Analyzing The Analysis Of The Recall

A friend asked me to take a look at this piece by Tom Sommers, a Wisconsinite who did his take on the recall election.

For the most part, it is well written and fairly accurate.  A couple of key excerpts:

On strategy, Walker’s campaign was a fairly typical deployment of the Powell Doctrine (itself taken from Harry G. Summer’s musings on strategy following the US’s Vietnam debacle) to use overwhelming force against an opponent. Walker’s campaign carpet-bombed media with non-stop television and radio commercials for a half-year. Meanwhile, they positioned what seems to be an army of professional bloggers to control comment forums in the local press. In effect, they crowded out the public and often aggressively spread outright falsehoods on these sites, thus moving the Internet from a place of democratic dissent to use as a tool for reactionary power. This itself represents a major turn in the management of public opinion.

[...]

Reagan successfully campaigned, and rode to victory on this model in 1980. Scott Walker has privately declared he takes his inspiration from Reagan. Walker asserted in his now notorious Koch call that Reagan’s strike against the PATCO union workers early in his presidency was his defining moment in office and history. Walker emphasized that this was vital not only to reign in labor, but also to demonstrate to the Soviets that Reagan was no pushover. In Walker’s view curbing labor and displaying his resolve (others say intransigence) are the keys to understanding his agenda and his unwillingness to back off. If Walker survives the John Doe investigation he might be under, he will simply roll over the compromise inclined Democrats and advance his program at any cost. And, he has the financial means to do it.

Yet, Walker, while committed and smart, is hardly deep. His understanding of economics, history, and politics are thin. While he takes at face value the narrative of tax cuts as the key to Reagan’s success, he fails to recognize that Reagan gave up on the cost cutting enterprise as hopeless within two years of assuming office. Indeed, Reagan’s early austerity policies further depressed the economy. Thus, Reagan “corrected” and launched a massive military Keynesian debt-fueled binge that pulled the economy from its torpor. Meanwhile, given the US success in 1970s of getting oil priced in dollars, Reagan was able to press the pedal to the floor on both government spending and the dollar printing presses alike. As Dick Cheney infamously noted, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” For Scott Walker, however, “the Gipper” was an austerity icon.

Walker is in for a rude shock when he discovers his austerity policies will only exacerbate recessionary conditions. With no Central Bank at his disposal to create dollars, he will be forced to either admit his error (not his strong suit) or launch even further divisive attacks to, in the fashion of the 1930’s USSR, that define and then hit out at “wreckers” responsible for undermining his policy. Further, in the fashion of Mao, he will launch an attack against educators as “elites” parasitically feeding off the people. Meanwhile, just as Reagan’s Director of the Office of Budget and Management, David Stockman, noted early on that it was “feeding time at the trough” for Reagan’s backers at the public trough. That too will continue under Walker’s billionaire, special interest funded Governorship. Walker’s hardcore followers, however, are zealots. They are aggressive in the extreme and will turn hard on all enemies when their ideology is exposed as a failure for not producing broad-based prosperity. Whatever motivates Walker, it is clear his hardcore supporters represent a kind of aggressive freikorps that one would find in the backrooms with Joseph McCarthy or Richard Nixon. What makes Walker dangerous is that at minimum he is comfortable in both attracting and using these elements, while he himself appears to many as a decent and reasonable person who much of the public would not imagine Walker associating with.

Unfortunately, after such a good start and well written article, he ends it way off base. He describes Walker as a better communicator than Reagan and that he was able to strike a chord with many middle class and rural Wisconsinites, giving them the message they wanted to hear.

This strikes me as being an example of Stockholm Syndrome.

Walker is in no way a great orator. His handlers give him a few soundbite lines, and he has been known to flub those. Get him off script and he totally self-destructs. The man really is that unintelligent. Just look at what happens when he tries to even write his own stuff.

As for striking a chord with the middle class and rural voters, that's not true either. Granted, he was saying what he thinks they wanted to hear, but that only cut it with some of the low info voters, the ones that listen to talk radio or watch Fox News. And they were going to vote for Walker regardless.

In my travels, there was a lot of support for Walker's opponent, Tom Barrett. The problem wasn't so much that Walker connected with the people as it was that Barrett failed to. But then again, I've already said that I didn't think that Barrett was the right candidate for this race. Sadly, he proved every one of my concerns to be right on the button.

Then there was also some degree of recall burn out, which Barrett failed to overcome. But that also goes back to his failure to do proper messaging.

In summary, while Sommers does a good job of analyzing the recall for the most part, he completely overestimates Walker's oratory skills and ability to connect. What he credits Walker for is actually a combination of Barrett's failure to do what he needed to do and the money that was spent to portray Walker as the great communicator and to pour hundreds of millions of dollars worth of whitewash to cover up the truth of the matter.