Scott Walker’s achievement

Jay Cost sums it up at the Weekly Standard:

… the Democratic party has found a way to pump money out of the public treasury to finance its campaigns; for another, state and local budgets are continually expanded beyond all reason. In the days of the 19th-century urban machines, this would have been called graft. Today, liberals and labor leaders call it “union rights.”

That phrase points to the great rhetorical scam of the modern Democratic party. While consistently couching its vision in communitarian language, the party nevertheless raids the public treasury and bends the vast governmental regulatory machinery to deliver billions of dollars worth of payoffs every year for the benefit not of everybody, but of fellow Democrats.

Walker has cut to the heart of this political Frankenstein’s monster. More important, he fought back the Democrats’ claims that he was trampling on “workers’ rights.” He convinced Wisconsinites that he was the protector of the public interest, while the unions were looking out for themselves. This is a feat no Republican has managed since the Great Depression….

Whereas Walker defied powerful Democratic party interests for the sake of the public good, Obama has done the opposite. On one issue after another—from the stimulus, to health care, to financial reform—the president and his allies in Congress larded up their legislation with goodies for their core voters, with little or no regard for whether the final product would benefit Americans generally.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 11, 2012 11:59 AM | Send