The Farewell Tour of Scott Walker

Scott Walker. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Poor Scott Walker, already reduced to tweeting photos of burger runs:

Warm meal at Mission BBQ on a cold day. Even got to sing the National Anthem at noon 🇺🇸. pic.twitter.com/Aw61Pu2D92

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) January 31, 2019

and trips he’s making on aeroplanes:

Beautiful mountains in Montana. pic.twitter.com/xfWmN2UkCp

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) February 9, 2019

— lovely, paid speaking gigs, perhaps?

Yet there he is, manufacturing media for himself about which he knows little and has accomplished less:

Manufacturing.

In this self-inflating and embarrassingly sad plea for relevancy Walker insists to the State Journal that Foxconn can revive manufacturing in the Midwest, adding “It’s something, I tell the president all the time.” He seems embarrassingly oblivious to his tacit admission that he indeed failed to meet his promise of creating 250,000 new jobs in four or five or six or eight years in office, even though he had full control of the government, budgets, and free media on talk radio and advocacy sites to control the outcome.

If Walker had been an effective governor and manufacturing leader for eight years, why would he be talking now about reviving manufacturing, not extending and burnishing it, let alone bringing up Foxconn – – the very manufacturing ‘deal’ whose death is burying the last molecules of Walker’s legacy?

Meanwhile the fresh embarrassment continued.

Offhandedly, he claimed he talks with President Trump about the connections between manufacturing and workforce issues “all the time.”

Sure. Like Trump cares about details like that, or needs information about anything from the governor who lost Wisconsin.

The only links between anything manufactured by a workforce which Trump cares about these days are the subpoenas being issued to his inner circle by House Democrats and indictments being crafted by Team Mueller.

On the other hand, since Walker suggested building a 4,000-mile wall across the US-Canadian border, maybe he can turn Trump’s attention to an even bigger project that could further stick it to Wisconsin exporters.

Walker also added a couple of his patented ineptitudes to a story he ginned up which is actually about nothing more than Walker seeing and hearing his own name:

“There’s gonna have to be automation, there’s gonna have to be artificial intelligence,” he declared in the State Journal story.

– –  which shows that when he says “manufacturing,” Walker’s not looking to help those blue-collar workers whose pay he helped diminish through fast-tracked ‘right-to-work’ legislation he signed after saying he had no interest in doing just that.

Meanwhile, what’s in Governor Tony Evers first budget explains why Walker’s out. Clean drinking water initiatives, more school funding and expanded dental coverage in BadgerCare. We’re seeing ever more of Evers’ priorities in his first budget, and, by implication, the range of of what Walker and his legislative allies had dismissed from public agendas or damaged statewide since 2011. Day by day, Walker becomes ever more irrelevant.

James Rowen, a former journalist and mayoral staffer in Milwaukee and Madison, writes a regular blog, The Political Environment.