry mobs yelling “Shame! Shame!” and “F——— you!”4 The unions sent crowds of protestors to follow lawmakers around the state, picket their homes, harass them everywhere they went, and generally make their lives miserable. Senator Neal Kedzie had a dead fish thrown on his lawn. Senator Van Wanggaard had protesters descend on his home, including a leader of the local teachers union who declared ominously: “We want him to know we have our eyes on him.”5

  It was not just members of the state legislature and me who were targeted. Paul Ryan had protesters following him everywhere he went—town hall meetings, parades, even outside his home—and he was not even voting on the issue. They just targeted him because he was a Republican who supported our reforms. Paul recalls doing an event on Lake Geneva and having protesters with bullhorns driving by in boats, screaming expletives at him; his wife, Janna; and their young children. He said that the first time his kids ever heard the F-word was when they had protesters yelling it at them.

  The unions’ goal was clear: to intimidate the senators and strike fear into them. But their smash-mouth tactics had the opposite effect. The more the senators were heckled, harassed, cussed at, and spat upon, the more their resolve deepened. Those who might have been wavering became increasingly determined not to give in. Instead of splitting the GOP, the protesters and agitators helped unify wavering Republicans—and that made it possible for us to pass Act 10.

  Second, the protesters’ antics also turned off Wisconsin voters. The unions and their allies violated one of the key tenets of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “Tactics must begin with the experience of the middle class, accepting their aversion to rudeness, vulgarity and conflict. Start them easy, don’t scare them off.”

  The Wisconsin protesters did the exact opposite of what Alinksy advises. They epitomized “rudeness, vulgarity and conflict,” and in so doing they lost the sympathy and support of many Wisconsinites.

  For example, on June 25, I traveled to Devil’s Lake State Park to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the landmark. Hundreds of people showed up and chanted the whole time. They sent a flotilla of boats on the water with sails painted to read “Walker Sucks!” and “Kill the Bill!” I wouldn’t react. Indeed, I got very good at talking over the din no matter what the protesters said and did.

  On July 12, we went to Gateway Technical College in Racine to celebrate the centennial of the technical college system. Hundreds of protesters showed up in red union shirts and pushed their way through the crowd, holding signs and chanting epithets. I talked right over them. When the president of the technical college system, Dan Clancy, got up to speak, they kept right on chanting. You’d think they would have had the decency to stop when I was done and allow the students and faculty to have their day of celebration.

  On July 18, I traveled to Beloit with Secretary of Tourism Stephanie Klett and Senator Tim Cullen (one of the fourteen Democrats who had fled the state) for the reopening of a visitors center. As I got up to speak, the protesters began chanting and screaming and yelling and banging cow bells—and didn’t stop throughout my speech. Senator Cullen came up to the podium and they began cheering. “One of the fourteen heroes!” someone shouted. But Tim said, “I came here as a state senator to do my job and I think the best thing we can do, regardless of how you feel, is to let this program go forward. . . . I think everybody should be more respectful to the secretary and the governor.” They yelled back at him, “He doesn’t deserve our respect!” And they resumed chanting “Shame! Shame! Shame!” and “Recall Walker!” Tim told me later that on the way out they called him a traitor for asking them to be polite.

  Scenes like that played out over and over again.

  Perhaps the vilest example took place on June 8, 2011, when I attended a ceremony in front of the capitol honoring the athletes participating in the Special Olympics. Surely, the protesters would have the decency not to disrupt an event like that. Well, as soon as I began to speak, protesters dressed as zombies marched in front of the podium and stood between me and the Special Olympians, blocking their view. State Treasurer Kurt Schuller—whose daughter had once been a Special Olympics athlete—spoke for many when he declared, “To be confronted by protesters, who will never understand the personal challenges that these Special Olympians face, who decided to politicize a nonpolitical event, shows a complete lack of civility when civility is something we should all be working toward.”6 He was right.

  Afterward, talk radio host Charlie Sykes suggested that I should have “gone Chris Christi
e on them.” Chris has a unique gift, but if I had done that, it would have been about the protesters and me. I wanted to keep the focus on the Special Olympics athletes as best I could. It was their day. Besides, the actions of the protesters spoke louder than any denunciation I could have delivered from the lectern. Any normal person watching on TV that day was horrified by their behavior. I think it was a turning point when people in our state began to realize that these people were not like the rest of us. It just showed they had no shame.

  Another shameless incident took place on August 26, when I visited the Messmer Preparatory School, a successful Catholic school in Milwaukee. I was coming to read to third graders as part of our reading initiative. Before I arrived, Brother Bob Smith, the school president, got a call from the police telling him that someone had tripped the alarms and vandalized the school. Protesters had squeezed super glue into the locks of the school doors. Brother Smith said it was the first vandalism in eleven years at the school. He told a local radio station that before I arrived, protesters outside the school warned him to “‘get ready for a riot,’ because they were going to disrupt the visit.”7 He said he told them, “You’ve got little kids who have no clue what you’re even talking about, and you make something political when it isn’t, that’s just flat-out wrong. People ought to start acting like adults.”

  On November 15, 2011, the first day the unions could kick off their effort to collect signatures for my recall, they bussed about a thousand people to march in front of my house in Wauwatosa, where our sons, Matt and Alex, who still went to public school, and my elderly parents also lived.8 The next day, Tonette went on Charlie Sykes’s radio show and said, “You know, it’s one thing to come out here and protest in Madison at the Executive Residence. . . . But to actually really be on our street in front of our house and disrupt our neighbors. I mean, we have two little girls that live next door, young girls. And then we have an eighty-year-old woman on the corner. I can’t imagine what they’re going through, those young girls. And we feel for our neighbors.”9

  Tonette also talked about the effect the protests were having on our kids. At the grocery store near our home, Alex and my mother had recently been accosted by a protester who came up and screamed, “Excuse my language, but [EXPLETIVE] SCOTT WALKER!” Tonette went on to say, “As a mom, of course . . . it’s on my mind all the time that, is today going to be a good day for them? Is someone going to step out and say something to them? Is someone in the grocery store going to say something to them? I would hope that they would leave, everyone would leave the boys and I alone. But we know that that’s not going to happen, obviously, with what they’ve decided to do to start the recall in front of our house.”

  One of the protesters even targeted Matt and Alex on Facebook. We got tips of protests planned for their football games at Hart Park. And the Wauwatosa police even had to close off our busy street for a while because of all the protesters in front of our home.

  Looking back now, it was moments like that which really backfired on the unions. Most people agreed with Tonette that targeting my family and disrupting the lives of our neighbors and their children was going too far. Protesting at a Special Olympics ceremony, or gluing shut the doors of a Catholic school, or disrupting a fund-raiser for disabled children, was going too far. No matter what your political views, here in Wisconsin people simply don’t do things like that.

  I hope that people also saw that we didn’t respond in kind to provocations like these. We were firm in our convictions, and unrelenting in the pursuit of our reforms. But we always affirmed the right of those who disagreed with us to express their views. We met indecency with decency, and respected those who disrespected us.

  There was a reason for that. For one thing, that is how my parents raised me. For another, that is also how Tonette and I wanted to raise our sons. I knew the citizens of Wisconsin were watching, but I also had an even more important audience—Matt and Alex. It was important to me that they saw that I never responded in kind to the often vicious attacks directed against me. I was firm and did not budge—but no matter how personal the invective became, I never made it personal.

  I wanted more than anything for my sons to understand that you can be committed to your principles, stick to your guns, and do the right thing—but you must be be decent in how you conduct yourself. I wanted to set a good example so they could always be proud of how their dad handled himself.

  Sometimes it was hard. One day, I was visiting a school in Stevens Point, and after reading to the kids I met with teachers in the library. A few questions in, one of the teachers stood up and asked me: “Why do you hate teachers so much? Why are you demonizing us?” I was tempted to pull a Chris Christie, but I resisted. Instead, I looked at her and said, “You know, with all due respect, I just don’t see that.” I pointed out that I was under such scrutiny that almost anything I said wound up on YouTube. “You go home tonight and search YouTube and try and find a single video of me saying anything but positive things about public school teachers in the state of Wisconsin. You’re not going to find it.”

  If anything, I always went out of my way to point out that the vast majority of the more than three hundred thousand government employees in our state were good, decent, hardworking public servants—and to say how much I appreciated them. Indeed, the reason I waited so long to point out the abuses taking place thanks to collective bargaining was that I did not want to do or say anything that could be misconstrued as criticizing public workers.

  Over time, I think people in our state saw the difference in the way we conducted ourselves and the way the union bosses conducted themselves. We always took the high road. We just kept repeating our arguments, explaining why we were doing what we were doing, educating people about how our reforms were pro-worker, pro-teacher, pro-student, and pro-taxpayer. We tried our best never to contribute to the hostility and the rancor. And the unions kept behaving like thugs and goons. In so doing, they made themselves appear extreme and radical, and that helped us unify the state behind our reforms.

  The third way the protests backfired is that they made what might otherwise have been an arcane debate over the Wisconsin budget into a national issue. The protests generated national and even global news coverage, and energized conservatives across the country. I got letters of support from people in almost every state.

  One day, I received a moving letter from a Vietnam veteran in Texas who had received several flying awards. He told me about the day when two union goons had come to see his dad and told him he was going to join the union or else. He praised my courage for taking on the unions, and said there was only one way to appropriately thank me for my courage. He included a small package. Inside was one of his flying medals. I was floored. I display it with great pride in my office today. It reminded me of the impact we were having on people.

  In fact, people all across the country wanted to help and be a part of our efforts. They sent donations, made phone calls, and many even came to Wisconsin to knock on doors and get out the vote. We raised over $37 million to fight the recall and received donations from tens of thousands of people, the vast majority of whom gave $100 or less. Our fight in Madison became a national cause.

  None of that would have happened were it not for the protesters and their antics that made network and cable news nearly every night. Our supporters were energized not only by the substance of what we had done but also by our standing up to the protesters. If we had been able to pass the bill in seven days, as we had initially planned, I probably would still have been targeted for a recall. But I would have had to fight it without the backing of all the people from across the country who rallied to support us.

  The fourth way the protests backfired is that they gave us an unexpected opportunity to make our case to the people of Wisconsin. Without the recall, I would never have had the opportunity to campaign across the state to defend our record. I would never have had a reason to air te
levision ads across to the state explaining the success of our reforms. Thanks to our opponents, every voter in Wisconsin now knows what our reforms were, why we made them, and—most important—that they worked.

  In the end, the protests did more to help us achieve our aims than anything we could possibly have come up with in the governor’s office.

  It just goes to show that the extremism of your opponents is often your greatest weapon in the fight for what is right.

  CHAPTER 25

  “We Did That Too”

  There was one other way the protests over Act 10 helped us: They so overshadowed everything else going on in the state capitol that we were able to pass a raft of other reforms and initiatives that at any other time might have sparked protests and controversy. Instead they went virtually unnoticed.

  Outside Wisconsin, few are aware of these reforms. I remember going to a meeting of Republican governors and listening as my colleagues ticked off the various economic, education, pro-life, and public safety reforms they had implemented. I raised my hand sheepishly and said, “As a point of clarification, we did that too.” Everyone knew we had taken on the unions, but many were surprised to learn all the other changes we had made in our state.

  For example, we passed legislation to prevent voter fraud by requiring voters to show photo identification at the polls—a bill Republicans had worked to pass since 2003. As I signed the bill into law, the protesters chanted “Shame!” and “Recall Walker!” outside my office. They weren’t there for the voter ID bill; they were the same union protesters who followed me everywhere to protest Act 10.