Posted on 08/25/2015 11:51:02 AM PDT by conservativejoy
Scott Walker took every position imaginable on birthright citizenship last week—so why is he so awkward about it? Because he doesn’t believe it.
For Scott Walker, last week could have been magic. But—thanks to his struggles with immigration—it was doomed.
The headlines started beautifully: On Aug. 18, he had a verbal tussle with a protester who heckled the Wisconsin governor’s soapbox speech at the Iowa State Fair.
“I am not intimidated by you, sir, or anyone out there,” Walker said to a heckler, according to CNN. “This is what happened in Wisconsin. We will not back down, we will do what is necessary.”
But that was before anyone asked about immigration.
Things get ugly for Walker—very ugly, quite fast—when he talks about immigration. It’s complicated his presidential bid, causing him headache upon headache. And some who know him say that a big reason his immigration struggles are perpetually messy just might be because he doesn’t necessarily buy into the things he’s saying.
The trouble last week began the day before the altercation with the protester, when MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt pressed the governor on his stance on birthright citizenship—should we end it?
“Yeah, to me it’s about enforcing the laws in this country,” he replied. This was Monday, Aug. 17. “And I’ve been very clear, I think you enforce the laws, and I think it’s important to send a message that we’re going to enforce the laws, no matter how people come here we’re going to enforce the laws in this country.”
It was a bit of a head-scratcher—did Walker really oppose birthright citizenship rights?
The story percolated, drawing more and more attention, and then things really got interesting Friday, when he told CNBC’s John Harwood that he was “not taking a position on it one way or the other.”
That, predictably, made things worse. So on Sunday, the governor went on This Week on ABC and said he doesn’t favor amending the Constitution to change birthright citizenship. Whew! Dizzying.
It’s a simple question, and answering it shouldn’t have been so hard.
But we are talking about Scott Walker.
Immigration has long tripped up the candidate, he’s found himself in awkward situation after awkward situation trying to explain how he moved from being a mild-mannered, business-friendly executive—uninterested in red-meat rhetoric about border fences or so-called anchor babies—to a presidential candidate bumbling through crowded fairgrounds while trying to get to Donald Trump’s right on the issue.
But to those who know him best, this shift isn’t that hard to understand.
Charlie Sykes, one of the most influential conservative talk-radio hosts in Wisconsin, estimates he’s interviewed Walker hundreds of times over the last 20 years. Sykes said there may be a very simple explanation for why Walker has had so much trouble talking about the issue: The governor doesn’t believe what he’s saying.
That’s right. Walker’s Breitbart-friendly, immigration-skeptical rhetoric on the issue is an innovation that seems to make the governor uncomfortable. Sykes said that though Walker’s official stances put him nearly as far right as Donald Trump on questions regarding birthright citizenship and the economic impact of legal immigration, his heart is elsewhere. Sykes said he thinks Walker has adopted this position to keep any other Republican candidates from getting to his right.
But that’s come with a cost: namely, it’s forced him to speak nativism, which isn’t his native language. And trying to become ideologically bilingual while bouncing betwixt campaign stops and squinting into national media spotlights has wrought unimpressive results.
“The immigration thing, I think has been a tricky issue for him because he wants to protect his right flank, although, intellectually, he’s always been very centrist on the issue,” Sykes said.
In late April of this year, the governor made headlines for saying that legal immigration could have hurt the wages of native-born Americans.
“In terms of legal immigration, how we need to approach that going forward is... to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, protecting American workers and American wages,” he said, via The Washington Post. “What is this doing for American workers looking for jobs, what is this doing to wages, and we need to have that be at the forefront of our discussion going forward.”
In that innocent, pre-Trump era, arguing that legal immigration could hurt the economy was highly unusual, even on the right. It was a case made primarily by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and writers at Breitbart News.
Sykes said he was baffled to see Walker make common cause with them.
“I’d never heard him take those kinds of positions on immigration prior to maybe April,” he said, “because first of all, that’s not the kind of issue that he’s been terribly involved in. It’s not the wing of the party, it’s not the things he talks about.”
“I think the nativist rhetoric does not come naturally to him,” he continued. That is not his native tongue. That’s when a politician begins to stumble, when they’re speaking a language they’re really not that comfortable with.”
Sykes said close watchers of Walker always believed he sided with The Wall Street Journal and the Chamber of Commerce on immigration: that legal immigration benefits the economy, that rising tides lift all boats, etc.
“I was genuinely shocked when he started doing that Jeff Sessions stuff about visas for legal immigration,” Sykes continued, citing Walker’s newly expressed concerns about legal immigration levels. “I actually thought that might have been a misquote or something, one of these verbal tic misunderstandings. But no, that’s what he’s been saying. And I’ve never heard him as governor of the state talk about the negative role of legal immigration in creating jobs.”
So Walker’s new, Trump-friendly stance on immigration has put him in rhetorically unfamiliar waters.
Liz Mair, a consultant who was fired from the campaign after Iowa Republican leaders took issue with some of her policy stances, said she noticed the same thing.
“Scott Walker has a lengthy history that encompasses all but about the last six months of his entire political career of being strongly pro-immigration, and pro-comprehensive reform,” she said. “No matter the supposed ‘incentives’ for doing it, it’s hard to sound like Jeff Sessions when your entire thought process surrounding an issue is and always has been radically different to Jeff Sessions.’”
She added, “It's also proving to be a dud with everyone but a few Breitbart staff; voters can spot a fraud a mile off, and Walker emulating Sessions on this issue correctly reads as fake.”
Before he was a born-again nativist, he went on foreign trade missions as governor—including to China—and led an effort to re-brand the state as “Wisconsin is open for business.”
“If people want to come here and work hard in America, I don’t care whether they come from Mexico or Ireland or Germany or South Africa or anywhere else, I want ’em here,” he said in a July 2013 meeting with The Wausau Daily Herald editorial board.
In that meeting, he even downplayed the need for more border security.
“[Y]ou hear some people talk about border security and a wall and all that,” he said. “To me, I don’t know that you need any of that if you had a better, saner way to let people into the country in the first place.”
And as Milwaukee County executive, he signed a letter calling for a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants living here.
But since then, he says he’s had an about-face. The governor now favorably compares his stance on immigration to Trump’s. And in March of 2015, he told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace that his view “has changed. I’m flat out saying it.”
Sykes isn’t alone in thinking Walker’s nativist tack is just politics. Heritage Foundation scholar Stephen Moore told The New York Times in July that Walker told him over the phone that he was “not going nativist” and that he was “pro-immigration.” But apparently those assertions were problematic, because Walker’s aides—again, according to The New York Times—pressured Moore into recanting the comments (conservative site Red Alert Politics reported that Moore still “stood by his beliefs that Walker was pro-immigration”).
On top of that, The Washington Post reported that one conservative billionaire, Stanley Hubbard, said he differed with Walker on birthright citizenship but would back him anyway as he doubted his zealousness on the issue.
“I got the feeling that he is not at all anxious to talk about taking away those rights,” Hubbard told the paper.
Walker has given all those doubters some reason for their doubt. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that he told a group of New Hampshire Republicans in private that he favored a pathway to legal status and citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
All told, it’s a dicey issue for his campaign, according to Collin Roth, the managing editor of Right Wisconsin.
“It goes to the very heart of the rationale for his candidacy, of being a big bold decider—a guy who makes a decision, sticks with it, and goes with it—for him to be all over the place,” Roth said.
He’s still in the race? I scratched him off my list during the debate.
I had to read that headline 3 times still not sure I get it.
If a pol has a core conviction and stands by it then that pol won’t stammer when talking about it. They’ll talk about it with gusto. You can, within reason, trust (but verify) what they have to say when this is the case
Conversely, when they stammer, hem and haw or change views over and over you know they don’t hold it as a core conviction and you can’t trust what they’re saying.
We've all seen that far too many times.
What a shame this guy is such a poor candidate after all his accomplishments in WI. A real shame, but he isn’t the one we need to lead us out of the mess we’ve allowed our government to become.
That’s right “WE HAVE ALLOWED OUR GOVERNMENT TO BECOME”. We the people were asleep in the stateroom at peace while the pilot house filled up with pirates. We ignored those that tried to wake us up, and now we have to come up with a way to get rid of the pirates without sinking the ship.
No one to blame but ourselves. It’s all part of keeping the Republic IF WE CAN.
My initial gut instinct about Walker was that he was another Cheap Labor Express candidate.
Then he made statements that made me question that instinct.
He has since confirmed my suspicions about him.
He will not stand for the rule of law and the citizens.
Not the headline I could have chosen, but the article was pretty much a thorough chronological narrative of the positions taken.
Neither will the mob candidate, Trump.
Not to mention hiring Brad Dayspring....and now Ed Gillespie. He screams GOPe.
What you’ve said is so true and God forgive us.
Not a strong core there, unfortunately.
Not only “forgive us”, but lead us out of our predicament as well.
Amen, FRiend.
Have you noticed how they tightly edit what Walker said to the reporter as they were walking though the fair, in a gaggle of media asking him questions from everywhere? Then they go on to editorialize about what Walker meant.
Walker has stated his position but the media is hot to take out the guy who took down the unions.
It's HEADLINE news gang!
It appears that the “media” interpreted Walker’s answer to a question and made it a headline.
Then they said he had to clarify (the media’s mistake).
So now the story becomes that Walker changed his mind.
Interesting how that works.
As Scott Walker has stated, "going forward" no amnesty, we seal the border (using all options), enforce the laws, remove the magnets (6 months - June 2011- into his 1st term Walker was the first and only governor to revoke instate tuition for illegals, secure jobs for American citizens [legal immigration must also be adjusted down], E-verify and then look at other options. And this is about more than illegal immigration, it's about national security.
One thing I can say on Walkers behalf is that he does not need to change the constitution regarding this matter and he knows it. Congress was given the power to legislate on this and this was best explained by Mark Levin:
Levin: Cruz, Trump, Sessions ‘Are Right,’ 14th Amendment Doesn’t Mandate Birthright Citizenship
Truth is Walker has never been consistent and decisive where the issue of immigration is concerned. He is trying to cater to his big money donors and it shows.
Three statements, three different positions on anchor babies in a week just underlines the on going problem.
That is your interpretation in your long history of anti-Walker postings.
Who is your candidate?
About your candidate (as it relates to your comment about Walker):
" “...And, for the party’s top donors, who hear pleas from all corners, “it’s more than some of these other candidates have for a path to victory,” says a GOP strategist familiar with Cruz’s pitch. As for those dreaded consultants the senator so often maligns, he’s not beyond their reach.
The Cruz campaign has paid Axiom Strategies, the consulting firm owned by Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, about $30,000 a month. A spokesman for the campaign says that fee covers Roe’s salary as well as those of three other campaign staffers. J2 Strategic Communications, the firm established by Cruz’s senior adviser, Jason Johnson, is also paid $20,000 a month for campaign work, which a Cruz spokesman says is the closest their operation comes to a traditional campaign-consultant relationship.
One of Roe’s former clients was former Texas lieutenant governor David Dewhurst, the establishment candidate defeated in a 2012 Senate bid by political upstart Ted Cruz.
That’s how quickly friends of the Republican establishment can become foes, and vice versa. Now, Cruz is hoping for a similar transformation if he manages to make his renegade brand that of the Republican standard-bearer. Source
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.