What people see when they read PolitiFact
Long after the rest of us have long given up, Wisconsin PolitiFact finally declares Scott Walkers one and only campaign promise, creating 250,000 "good paying" jobs in his first term, as
broken.
Really? Ya think?
They fought to keep Walker looking good, but just couldn't anymore. It was becoming laughable.
From solidly declaring Walkers obviously failed promise "in process" for nearly all of his Governorship, months ago they decided to list it as "stalled" despite the fact that he wasn't even halfway to his promised goal. Today, they list it (finally) as "broken" about 6 weeks from the election.
But look at how they put it:
Our tally now stands at 100,613 jobs -- or about 40 percent of what Walker promised.
Time is running out on this campaign promise.
Time is running out? Do they think Walker will pull some miracle out of his pocket right before the election? Maybe he and his followers can hold some kind of prayer festival and pray up all the rest of those jobs. Maybe Best Republican Vote Countin' Gal Evah, Kathy Nicklaus, can suddenly discover a great big bag o' jobs that she forgot to count. Maybe Walker can come up with yet another Job Counting Scheme to make it look like those jobs were just hiding.
The reason that Walkers promise of 250,000 new jobs is so important is that it is literally HIS ONLY CAMPAIGN PROMISE. In ad after ad, speech after speech, appearance after appearance, it's ALL Walker talked about in 2010. Jobs, jobs, jobs. He'd have a "laser like focus" on bringing new jobs to Wisconsin.
Listen to Walker himself:
So, when he was elected, people expected jobs. Lots and lots of those "good paying jobs" that Snotty Walker promised.
He did nothing about jobs.
Instead, his "laser like focus" was on screwing cities, towns and counties out of state shared revenue, taking nearly $2 billion out of our public schools (the biggest cuts in the country), cancelling a federally funded high speed rail line (a great compliment to a factory that was planned to build high speed rail cars - now built elsewhere), screwing over anyone on public assistance and Medicaid (including the disabled), and punishing his enemies: public employees at every level - state, county, municipality.
Remove those unions and you remove campaign volunteers, small dollar contributions, and endorsements. Then strip away 18% of their pay for "benefits", limit future raises and you'll soon have dysfunctional public services that you can easily privatize. Money in the pockets of donors, donchaknow.
His other "laser like focus" was on moving all of those "savings" to his donors: business, corporations, and manufacturers as well as the monied elite.
He wasted no time getting rid of the Department of Commerce and setting up his own quasi-private outfit, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. Yeah, loans and subsidies to his business pals. No requirement for that pesky Gubmint transparency and not much oversight. It helped, of course, when Walker put himself in charge of the whole thing, too. No arguments with the boss if you ARE the boss.
And WEDC, despite the corporate media prop-up (they "sponsored" the Milwaukee Journal Sentinels News Watch for a long time), has been a disaster from the start. Sadly, their consistent record of scandals and failure never seems to mention the boss, Scott Walker.
I come here not to praise PolitiFact, but to wonder why it took them so long to see what the average dumbass has seen for a very long time. Walker not only broke his promise, he had ZERO intention of keeping it. To Walker, promises are just to get votes, get into power, and then do whatever the hell you want.
Walkers promise was one that should have been kept. He could have done it if he hadn't devastated Wisconsin's economy. But, no, what Walker calls his "reforms" were much more important to him than any promise made to stupid voters. And that part of the story is still missing from our media.
.