Just Another Dee Perez-Scott Bleeding Heart Liberal

John Gurda, historian, wrote, “Republicans are on the offensive these days. Emboldened by their success at the polls and energized by the tea party activists in their midst, the GOP faithful have set out to remake America, and they've started in Wisconsin.

Virtually unknown outside Milwaukee County only a year ago, Governor Scott Walker has emerged as a rising star in the national party. Working in concert with conservative luminaries elsewhere in the country, Walker has demonstrated a flair for the bold statement and the sweeping proposal, and he pursues his grand plans with single-minded determination.”

We've been here before, of course. America has witnessed similar eruptions of political passion in decades past, on issues ranging from the great depression, the world wars, unionism, child labor, segregation, and creeping socialism.
John Gurda believes that Governor Walkers has contempt for compromise but the facts reveal otherwise. His proposals on employee contributions to health care and pensions already represent compromises. For example, although the national average on employee contributions to health care costs is 29%, Walker has asked for only 12%. Here in Colorado I understand the contribution is more like 31% with the government picking up the other 69%. The governor proposes a compromise pension contribution rate of 8-9% of salary. I don’t know what the national average is but in Colorado state employees pay 10.5% of salaries. Since the unions have already tacitly agreed to both proposals, one would have to conclude that even they see these changes as fully justified.

Gurda goes on to allude to Walker’s “demographic base” as though there is something suspect about that base. It won’t be long before Gurda is a member of that demographic. Maybe then he will see Walker’s efforts in a different light even thought Gurda has already erroneously concluded that “today's new right is the philosophical first cousin of prohibitionism.”

Gurda announces that the tea party draws heavy support from Protestant evangelicals such as Walker himself, and their political playbook is a throwback to the “media-savvy opportunists, taking advantage of every opening to advance their cause.” Now this has a familiar ring to it. It sounds like a statement attributed to Rahm Emanuel when he was Obama’s chief of staff and also to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Saul Alinsky. In fact, you might say that this is right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook that has guided Obama before and since his election to the presidency. Never let a good crisis go to waste!

Gurda acts as if “demonizing” ones opponents or things that one opposes is something new. Maybe he was too young to appreciate fully how we demonized the Germans and the Japanese during World War II. “...The current crop of conservatives is making political hay from another temporary phenomenon: the global economic recession. The need for fiscal austerity has rarely been more obvious, but it's being used as a pretext for advancing the new right's legislative agenda.” Fortunately, no pretext is necessary because the need for fiscal austerity is coincident with the Tea Party’s agenda. But, one could argue that Pearl Harbor was our pretext for going to war even though there was a much larger agenda—to rid the world of some of its most repressive and cruel dictators.

Walker has demanded that public employees pay more for their pensions and health insurance - a necessary step to which they have agreed - and then proposed to modify their collective bargaining rights so that it will be more difficult to recoup those benefit changes if democrat/union control is returned to the legislature. That makes eminent good sense if you look beyond the immediate time frame. The history of public employee benefits provided by democrat legislatures in return for union political contributions and boots on the ground is clear in Wisconsin and other states.

Walker first declared a budget emergency and then cut taxes by $140 million to boost the ailing Wisconsin economy. This is equivalent to giving a blood transfusion to an ailing patient but you can count on the left to see this as a reward for rich businessmen rather than a life-saving necessity. In a spate of hyperbole, Gurda uses words like: “amputation”, “juggernaut”, and “dismantling”, all within two sentences. He sees the governor’s actions as “dismantling government one line item at a time, regardless of the consequences.” But there is certainly another point of view related to paring back a government that has become so bloated that it is doing too many things that people should be doing for themselves.

All political parties are driven by ideologies. They represent fixed, blinkered views of the world that focus on their own perspective and dismiss all other positions as either incomplete or simply wrong-headed. Sounds like both of the major parties, doesn’t it?

Limited government has always been an article of conservative faith as well it should be for all of us. Gurda argues that the movement currently afoot is not classic conservatism but something closer to creeping libertarianism. Norman Thomas, American socialist, 1948 once said, “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." That’s probably the same thing Barack Obama is saying quietly to his Administration today and that is his objective. Conservatives, therefore, are doing what they must to combat the creeping socialism of Thomas and Obama.

Tea party sympathizers want from the federal government only what the constitution intended. Gurda suggests that there is something wrong with giving personal liberty precedence over the state but isn’t that what distinguishes democracy from communism?

Gurda says,"If you listen closely to the rhetoric of the new right, the libertarian message is hard to miss, and there are corollaries of that message that many Wisconsinites might find troubling." However, to make his point, Gurda misstates and overstates the position of the Tea Party when he writes, “Everyone should have the opportunity to make just as much money as he or she can, beginning with the rich. The tea party faithful display a grim preoccupation with money: making it, growing it and preserving it intact from the clutches of a rapacious government.” Writer Kenneth Sollitt put it best, ‘‘…in the economic realm …, you cannot legislate the poor independence by legislating the wealthy out of it. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give to the people what it does not first take away from the people. … what one man receives without working for, another man must work for without receiving.” I suspect that makes perfectly good sense to those who believe in personal responsibility.

“The poor are largely responsible for their poverty. Some groups are truly deserving of help - the disabled and the frail elderly among them - but any able-bodied person of even modest intelligence should be able to get by without assistance from the rest of us." “We cannot fix generations of family dysfunction, centuries of entrenched prejudice or an economy that has shed entry-level jobs by the hundreds of thousands”... by indulging in cradle to the grave welfarism. We cannot build personal responsibility at the same time as we relieve people of that responsibility.
We cannot build self-esteem by robbing the poor of whatever self-esteem they have.

In Gurda you sense a liberal who resents that he has had to struggle to make a living, as though there was something inherently wrong with hard work. He alludes to Walker’s 52% of the vote. What was the typical margin of past presidents and governors? Oh, we wouldn’t want to disclose that context because it might weaken the argument. Walker’s actions are an attempt to redress decades of union –dominated, democrat legislatures that gave them all they asked for, saving nothing for a rainy day. Gurda is right when he mentions that there are two sides to the equation: revenue and expense. However, the conventional wisdom is that you don’t raise taxes during a recession. Has Gurda never heard the word “stimulus?” Tax increases are a reverse stimulus.

Walker had no intent to demonize teachers. He merely pointed out that collective bargaining has enabled public employees to enjoy advantages not available in most other occupations and that in the present recession it is necessary to pare back those advantages and establish a way to make sure they do not get out of hand in the future. Gurda acts as if the legislature is incapable of providing fair compensation to public employees without the pressure of collective bargaining and unions breathing down their necks. If government is the expression of our collective will then so be it. Let’s not give that up and allow unions to usurp the power of government.