Can Scott Walker be defeated?

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Column

The most infamous member of the rogues' gallery of Republican governors running for reelection this year is Wisconsin's Scott Walker.

Walker became a rightwing celebrity overnight when he sparked an uprising in 2011, with tens of thousands of citizens gathering to protest outside his office day after day.

But when Walker won the governorship in the backlash elections of 2010, most progressives were not paying close attention. They were too focused on Senator Russ Feingold--the lone Senator to vote against the U.S.A. Patriot Act--and his heartbreaking loss to a know-nothing businessman to expend much energy on the Milwaukee county executive who held brown bag lunches to advertise his fiscal responsibility.

The local alternative weekly in Madison ran a cover story on Walker and his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, showing both men with Pinocchio noses under the headline "They're Lying!"

To their credit, women's health advocates raised an alarm, pointing out Walker's extreme antiabortion and anti-birth-control positions back when he served in the state legislature.

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards traveled to Wisconsin to stand on the lawn at the governor's mansion and praise outgoing Democratic Governor Jim Doyle for vetoing a barrage of anti-women's-health legislation passed by the rightwing legislature, and to urge support for Barrett.

But the Walker-Barrett race mostly elicited a yawn.

What a shock, then, when Walker unleashed his attack on public employee unions, which kicked off the massive, historic protests around the capitol building in Madison, attracting international news coverage and prompting an outpouring of support from around the world.

This force is working to undo not just the gains of the Great Society and the New Deal, but even the Progressive Era.

Walker summed up their position in a "fireside chat" with Wisconsinites, in which he appealed to the resentments of strapped, private-sector employees. Why should public employees have cushy health care and retirement benefits, when so many nonunion workers did not? Walker asked.

Instead of offering to improve health care and retirement benefits for struggling working-class voters, Walker offered to strip teachers and other public employees of their rights.

It worked.

The sheer nastiness and divisiveness of Walker's attack on teachers and other public servants made for a classic Daily Show segment, in which Jon Stewart spoofed the attack on "greedy" teachers...