Gov. Walker is truly living in his own Wisconsin: a Wisconsin that hasn’t seen economic hardship, no job gain, severe cuts to public education and unions broken up.
At a recent summit, the Governor told the crowd that Wisconsin’s future is so bright. “You think about the future of this state, it really is exciting – not just where we’re at now, but where we’re headed,” Walker said.
The Journal Times reports
Notwithstanding the song being an irony-laced ditty about a grim nuclear future, Walker was turning the page on an overcast two years in which his job approval rating and presidential election ambitions fizzled.
He also was pivoting from an election in which his party’s nominee cast the slow-growth national economy as a disaster, to one in which Walker, should he run for a third term in 2018, will be defending a state economy that has lagged the national recovery as a success.
In a recent interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, Walker dismissed the notion that he might be vulnerable in 2018.
“The fact of the matter is if I chose to run again, I wouldn’t just run on our record, I’d have to lay out an agenda for the future,” Walker said. “Elections are about the future, not about the past.”
Wisconsin Democrats face their own problems after a disastrous 2016 election in which they lost two seats in the Legislature and a U.S. Senate race they were favored to win. President-elect Donald Trump won 545 of the 809 Wisconsin cities, villages and towns President Barack Obama won in 2012 on his way to becoming the first Republican to win Wisconsin since before Timbuk3 had a hit record.
But the handful of Democrats considering a gubernatorial run see several problems piling up in state government that they blame on Walker. They include the state ranking 33rd in job creation and last in new business start-ups, a strained transportation budget that Walker has delayed fixing with increased borrowing, deferred debt payments needed to balance the state budget and sagging research dollars at UW-Madison.
For more on what Walker sees for the future of Wisconsin, visit The Journal Times.
