CHAPTER 26
The Lessons of Wisconsin Can Be Used in the Battle for America
There is a lot conservatives can learn from the battle in Wisconsin that can help us win the battle for America. We did a lot of things right in the fight over Act 10, but we also made a few mistakes. Here are some of the lessons learned from our experience that can help inform the larger debate over the future of our country.
CHANGE THE POLLS, NOT YOUR PRINCIPLES
If you know you are doing the right thing, and the polls say voters disagree, change the polls, not your principles. President Reagan used to look at polls not to determine his positions, but to see where he needed to do more to persuade the public. That’s a sign of true leadership.
If I had listened to the polls during the fight over Act 10, I would have backed off of our plan. One poll found that if the gubernatorial election were held again, I would have lost to my opponent by seven points. My approval dropped to 37 percent. But I was so confident our reforms would work that I pressed forward into the political headwinds. And my confidence was vindicated. Our reforms did work. And voters stood with me in the recall election.
I wanted to win, but I also wasn’t afraid to lose. I cared more about getting things done than getting reelected. That liberated me to take bold actions I might never have taken if my first priority had been political survival. Too many people in politics today spend their time trying not to lose instead of trying to do the right thing. I often say that politicians need to spend more time worrying about the next generation than the next election. The irony is that politicians who spend more time worrying about the next generation than the next election often tend to win the next election because voters are starved for leadership.
DON’T COMPROMISE YOUR PRINCIPLES BUT DO BE WILLING TO COMPROMISE
Another important lesson is that while it’s important not to compromise your principles, do be willing to compromise.
My original plan for Act 10 was to eliminate collective bargaining altogether for all government workers. But when my staff pointed out that police and firefighters could go on strike, possibly endangering public safety, I didn’t hesitate to exempt them.
Similarly, when Republican senators wanted to reform collective bargaining rather than eliminate it, we compromised again—finding a way to accommodate their concerns while preserving the goals of our legislation. The changes actually improved our bill because they put the unions’ fate in the hands of their own members. Teachers and other public employees would choose whether the union could negotiate on their behalf and whether they paid union dues—not the government.
And when the senate Democrats fled the state, I was willing to compromise yet again—offering them a number of substantive concessions if they would come back to Wisconsin and do their jobs. In the end, the senate Democrats didn’t take our offer, and we found a way around their obstruction. But simply by offering concessions, we showed the citizens of our state that we were willing to compromise—and exposed the fact that the Democrats were not.
The media and unions portrayed me as uncompromising, but the fact is we compromised a lot. We just refused to compromise our principles. I was willing to be flexible, and to make changes to the bill, so long as the final legislation achieved our overarching goals.
DON’T ACCEPT THE FALSE CHOICES PRESENTED TO YOU
With a little ingenuity, you can break the mold and find a better way forward.
When I first took office, we faced a $3.6 billion deficit and two bad choices: raise taxes or dramatically cut government services. Neither of those options was acceptable to me. I had promised to cut taxes, not raise them. And I was not going to slash spending on the poor, throw thousands of people out of work, or devastate education and public services.
By talking to smart people like Mitch Daniels, doing our homework, and examining all the alternatives, we came up with an innovative approach that allowed us to balance our budget while protecting taxpayers, protecting the poor, protecting schools, protecting local governments, protecting teachers and government workers—all while actually improving education and strengthening public services.
We rejected the false choice between raising taxes and cutting government services. There is really nothing revolutionary about this. In the private sector people do it all the time. If you own a business that is struggling, you don’t double the price of your product or cut its quality in half. You find ways to run your business more efficiently and deliver a better product than your competitor at lower cost. With Act 10, we simply applied that same principle to state government. It wasn’t easy, and it certainly was not without controversy. But it worked.
We also rejected false choices when it came to President Obama’s Medicaid expansion. Once again we were presented with two bad options: Accept a massive expansion of Medicaid (knowing that the federal money would eventually dry up and Wisconsin taxpayers would be left on the hook) or reject the expansion (and leave hundreds of thousands of our citizens uninsured). We rejected that false choice and found another way.
Together with Dennis Smith, my secretary of the Department of Health Services, I spent two years studying the issue and examining all the possible alternatives. In the end, we came up with a solution that reduced the number of people on Medicaid, reduced the number of uninsured in our state by 244,580, and moved tens of thousands off government health care and into the market while ensuring that, for the first time, everyone living in poverty was covered. We improved health care for our citizens while decreasing government dependency.
If we can do it in Wisconsin, it can be done anywhere. Conservatives need to stop playing by the rules set by the left. With creativity and a little innovation, we can redefine the debate on our terms.
A BIG CRISIS IS A CHANCE TO DO BIG THINGS
Another lesson is that times of crisis present a chance to do big things that otherwise might not be possible.
For years, my predecessor had used accounting gimmicks and temporary fixes to paper over our state’s fiscal problems. When we came to office, the bag of tricks was empty. We faced an unprecedented fiscal crisis—a $3.6 billion deficit with no way to close it. Rather than simply tinkering around the edges, we took bold action not only to balance our budget in the short term but also to put in place long-term structural reforms that will help us balance state and local government budgets for years to come.
If it had not been for the depth of the fiscal disaster we inherited, our reforms would never have passed—even with a Republican majority. The only reason we were able to make the changes of this magnitude was because of the magnitude of the deficit and the lack of any viable alternatives. Passing Act 10 would have been the right thing to do under any circumstances—but it might not have been possible under any other circumstances.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that some people are willing to make tough choices only when there are no easy ones available that will work. That’s why we see so many difficult problems kicked down the road for future generations. So when circumstances present you with the chance to take big, bold, decisive actions that would otherwise not be possible, seize it.
YOU CAN REFORM ENTITLEMENTS AND SURVIVE
What we did in Wisconsin with Act 10 was in many ways much harder than what Congress and the president need to do to tackle the federal entitlement crisis.
Most of the proposals for saving Social Security and Medicare affect future retirees, not current recipients. Our reforms affected current public workers and retirees. It should be a lot easier to change benefits before people start collecting them than it was to roll them back once they are already being paid out.
Our experience in Wisconsin shows that politicians can make the tough decisions to deal with the massive unfunded liabilities we face, and survive. If we can do it in Wisconsin, it can be done in Washington.
AUSTERITY IS NOT THE ANSWER
In times of crisis, people are looking for hope. Too often, conservatives present themselves as the bearers of sour medicine when we should be offering a positive, optimistic agenda instead.
At a time when our national debt is soaring, that can be a difficult challenge. It isn’t easy to make fiscal responsibility hopeful and optimistic. But it can be done. We did it in Wisconsin.
We could have responded to our budget crisis in Wisconsin with an austerity budget. We could have simply enacted deep spending cuts and told our citizens that it was time for everyone to cinch up their belts and live with less. We could have laid off tens of thousands of middle-class workers. We could have cut Medicaid for needy families, seniors, and the poor. We could have cut $1.25 billion from schools and local governments, and told parents they needed to accept life with many more kids in the classroom. But where is the optimism in that?
Instead we found a hopeful, optimistic alternative to austerity. With the passage of Act 10, we made tough choices, but they were choices about how to save money by making government operate better. We found a way to make government not just smaller but also more responsive, more efficient, and more effective. And because we did, we were able to cut government spending while still improving education and public services. We turned our deficit into a surplus, but we rejected the sour politics of austerity.
We’re doing the same thing with our entitlement reforms. Our critics say that I must hate poor people because I’m making it harder to get government assistance. The opposite is true. I love the people of my state so much that I don’t want them to be permanently dependent on the government. I don’t want to make it harder for them to get government assistance; I want to make it easier for them to get a job. We are requiring able-bodied citizens to work or receive job training if they receive food stamps. But we are also increasing funding for that training as part of a plan to expand and revitalize our state’s workforce development.
I want to help my fellow citizens who have fallen on hard times, and are temporarily dependent on government, to get the skills they need so they can once again support their families and control their own destinies. Today, there is a perception that Republicans simply want to cut things. I take a backseat to no one when it comes to cutting spending and fiscal responsibility. We cut spending and turned a massive budget deficit into a sizable surplus. But austerity is not hopeful or optimistic. Moving people from government dependence to true independence is—and in the long run, it saves money too.
The only reason we have the resources to expand job training today is because of Act 10. If we had not reformed collective bargaining and turned our $3.6 billion deficit into a half-billion-dollar surplus, there would be no money available to reform food stamps by increasing job training . . . or to reform Medicaid to cover everyone living in poverty . . . or to cut income tax rates in Wisconsin. It is only because we took on the unions and freed Wisconsin from the grip of collective bargaining that we are now able to fund our priorities and return money to the taxpayers in the form of lower property taxes and lower income taxes.
The lesson is that benefits of boldness often go far beyond the immediate effects of the action you are taking. Act 10 not only allowed us to fix our budget, improve education, and strengthen public services—it has also allowed us to unleash a host of other reforms that will benefit the citizens of our state for decades to come.
WIN THE CENTER WITH LEADERSHIP
There is a myth out there that the only way to win the center is to move to the center. If that were true, Barack Obama would not be president today—and I would not be governor of Wisconsin.
There are independent, reform-minded voters in every state. In times of crisis, they want leadership. They don’t care if it is Republican leadership or Democratic leadership. If you step forward and offer a reform agenda that is hopeful and optimistic, they will give you a shot. And if you have the courage to follow through and keep your promises, they will stick with you. (It is still amazing to me that politics is one of the few professions where keeping your word makes you “courageous.” Everywhere else in life, keeping your word is expected. Somehow it is exceptional in politics.)
In Wisconsin, we have a phenomenon known as Obama-Walker voters. When I was first elected to lead Milwaukee County, a deep blue Democratic enclave, no one thought I would survive very long. My election was a fluke, the pundits said, and if I wanted to stay in the job I would have to do what so many Republicans in urban areas do and move to the middle. Instead, I governed as a conservative reformer and didn’t flinch—and won three consecutive elections with a larger percentage of the vote each time. In 2008, the year President Obama won Milwaukee County with 67.5 percent of the vote, I won with nearly 60 percent.
As governor, I have continued to pursue bold, conservative reforms. And in the 2012 gubernatorial recall election, one out of six voters who cast their ballots for me also planned to vote for President Obama. Exit polls showed that these Obama-Walker voters constituted 9 percent of the electorate.1 And today, polls show that about 11 percent of Wisconsinites continue support both me and President Obama.
There are probably no two people in public life who are more philosophically opposite than President Obama and me. Yet more than one in ten Wisconsinites approve of us both.
To make a conservative comeback, we need to be able to win these Obama-Walker voters, and their equivalents in other states. The way to win over those in the middle is not by abandoning your principles. To the contrary, the courage to stand on principle is precisely what these voters respect. If you back away from your principles, you not only lose your base, you also lose the one thing that attracted these independent voters to you in the first place. The way to win the center is not to waver. The way to win the center is to champion bold, positive reforms that make people’s lives better—and to show that you have the courage to follow through on these reforms.
The way to win the center is to lead.
CHAMPION THE VULNERABLE
Liberals want to portray conservatives as defenders of the rich and powerful.
Unfortunately, we often make it too easy for them to do so.
I recall doing a television interview one day about our entitlement reforms, and I was getting really fired up talking about how nobody comes to this country wanting to be dependent on the government. Whether they arrived here on a raft, or were born here in a barrio, people all want the same thing: self-determination, independence, opportunity, and the chance for their kids to do even better than they did—the American dream.
After the interview was over, and I was preparing to leave, the woman who had prepared me for the show came up to me in tears and said in broken English: “That’s me.” At first I didn’t understand what she meant. She told me, “I’m from Cambodia. I came here to live the American dream. You were talking about me.”
Conservatives need to champion people like her. We need to champion immigrants who come here seeking a better life. We need to champion those born here in poverty who want nothing more than to escape it. We need to heed the call Ronald Reagan delivered in his farewell address at the Republican National Convention in 1992: “With each sunrise we are reminded that millions of our citizens have yet to share in the abundance of American prosperity. Many languish in neighborhoods riddled with drugs and bereft of hope. Still others hesitate to venture out on the streets for fear of criminal violence. Let us pledge ourselves to a new beginning for them.”2
Republicans need to reclaim their position as the party of upward mobility and opportunity for all. We need to lay out a positive vision for an America where every one of our citizens—no matter what their race, creed, origin, political party, or station in life—has a chance for a better future. We need to offer innovative, free market alternatives to the permanent welfare state.
That requires more than saying the right things. It requires showing up in inner-city schools and talking about expanding school choice, reading initiatives, and our plans to reform education so that everyone among us will have the mental tools to build a better life. It requires showing up at community colleges and job-training centers, and talking about our plans to help people escape dependency and get the skills they need for the jobs of the twenty-first century. It requires visiting local chambers of commerce, particularly in struggling neighborhoods, and talking to small-business owners about our plans to create jobs and opportunity in places bereft of hope.
Voters want to know we are fighting for them. We need to fight for the vulnerable among us. Just as important, we need to fight cronyism and corruption. One of the reasons we took on collective bargaining in Wisconsin is because it was inherently corrupt. Collective bargaining allowed the union bosses to effectively sit on both sides of the bargaining table when contracts are negotiated—putting their interests ahead of those of teachers and students and taxpayers. It was cronyism, plain and simple. We dismantled it.
We need to take on and dismantle cronyism and corruption wherever we find it—whether it is President Obama’s “green energy” program that gave billions in taxpayer dollars to his political cronies or the billions of dollars in government benefits, taxpayer subsidies, and corporate welfare that special interests receive from Washington each year and do not need.
BE DECENT
During the fight over Act 10, our opponents compared us to Hitler and slave masters. And those were just the Democratic senators. Today it seems that whenever the left is losing a political battle, they villainize their opponents.
We see this phenomenon in Washington as well. During the debt limit standoff, President Obama declared, “What’s motivating and propelling at this point some of the House Republicans is more than simply deficit reduction. They . . . are suspicious about government’s commitments, for example, to make sure that seniors have decent health care . . . [and] about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat.”3
The president wasn’t simply questioning the wisdom of the House Republicans’ policies, he was also questioning their motives. He was saying Republicans want to take health care away from seniors and food out of the mouths of poor children.
Sadly, this is not uncommon. We suffered far worse in Wisconsin, but we never responded in kind. When I served in the state assembly I used to tell new members not to personalize their differences, because their opponents today may be their allies tomorrow. And during the fight over Act 10, no matter what the other side threw at us, I never responded in kind and always affirmed the right of our opponents to protest and have their say.
Decency is its own reward. But it also serves to contrast you with the extremism of your opponents. They often cannot help but to overreach. We saw that when the union bosses accused Justice Prosser of protecting a pedophile priest. It was an outrageous accusation. It was untrue. And it cost them the election. It cost them control of the state supreme court. And it ultimately cost them victory in their fight to overturn Act 10.
At one point during the protests, Representative Robin Vos was sitting in a bar near the capitol when a protester came up and poured a beer over his head. He was mortified and just wanted to forget that it ever happened. When he told me about it the next day, I urged him to tell the press. The people of Wisconsin needed to know that our opponents poured beer over the head of Republican leaders, shouted at and spit on senators, disrupted a Special Olympics ceremony, and glued shut the doors of a Catholic school I was going to visit.
By contrast, we always took the high road and never contributed to the hostility and the rancor. In the end, the contrast between our conduct and their outrageous behavior helped turn public opinion in our favor—especially among the Obama-Walker voters. There are millions of Americans who are frustrated by the cheap shots and smash-mouth politics that are all too common today. When you come under vicious personal attack, you win more support by responding with decency than you do by responding in kind.
OWN UP TO YOUR MISTAKES
Another important lesson is that when you screw up, own up to it. When I took that prank call from the fake David Koch, it was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. I went out before the press and took my beating. I learned from the experience—to be more humble and to make certain I was doing things for the right reasons.
Because I owned up to what I had done, it was harder for our critics to continue exploiting the story and easier for us to move past it. Today, too many political leaders are hesitant to admit mistakes—and that often gives their mistakes a much longer shelf life than they deserve.
At the same time, never apologize for doing the right thing. Some of my advisers wanted me to apologize to the state for the unrest over Act 10. That would have been a terrible mistake. Reforming collective bargaining was the right thing to do. Moreover, we never responded in kind to the provocations of the protesters, or did anything to bring dishonor to our state. Apologizing would have done nothing to win over those who were angry with me. And it would have dispirited those who stood with me—folks who supported me precisely because we stood on principle.
While I did not apologize, I did acknowledge a critical error I made, which was not properly preparing the people of Wisconsin for our reforms. I was so eager to fix the problems we faced, I did not do enough to explain to people what they were or why our solutions were the right course. I’ve learned from that experience and applied those lessons when announcing subsequent reforms.
We didn’t stop reforming once we passed Act 10 and defended it at the ballot box. We expanded our education reforms and turned immediately to the next big idea: entitlement reform. And once we have reformed entitlements, we will turn to the next big reform, and the next one. We are following the advice Mitch Daniels gave me before I took office: Never stop reforming. Never stop innovating. When you set the pace of reform, voters will see you as someone who is constantly trying to make things better. And your opponents will be forced to respond to your agenda rather than setting one for you.
Plus, it’s fun. I enjoy finding creative solutions to difficult challenges.
BE RELEVANT
The people I speak with in Wisconsin are not talking about who will blink first in the latest budget standoff in Washington. They want to know: Will my neighbor down the block who’s been out of a job for six months be able to find work? Will I be able to support my family and save enough for retirement and to send my kids to a good college? Will my kids’ school perform well enough to help them get into college in the first place? And when my son or daughter graduates, will he or she be able to find a job in our state and be able to stay here, or will he or she have to move away?
Those are the questions that are relevant to our citizens. Republican governors are succeeding because we are focused on answering those questions.
Republicans nationally need to be focused on those kinds of questions as well. We need to talk about things that are relevant to people’s lives, such as: Are our children going to be able to afford the debt being passed on to them by the federal government? And how can we improve the economy so that our citizens may find better job prospects and enjoy a better quality of life? “Sequesters,” “fiscal cliffs,” and “debt limits” are not relevant to people’s lives; growth, opportunity, and upward mobility are.
Part of being relevant means going to places where Republicans don’t typically show up. When I was a local official, I did very well in areas that were dominated by Hispanic voters. The reason: I was a strong advocate for small businesses and for school choice. Voters in those neighborhoods knew me because I helped small-business owners grow and because I championed the Catholic schools in their area. I spoke in terms that were relevant to these voters and I spoke to them in familiar places.
Speaking in terms that are relevant to everyday citizens isn’t always easy. When I first ran for governor, I talked about the fiscal and economic crises we faced in our state and then I laid out my plans to fix them. I was so focused on these issues that it was likely that if a reporter asked my mother’s maiden name, I would say, “Fitch, and every Fitch I know believes we need to fix the economy and the budget.” The lesson is: Stay relevant.
WIN THE FAIRNESS FIGHT
Conservatives spend far too much time trying to move minds without moving hearts as well. We gather tons of empirical data to back up our arguments, only to see the liberals respond with heartbreaking stories about how our policies will supposedly hurt children, the elderly, and the destitute. The heartbreaking stories win.
As the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks points out, human beings by their nature respond to moral, rather than empirical, arguments. If we find a policy morally repugnant, there is little anyone can say that is likely to change our minds using data, reason, or empirical evidence. When we feel something is wrong, it is just wrong—period.
This is an admirable quality, really. We respond to moral arguments for a reason: That is how God made us. We are inherently moral creatures, created in His own image and likeness. We were designed by our Creator to see the world through the prism of good and evil, of right and wrong. That is why most of us want not only to be a prosperous nation but also a nation that is good, decent, and—yes—fair.
President Obama understands this, which is why he made “fairness” a central message of his reelection campaign. Who is opposed to fairness? Shouldn’t everyone get a “fair shot”? Shouldn’t everyone pay their “fair share”? The president appealed to the American people’s innate sense of fairness. Republicans did not. That is one of the main reasons he won a second term.
If we want to win the policy debates of the twenty-first century, we need to stop allowing our political opponents to claim the moral high ground that we should be occupying ourselves. For example, most Americans believe that conservatives care about balancing budgets, while liberals care about putting more money into classrooms. But in Wisconsin, our reforms put more money into classrooms. It was the unions and the Democrats who were ready to see us cut a billion dollars from classrooms, and lay off thousands of teachers, just so long as they could continue to fill their coffers with involuntary union dues. We stopped them, and protected students and teachers from disastrous cuts.
The unions tried to make the battle over Act 10 a fight over collective bargaining “rights.” It was a powerful message. No one wants to see anyone’s “rights” taken away. Taking away “rights” gets a reflexive moral reaction from people. The unions said we wanted to take “rights” away from teachers, janitors, nurses, prison guards, garbage collectors, bus drivers, crossing guards, and snowplow operators. Most people responded: That wasn’t fair.
As a result, support for our reforms plummeted.
We began to recover only when we started making our case against collective bargaining with moral arguments. We told the story of Ms. Sampson, the award-winning teacher who lost her job because of “last in, first out” rules under collective bargaining. Wisconsin voters responded: That’s not fair.
We explained how corrections officers and bus drivers abused overtime rules under collective bargaining to make six-figure salaries. Wisconsin voters said: That’s not fair.
We explained that public workers had no choice of whether to join a union, and that the government forcibly took as much as $1,400 a year out of their paychecks to hand over to the union bosses. Wisconsin voters said: That’s not fair.
We explained how government workers paid nothing for their pensions and next to nothing for their health care, while their employers—the hardworking taxpayers—did not enjoy such lavish benefits. Wisconsin voters said: That’s not fair.
As conservatives, we should be able to finish any public policy argument with the words “that’s not fair.” If we can’t do that, we need to go back and rethink how we are making our case.
This is not to suggest that empirical evidence doesn’t matter. To the contrary, if people had not seen that Act 10 was working—that schools were better off, local governments were balancing their budgets, and property tax bills were down for the first time in over a decade—we would have lost the recall. Results matter. But it was also critical for people to see not only that our reforms worked but also that they were just and fair.
If we counter the left’s arguments simply with logic, reason, and data alone, we will lose the debate over the future of our country. But if we counter them with logic, reason, data, and an appeal to the American people’s innate sense of fairness, we can prevail.