Oops! Maybe the Scott Walker recall election in 2012 was not such a good idea in retrospect. Such is the conclusion of liberal Chris Cillizza writing in the Washington Post. According to Cillizza, although the attempt to recall Walker was appealing to liberals at the time, it backfired in a big way by making the Wisconsin governor well known nationally to the extent that he now has a good shot at winning the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
Cillizza tells his tale of political woe due to unexpected consequences:
Remember that Walker's initial win in 2010 occasioned no great attention among national politicos. He was a little-known county executive who was known, primarily, for being the "brown bag" guy. No one expected to hear from him again, nationally speaking.
Then Walker made his move on public employee unions. Suddenly, he became enemy number one of the organized labor movement nationally and the Republican every Democrat in Wisconsin loved to hate. That emotion led to the push to recall Walker in a June 2012 election; there was a widespread belief in the anti-Walker crowd that it was a virtual guarantee that voters would get rid of the governor.
Except that didn't happen. In fact, Walker won by a larger margin over Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett in the 2012 recall than he did in the regularly scheduled 2010 election.
...Looking back, it's clear that without the recall, there is no Scott Walker presidential announcement today. What the recall did was turn Walker into a conservative hero/martyr -- the symbol of everything base GOPers hate about unions and, more broadly, the Democratic party. He went from someone no one knew to someone every conservative talk radio host (and their massive audiences) viewed as the tip of the spear in the fight against the creep of misguided Democratic priorities. He became someone who had the phone numbers of every major conservative donor at his fingertips. He became what he is today: The political David who threw a pebble and slew the mighty liberal Goliath.
Cillizza included a David Axelrod tweet that came to the same conclusion:
In airport watching @ScottWalker rally with no sound. Did he offer tnx to authors of ill-conceived '12 recall that set him up as GOP hero?
In airport watching @ScottWalker rally with no sound. Did he offer tnx to authors of ill-conceived '12 recall that set him up as GOP hero?
— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) July 13, 2015
Cillizza ends with this sad analysis:
The recall was a major -- and long-tailed -- strategic mistake by Democrats. It elevated Walker from a low-profile governor into a conservative superstar. If Walker winds up as the Republican nominee in 2016 -- and he has a real chance to be just that -- Democrats have only themselves to blame for his rise. They made Walker into the kind of politician who could beat Hillary Clinton next November.
With the passage of time, it is easy forget just how much emotional investment liberals had in the recall of Scott Walker to the extent that protesters in Madison, Wisconsin had a solidarity sing along every day for months leading up to the election. The following video shows these same protesters the day after they lost the recall election in a state of complete denial of reality. They even attempted to keep a CNN bus from leaving because they still held out hope that their alternate reality might somehow turn out to be true in their fantasyland.
