Walker for President? WI Gov’s Rise Has Similarities to Reagan

The “elephant in the room,” now that Scott Walker has won a remarkable third election as governor of Wisconsin in only four years, is the presidential election in 2016. Well before the 2014 midterms, speculation was rife about Walker’s possible presidential ambitions, and his several trips to neighboring Iowa did nothing to quell it. It is widely assumed that Walker’s possible presidential ambitions are a major reason the national Democratic Party and its various third-party interest groups expended enormous resources in the unsuccessful attempts to defeat him.

There are many reasons for the Democrats to be terrified of a possible Walker candidacy for president. Most of those reasons can be summarized with two words: “Ronald Reagan.”

In 1980, Reagan ran against a wildly unpopular and discredited incumbent, Jimmy Carter (widely regarded as the worst president of the 20th century and, before Obama, a popular contender for the worst of all time). Reagan had been a successful two-term governor of the most populous state in the country. He was a well-known advocate for conservative values ever since his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech in the early ‘60s, hardly the Hollywood lightweight the Democrats tried to portray. In the 1980 election he carried 44 states with a positive, undeniably conservative message.

As an incumbent, Reagan bettered that performance in his second term, carrying 49 states against Minnesota Senator Fritz Mondale.

Though Walker is not the communicator Reagan was, neither are any of the other likely candidates, Republican or Democrat. Yet Walker does have several similar advantages.

Walker has political executive experience. He is now embarking on a second term as governor of a midsize state (Wisconsin has ten electoral votes, reflecting its two senators and eight federal representatives). Prior to that, he had been elected to two terms as county executive of Wisconsin’s largest and most populous county; his seat was in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city.

The previous Democratic administration had left an unconstitutional $3.6B hole in the state budget. Walker’s administration was able to balance it without raising taxes. On the contrary, taxes were reduced three times in his term without harming any core functions of state or local government.

Tuition at all branches of the University of Wisconsin has been frozen. Previously, it had been rising faster than the rate of inflation. Local and county governments have been given back control of their budgets, which previously had been held hostage to collective bargaining agreements with public employee unions that held a major influence on the Democratic Party and its politicians.

A number of other legislative initiatives moved Wisconsin from its dismal position near the bottom in job creation to fourth among the ten states of the upper Midwest.

Further, emphasis can be placed on “political” in the phrase “political executive experience.” Wisconsin is a deeply divided state, in some ways a microcosm of the United States as a whole. The last time Wisconsin electors voted for a Republican president was 1988. The administration replaced in the 2010 election was one in which Democrats held all but one statewide office, had control of both houses of the state legislature, and held five of the eight seats in the state delegation to the House of Representatives. The “Wisconsin revolution” led by Walker has almost completely reversed this. The Democrats still hold three statewide offices (secretary of State, sirector of Public Instruction, and one Senate seat), but everything else is Republican. And Walker did it with a positive conservative message all three times.

Walker has been vetted by the opposition as few politicians have been. The never-ending “John Doe” probes launched by sharply partisan Democratic Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm, with full malice aforethought, turned up exactly nothing to blemish Walker’s record of upright probity.

Walker himself has emphasized — most recently on Sunday’s Meet the Press — a preference for presidential contenders with actual executive experience in the wake of the disastrous performance of Obama. Obama had never run anything prior to his election in 2008. However, Walker did name one exception whom he found to be an acceptable candidate despite lacking executive experience: Paul Ryan.

Ryan is a national figure due to his confrontations with Obama over budgetary issues as chairman of the House Budget Committee, and of course due to his run as Mitt Romney’s vice presidential candidate. If Ryan decides to run in 2016, Scott Walker will likely not want to split the state party by opposing him in the primaries. Assume there will be some intense conversations between Walker’s people and Ryan’s people in the coming months.

"Though Walker is not the communicator Reagan was, neither are any of the other likely candidates, Republican or Democrat."

Say again?

[Ted] Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1992. While at Princeton, he competed for the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's Debate Panel and won the top speaker award at both the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship. In 1992, he was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year and Team of the Year (with his debate partner, David Panton). Cruz was also a semi-finalist at the 1995 World Universities Debating Championship, making him Princeton’s highest-ranked debater at the championship. Princeton's debate team later named their annual novice championship after Cruz.

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Appointed to the office of Solicitor General of Texas by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, Cruz served in that position from 2003 to 2008. The office had been established in 1999 under to handle appeals involving the state, but Abbott hired Cruz with the idea that Cruz would take a "leadership role in the United States in articulating a vision of strict construction." As Solicitor General, Cruz would argue before the Supreme Court nine times, winning five cases and losing four.

Cruz has authored 70 United States Supreme Court briefs and presented 43 oral arguments, including nine before the United States Supreme Court. Cruz's record of having argued before the Supreme Court nine times is more than any practicing lawyer in Texas or any current member of Congress. Cruz has commented on his nine cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court: "We ended up year after year arguing some of the biggest cases in the country. There was a degree of serendipity in that, but there was also a concerted effort to seek out and lead conservative fights."

In the landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, Cruz drafted the amicus brief signed by attorneys general of 31 states, which said that the D.C. handgun ban should be struck down as infringing upon the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Cruz also presented oral argument for the amici states in the companion case to Heller before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In addition to his success in Heller, Cruz has successfully defended the constitutionality of Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds before the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court, winning 5-4 in Van Orden v. Perry.

In 2004, Cruz was involved in the high-profile case, Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, in which Cruz wrote a U.S. Supreme Court brief on behalf of all 50 states. The Supreme Court upheld the position of Cruz’s brief.

Cruz served as lead counsel for the state and successfully defended the multiple litigation challenges to the 2003 Texas congressional redistricting plan in state and federal district courts and before the U.S. Supreme Court, which was decided 5-4 in his favor in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry.

Cruz also successfully defended, in Medellin v. Texas, the State of Texas against an attempt by the International Court of Justice to re-open the cases of 51 Mexican nationals, all of whom were convicted of murder in the United States and were on death row. With the support of the George W. Bush Administration, the International Court of Justice argued that the United States had violated a treaty by failing to notify the convicted nationals of their opportunity to receive legal aid from the Mexican consulate. Texas won the case in a 6-3 decision.

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