April 2015 will go down in history as the month that the 2016 race for the White House began in earnest. Hillary Clinton’s online declaration of her presidential candidacy was the critical moment. With it America’s two major political parties have locked horns with each other. The Democrats intend to continue their control of the presidency for another four years; Republicans hope to finally make good on a conservative bumper sticker that began appearing on automobiles as early as the summer of 2009 and that read, “Had Enough Yet? Next Time Vote Republican.”
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Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has inked a book deal with Penguin Group’s Sentinel imprint. President George W. Bush‘s former chief speechwriter Marc Thiessen will co-write.
The publisher acquired world rights to Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge and publication is tentatively scheduled for “late 2013.” Writers’ Representatives agent Glen Hartley negotiated the deal with publisher Adrian Zackheim. The book will cover Walker’s controversial battle with Wisconsin unions.
Governor Walker became the focus of a nationwide controversy in 2011 when he proposed a series of budget reforms that eliminated Wisconsin’s $3.6 billion deficit through limiting the collective bargaining power of public employee unions, which was costing taxpayers billions in pension and health care costs across all levels of government. Liberals all over America swiftly denounced Governor Walker, with nearly 100,000 protesters overtaking the state Capitol. Despite relentless attacks, Governor Walker stood his ground — and with the help of supporters from across Wisconsin and the country he passed his reforms, took his case to the voters of Wisconsin, and became the first governor in American history to survive a recall election — and thus be elected not once, but twice, to his first term in office.
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History professor William Cronon (pictured, via) has written two opinion pieces criticizing Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Shortly after publicizing them, the Wisconsin Republican Party filed a request under the state’s Open Records Law for access to Cronon’s university email inbox.
The request demands copies of emails received and sent dated from January 1, 2011 to the present. Last night, Cronon responded with outrage on his blog, “Scholar as Citizen.”
Here’s an excerpt from Cronon’s post: “My most important observation is that I find it simply outrageous that the Wisconsin Republican Party would seek to employ the state’s Open Records Law for the nakedly political purpose of trying to embarrass, harass, or silence a university professor (and a citizen) who has asked legitimate questions…I’m offended by this not just because it’s yet another abuse of law and procedure that has seemingly become standard operating procedure for the state’s Republican Party under Governor Walker, but because it’s such an obvious assault on academic freedom at a great research university.”
continued…
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By Elvin Lim
Something is afoot in American politics. There was a time when the rights of workers, even government workers, to collectively bargain, was taken for granted. There was a time when federal budget deficits were accepted as a necessarily evil but it was only a problem talked about and no one addressed. There was a time when it was political suicide to talk about extending the retirement age or reducing Social Security benefits. Whatever that is left of the political consensus of the last half-century is unraveling today into a cantankerous politics in which settled issues are now up for political re-litigation.
Democrats are on the defensive because they have never taken seriously the diversity of the Republican party, and have therefore failed to anticipate the insurgency of fiscal conservatism that began in 2009. They are fumbling to define a strategy to defend labor in Wisconsin because they have for so long been fighting a different enemy, neo-conservatism – which one might argue is a familiar cousin to liberalism in their shared commitment to budget deficits as an embarrassing but necessarily evil.
For so long relegated to second-place within the Republican fold, fiscal conservatism is today the pre-eminent breed of conservatism, sexier even than neo-conservatism. For so long presumed to be the heart of the Democratic party, labor knew not what to say when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker threw them a curveball, attacking the right to collective bargaining which had been entrenched for the last half-century. Democrats know how to protest wars, but they haven’t had to aggressively organize themselves to defend labor rights for half a century! Obviously, there are a many number of ways of making up a budget shortfall without attacking collective bargaining rights, but Wisconsin Democrats did not dive straight into articulating this odd connection. Instead, they appear to have conceded to the framing of the problem in fiscal terms (by accepting the Governor’s proposal that state employees pay 5.8 percent of their salary toward their pensions and 12.6 percent of their health-care premiums) and ended up restricting the range of argumentative exits left to them.
Successful political aspirants of the 21st century must understand the tectonic shifts which are occurring with increasing regularity in our politics. And politicians who are not nimble responders to the political cleavages of the day are condemned to fight the wrong battles. The reason why John Kerry lost in 2004 was because he was cast and perceived by a sufficient majority to be a flip-flopping pacifist. 2004 was not the time to challenge the wars abroad. (2008 was.) The reason why Democrats lost so many seats in Congress in 2010 was not because the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan weren’t going well enough, but because a new faction within the Republican party was able to bring domestic politics, and in particular fiscal issues, back on the national agenda.
For Democrats to stand a fighting chance in the congressional elections in 2012, they have to take the fiscal bull by the horns, even if it means renegotiating the relationship between the party and the clients of the Democratically-sponsored social-welfare state. Similarly, for social conservatives who want to advance their cause, they must piggy-back it on libertarian issues, as advocates for the de-funding of Planned Parenthood have wisely done.
Republican primary contenders should also note that seasons have changed. Dick Cheney is out, and Paul Ryan is in. There is a new issue du jour in town – though for how long, we don’t know – but it will likely be
