Scott Walker, Trying To Remain Relevant, Goes Back To His Old Habits: Bending The Truth And Omitting History

Walker says he "cleaned up" Wisconsin after a stimulus...which glosses over history in a big way.

Ousted former Gov. Scott Walker is trying to become relevant again by tweeting nonsense that tries to put him and his time in office in a better light than it really was.

So let's make him irrelevant by correcting the record.

Walker (no relation to myself, it bears repeating) tweeted on Tuesday against the concept of a stimulus bill, in general, to help states that are overwhelmed by the coronavirus crisis. Yes, for real, he did:

“Stimulus” funding from federal government to bail out state and local governments more than a decade ago just created a bigger hole when it was gone and those of us elected in 2010 had to clean up mess.

Don’t do it again.

— Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) May 5, 2020

"'Stimulus' funding from federal government to bail out state and local governments more than a decade ago just created a bigger hole when it was gone and those of us elected in 2010 had to clean up mess," Walker wrote.

Actually, the stimulus in 2009 from the Obama administration did a lot of good, particularly for the middle class. And Walker, suggesting he had to "clean up [a] mess," is a stark retelling of history that needs to be corrected.

Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Walker campaigned for governor in 2010 on the promise that his administration would create 250,000 new jobs for the state within four years' time — a promise he never reached within eight years of governing, mind you.

Nevertheless, in much of his campaigning, he derided the previous administration of Democrat Gov. Jim Doyle for having lost 133,000 jobs in the state before he ran. Walker repeated the claim again in 2014 during his re-election campaign against Mary Burke.

Never mentioned in Walker's ads, however, was why Wisconsin lost those jobs. It was the Great Recession. EVERY state in the country — and nearly every country in the world — suffered during that time. But in Walker's commercials, the blame was set on Doyle alone, or anyone associated with him, as was the case with Burke.

Something else was missing from those ads as well, however, and remain omitted from Walker's talking points to this day, as evidenced by his tweet above. While Walker claims that he "cleaned" that mess up, the recovery of jobs lost in Wisconsin actually began before he won the governorship. The first year of recovery took place under Doyle's watch, not Walker's.

In Wisconsin, state budgets are created and begun at the end of the second quarter of the year, around June or July, after which they last for two years. In the last year that Doyle's budget was in place, the state saw a 1.7 percent increase in private sector jobs created, a point Walker readily left out of his campaign ads and fails to acknowledge in his recent tweet.

What's more, in every budget year after that crafted by Walker, his job creation rate never reached the same level that Doyle's did in 2010-11.

So remember: when Walker says he cleaned up a mess, what he really means to say is that he was given a pretty clean room to begin with, got handed the broom and dustpan after Doyle left office, and took credit for sweeping afterward.

In other words, he did next to nothing to create jobs after most of the hard work was already done, and claimed he was an amazing governor for what he had "done."

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