Gov. Scott Walker: Once A Fan Of Recalls…

… until he has had to face one himself.

By  eXtina  on Wed May 30, 2012         Original Post

Gov. Scott Walker has claimed the effort to recall him and his allies is an expensive and unnecessary political gambit, even  though Wisconsin's Constitution is clear that the reasons for recall are to be specified by those seeking the recall.

He says

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign is spending a lot of the money it has collected from out-of-state billionaires to fund a television ad campaign that preaches against recall elections.

The governor’s “Recall: No” campaign, ../ argues that the push for a recall election is simply “sour grapes.” Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch won the 2010 election, the line goes, so Wisconsinites should swallow hard and shut up for four years.

This fantasy, that elections produce a “king for four years” or an “elected despot” (to borrow phrases from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison), has been promoted by the governor in interviews with right-wing talk radio and regular appearances on Fox News and CNBC programs.

“A minority of voters will get to force a new election in Wisconsin … costing millions of dollars to the taxpayers this spring,” Walker griped in the latest of the appearances on programs that he makes as part of a fundraising push.

And Tom Barrett reminds us that Walker signed petitions to recall Sen. Feingold and Sen. Kohl, because he disagreed with political decisions they made, one of only a few state legislators to do so. Walker has no memoryof signing those petitions he says, and they have since been destroyed. And took money from this group after it disbanded.

In 2002 Walker became the favored candidate of the group seeking to replace County Executive Tom Ament. He waxed poetic about that 'display of hope'when he ran for governor in 2010.

You know the folks that were angry about this started a recall and they were told they needed to collect 73,000 signatures in 60 days. Well, not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of thousands of ordinary people did an extraordinary thing. They stood up and took their government back. In less than 30 days they collected more than 150,000 signatures. It was at that moment I realized the real emotion on display in my county wasn’t just about anger. You see, if it had been about anger, it would have been about people checking out and moving out or giving up. But instead what happened was really amazing. You saw people standing up shoulder to shoulder, neighbor to neighbor and saying we want our government back. And in doing so the real emotion on display was about hope.”

Recall of Scott Walker? Sour grapes.  Recall of someone Walker wants to replace? Democracy and hope on disply. Just a little bit of hypocrisy there.

 

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