AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

UNINTIMIDATED: A CONVERSATION WITH GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER

SPEAKER:

SCOTT WALKER, GOVERNOR OF WISCONSIN

MODERATOR:

MARC A. THIESSEN, AEI

1:00 PM – 3:30 PM THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21ST, 2013

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/2013/11/21/unintimidated-a- conversation-with-governor-scott-walker/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY: DC Transcription – www.dctmr.com

MARC THIESSEN: Good afternoon. Welcome to AEI. My name is Marc Thiessen. I’m a fellow here at the American Enterprise Institute. And most recently, I had the privilege of collaborating with Governor Scott Walker on his new book, “Unintimidated,” so we’re very glad that you’re here today.

A couple of housekeeping notes I’ve been asked to pass on before we begin: After our discussion, Governor Walker will sign copies of his book here in this room, which can be purchased at the vendor’s booth set out in the hallway. After the book signing, we’ll kick off our panel discussion with Steve Hayes from the “Weekly Standard” and Bob Costa from “National Review,” who are both here.

Governor Walker is hoping to sign as many books as possible. So it’s crucial we transition to the book signing in an orderly fashion. So after – and then after the Q&A, AEI staff will help those of you who’d like to have your book signed form a queue down the center aisle of the room, where the yellow tape is over there. If you’re not getting a book signed, please avoid the center aisle and use the aisles if you wish to exit. OK, now our housekeeping’s done.

So in the course of the last year, I had a unique opportunity to see Scott Walker up close. I spent dozens of hours with him, with his staff, getting to know his family; his wonderful wife, Tonette, who’s here; and the team that he assembled in Wisconsin to lead that state, which is just remarkable. And we skyped for half a year every Sunday, sometimes for two or three hours at a time to – and so I got a real insight into this man, going over drafts of the book, discussing what he accomplished in Wisconsin, the lessons he learned; the mistakes he made, which he’s very candid about in this book; and what those lessons are for a conservative comeback nationally – what we can learn from what he did in Wisconsin, what he did right, what he did wrong.

And when the book was finished – I was just saying this at a lunch we just had – I told him that I came into this process as an admirer, and I finished it a true believer. I think that he is a remarkable politician. And I could spend a long time here telling you why, but I’ll give you just a couple of reasons why that is.

First of all, Scott Walker has a spine of steel. There is nothing that fazes him. And I want – just a figure to put that in perspective for you. There were 100,000 people protesting at the Wisconsin State Capitol. When the Packers won the Super Bowl, 56,000 people came out to Lambeau Field to celebrate. So double that number of people outside and inside the Capitol, chanting his name – not in a good way. And he was followed – you know, for events around the state. They – I mean, imagine having to walk through your own Capitol with a phalanx of state troopers in a flying-wedge formation.

He said he felt like – he knew what it was like to be a Green Bay Packer for the first time. Protesters following him everywhere, camping outside of your home. At one point, they even surrounded his car and shook the vehicle while he was in it. And the pressure here was enormous, and he didn’t falter under it. And I don’t think there’re a lot of people who would have stood up. I mean, the polls showed that if when – at the height of this, his popularity dropped down to 37 percent. The polls showed that just a few months after the election, if he had run again that day and the election were held that day, he would have lost by like 13 points.

He was so confident in his reforms and what – that they would work and that people would come around and see that, that he just never – never for a moment even considered backing down, which I think is very rare in politics today.

He did that all without abandoning his principles or moving to the center. He was a man who believes in certain things and is willing to fight for them and it’s not just on collective bargaining. There’s a chapter in the book where he talks about all the other things that were accomplished that no one noticed because of the collective bargaining fight, but these conservative reforms on everything from economics to entitlement reform and all the rest. So he’s a – not just a principled and courageous leader, but a full spectrum conservative.

And he’s a proven winner. The unions spent millions and millions of dollars to push him out of office and make an example of him. And when the dust had settled and the recall election was done, he won with a – not only did he become the first governor in American history to win a recall election; he won with a larger percentage of the vote than in his initial election. That’s a remarkable thing.

And finally, he’s just an incredibly decent man. The things that were said about him, the signs comparing him to Hitler and Osama bin Laden. “Time” Magazine had a story where they talked about when the (protests would leave?), how they were – the workers were washing off the chalk drawings on the floor with his name in it – dead body – you know, portraying a dead body, He never responded in kind. I think you go through the transcripts of everything he said during that fight, not once will you hear a single thing that he said negative about the public workers and the protesters outside.

He was unfailingly positive. And I remember we talked about this and I asked you why that was, and what you told me was, my kids – that I wanted to set an example for my children that you can be true to your principles and be decent at the same time. And I think that’s a remarkable achievement.

So I think – if I would summarize Scott Walker, it would be tough, smart, principled, decent, and someone who knows how to win, which is something we conservatives really are looking for.

So without further ado, I give you governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. (Applause.)

GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER (R-WI): Thank you.

Of course, first off, thank you all for coming and thanks to AEI for hosting this. And most of all, thanks to Marc not only for moderating this, but for helping me write this book. It was real important for me to put Marc’s name up on the front along with mine because he really, really got to know me and Tonette and our family, my team, both my official office, my political team, and know the people of the state of Wisconsin, which was really important.

In addition, I wanted, unlike some politicians who get a ghostwriter and pretend that they wrote the book, I wanted the people in my state to know I was their governor throughout the week, that I wasn’t off writing a book all the time – that it really was as Marc mentioned. We spent the time on Sunday skyping, which is, you know, just even from a few years ago interesting to think how things change, but I got to know him and understand that he really shared the vigor for our reform that we’re going to talk about that is clearly articulated in the book.

I’ve also got to tell you, it’s kind of fun having this microphone on. It feels like – Tonette, over the years we go to the state fair, and I feel like I should be doing one of those Ginsu knife set things behind the – (inaudible) – with this microphone on. (Laughter.)

And she’s going to point – and she’s going to point out that Hayes, who’s going to be on the panel later, always gets me to eat goofy things at the Wisconsin State Fair as well, not the least of which was Krispy Kreme cheeseburgers. Don’t ever eat those, bad idea. (Laughter.)

But on the book, the – you know, it’s interesting. One of the things you, Marc, you just said brought to mind a story we tell about in the book about our sons and just kind of putting things in perspective. About two years ago at this time, late in November of 2011, the protests and all that had happened earlier in the year, we’ll touch on that in a moment. And then, we’d gone through, were successful, finally got it passed, went through court challenges. Things were starting to brew up a little bit for the beginning of getting the signatures for the recall, which ultimately was held June of 2012.

But this one Sunday afternoon, our home – both of our kids, my first year in office, were both still in high school. They’re now both in college, but both were at Wauwatosa East High School, which is just outside of Milwaukee. And so to keep them sane and to keep us sane, we kept them in high school instead of moving to the governor’s residence. So we’d come back home most nights. So this Sunday, between church and the Packers’ game, we’re out raking leaves, which, by the way, in our state are two religious activities – church and the Packers game. But we’re out – I’m out raking leaves out in the front. Matt and Alex are at high school. One of their friends, whose family had moved away, was living with us to finish off his senior year – as if we needed any more chaos, right? But Gavin’s out front raking leaves with me.

And we live on a busy street in Wauwatosa. And, you know, I’m raking along and all of the sudden I hear a honk and I turn and sure enough, he’s a guy, car going by, windows rolled down, arm comes out and he flips me off.

And Gavin says to me, Mr. Walker, did you know that was going to happen? I’m like, well, you know – he goes, how do you put up with that? You know, how do you deal with that? And I said, well, Gavin, you know, it’s America. The beauty of America is people can do and say whatever they want. I said, yeah, it’s a little crude. You know, it’d be one thing at the Capitol, one thing at the governor’s residence. Here it’s on a busy street. I said, but you just got to stay positive because in the end if you stay positive, good things will happen.

We go back to raking the leaves and literally not more than a couple of minutes go by and I start to hear a honk again. And I’m really thinking, Lord, maybe I should have done this at night. (Laughter.) You know, this is crazy. But being a bit of a masochist, I turn to look and now there’s not one. There’s two cars, both of them honking, both of them the windows going down, the arm comes out. I think here it comes. Both of them give me thumbs up. (Laughter, applause.)

So of course, Gavin says to me, Mr. Walker, did you know that was going to happen? (Laughter.) Thinking I planned it or something. I said, no, but it was a great way to not only make a point to Gavin, but to reinforce to me that what we talked about, not only for Matt and Alex’s sake, but for the state’s sake, that you could show people that you could be principled, you could stick to your guns, but you could do it in a way that’s still decent.

And I think in the end, one of the many untold stories that if you watch what happened in Wisconsin, you saw the protests and you probably saw the results of the recall, but for most people across this country, including some of the people in my own state, most people don’t know everything else that happened. And that’s what’s interesting about this book. I had a very revealing compliment the other day from a columnist in the media who said, I read the advance copy of your book and I got to tell you, I was surprised. It’s really quite good. (Laughter.) And I said, well, thanks, I think. But his point was that, you know, a lot of times these political books are a little bit insufferable.

This is – if you’re looking for my biography, you want to know how I became an Eagle Scout, you’re going to be disappointed because that’s not what this book is about. It’s really about Wisconsin and the reforms that we did, how we did it, what we did, but most importantly why we did it, and then how that can apply to other states and, equally as important, how it can apply to some of the things we need to do to reform our nation right here in our nation’s capital.

And so that’s really what we share in this. It’s – a little bit of the story does go back – at one point in a chapter go back in time to the eight years when I was a county executive, not so much from a chronological standpoint, but to put it in perspective that I didn’t need any group, any organization, any supporters, anybody else telling me why I needed to do this. It was self-apparent after eight years of being a local official. And that was – in the past, even when Democrats were in charge of the state government, in my state, when they cut aid to local governments like mine, at the county level or to schools or to others, the reality was they didn’t give us any tools to deal with it. And so we’d have to come up with creative solutions, but sadly, more often than not those solutions required the public employee unions’ leaders to step up and give us something in return – to give us some help and assistance along the way.

In another chapter, we talk about how frustrating it was that many times those very leaders who were supposed to be standing up for the solidarity of their coworkers were the very ones encouraging us to just go ahead with the layoffs because they’d rather protect the benefits, assuming that in a year or two they’d elect someone new to take my place or someone (like me’s?) place and that those people would want to put – those elected officials would ultimately restore the positions, and they would never have to give the benefits up. I mean, the most egregious of that was we even proposed a 35-hour work week, which we thought was a pretty reasonable way to avoid layoffs for a couple of weeks, for a couple of months, and they said no.

So we – I knew early on that if we wanted to balance the budget, do it without raising taxes, without massive layoffs, without cuts in things like Medicaid, which other states did all across the country, led by Republican and Democrats alike, the only way I could do it in a state where more than half the budget is aid to local governments is to give those local governments the tools to offset those changes in the budget. And really the paramount way to do that was to take collective bargaining head on. And in doing so, we not only put the power back in the hands of the taxpayers, we did so in a way that was pro-worker.

And one of the misnomers out there that somehow I was anti-union. No, I’m not that at all. I’m pro-worker and pro-taxpayer. And I think in this discussion today, I hope to give you some examples that you can read more in depth in in the book about what that means, how we can learn to apply it in other states, and how there are similar parallels to what we can learn here in our nation’s capital.

MR. THIESSEN: One thing I’d – I’d like to take you back to the capitol and what it was like back then. I mean, I think people forget that all this took place a few weeks after the Gabby Giffords shooting. And, you know, all the people on the left who said that it was all the heated Tea Party rhetoric that was responsible for that and that caused the climate of hate and all the rest of it. And all of a sudden in the Wisconsin State Capitol, you have people with signs with your face in the crosshairs – “don’t retreat, reload.” I mean, we documented some of these and there are pictures of them in the book, of some of these signs.

One day, somebody scattered .22 caliber bullets all over the capitol grounds. This is a few weeks after Gabby Giffords. And at one point, the head of your security detail, Dave Erwin, came to you, and I want to read to people what he said. He took you aside and he said, “Governor, I’ve been at this a while and when hairs in the back of my neck stand up, you have to be concerned. They know where you go to church. They’ve been to your church. They’re following your children and tracking your children. They know where your children go to school, what time they have class, what time they get out of class. They know when they have football practice. They know where your wife works. They know that she was at the grocery store at this time and that she went to visit her father at his residence.”

What was like to have the head of your security detail come to you and tell you we’ve got intelligence that these people are tracking your family and sending death threats to your family?

GOV. WALKER: Well, it was, you know, certainly like anybody, any family member, you know, first reaction is for the safety of Tonette, my sons Matt and Alex, my parents, who live at our home. My father-in-law Tony was then still with us. And you immediately think about their concern. And so while I didn’t stop making public appearances, we went to great length to listen to what our security detail told us in terms of making precautions that were necessary to protect the safety of my family and our circle of friends who were amongst us.

But at the same time, I’ve got to tell you, it wasn’t just that. It was – in one of the very vivid letters that was sent – most of them were sent threats to me, but this particular one was sent to Tonette that I didn’t show her at first. We later talked about, but it was a very graphic letter to Tonette about – pointing out that a governor had never been assassinated before, but I might be the first. And then took it a step on, and said, or, maybe we’ll impair that kind of pain on your sons because that would be more painful and kind of basically tried to threaten her into saying you need to do something to stop him because if you don’t, we’re going to do something in return. And that was one of the more serious ones because it talked, as you mentioned, about all those details.

They knew where the kids went to school, where Tonette went to work and that. And it was one of the rare times where I tried not to get real worked up one way or the other because I thought, you let emotion in, you get out of control. You lose the focus. You lose the argument. You lose the debate. But in that case, Dave Erwin, who was then head of my detail, gave it to me right before I was going out for one of my live press conferences. And I got to tell you, more than anything it just ticked me off.

It really got me angry. And I thought – and I think this is – eventually, we saw this out of our state senators and our state representatives, some of whom in the senate were a little bit on the bubble to begin with. As the threats started to come in against them and not just me, if anything, for all of us, it had the opposite reaction – not just for me, but for them. They were unintimidated as well because they said, I’ll be damned if somebody’s going to come in, particularly from some other state, and try and threaten me to not do the job I was elected to do. And – but it was – you know, it’s one of those where you – even now, I think about the passion that – you know, that it really worked us up over. And it was a challenging time.

MR. THIESSEN: Your reforms were extremely unpopular when they first passed. Your approval rating dropped to 37 percent, which was the average of Bush’s second term approval rating.

GOV. WALKER: About where Obama is headed –

MR. THIESSEN: A little higher than Obama actually now. But we’ll get into that. But – (laughter) – “Time” Magazine called you “dead man Walker.” But you were so certain your reforms would work and that once people saw how effective they were that they would come around, that you took a gamble on it and you risked your entire political career on it. As you alluded to, there’s a guy in Washington who sort of did the same thing, and it’s not working out as well for him. (Laughter.) Can you talk a little bit about why your reforms work and why Obama’s not having the Walker experience?

GOV. WALKER: Well, that’s exactly right because I think people appreciate leadership, which we can talk about as well, because we talk about that link later in the book, regardless of which direction leadership’s headed, but they ultimately want those reforms to work.

I knew from my experience as a local official that these reforms would indeed work. And I remember one night standing, looking out from the governor’s residence. We’d been going back and forth with the kids, but looking out that night I’d taken a call from one of my colleagues, another fellow governor. And he was worried, you know, as were a lot of governors. A lot of governors repeatedly called me throughout this whole process. And that particular night, I remember – visually – I was standing looking on across Lake Mendota. I could see the capitol. I could see the lights from the University of Wisconsin. And I remember he was asking me about this. I said, you know what, every day, every week, and every month that goes by will get better because I’m confident once people see these reforms and see how they positively affect their lives, that the public’s mood will change. Because up until now it wasn’t just the protesters. Remember, once the national unions got involved, they literally came into my state and started running millions of dollars of campaign-style ads against me, trying to pressure the legislature not to pass our reforms.

We were so focused on doing what we were elected to do about doing these reforms that we never planned any sort of a media campaign. It just was you just do your job. And so they had the upper hand in that regard.

You had the protests. You had the media. At least locally, much of it tended to be very much obsessed with listening to the protesters because it was easy. Protesters are upset. It was hard emotionally to find a counter to that that was just, you know, based on reason or saying, well this – so but our hope was, I thought, this was something I really learned from Mitch Daniels. We can come back and touch on this as well. But doing it early was important because it gives you time to show that your reforms work. And what happened was two key elements started to change the tide.

On September of 2011, when most parents sent their kids back to public schools, like we did with our sons Matt and Alex, most schools in our state – parents were surprised to see that the schools were the same or in many cases better because if they used our reforms, many of them actually found that they were able to save positions or add positions, and so the schools themselves were the same or better. And then a couple of months later in December when property tax bills came out, in most places around the state, property tax bills were the same or lower for the first time in about a dozen years.

And suddenly, as I would travel the state and I’d talk to people, I’d go to factories or farms or small businesses and talk to my constituents, I’d get people would say, man, this is awesome. You know, it’s not what they said. Things are great at the local level. Things are really improving. It’s not all the chaos. Or they’d say, hey, my goodness, I haven’t seen my property tax bill go down in I don’t know how long. Your reforms are actually working.

And so that was a critical point for us. And that was just the beginning of the reforms. The reforms were much bigger than just tax cuts and just on the surface on the schools because we did things like get rid of seniority and tenure in our schools and in other local and state governments, we can literally hire and fire now based on merit. We can pay based on performance. That means we can put the best and the brightest in our classrooms and we can keep them there. And that’s what makes the private sector routinely successful. It wasn’t happening in the public sector before.

And more and more and more, we do great job in this book documenting those sorts of savings and those reforms and those benefits. The more people learned of those stories, the more they saw it firsthand in their own households, in their own communities, the better off things were.

MR. THIESSEN: What – this is – this book is, in part, a memoir of your experiences fighting for reform in Wisconsin. But it’s much – it’s also a path-out-of-the- wilderness book for the conservative movement in a lot of ways. How what you learned from your experiences and how that can be applied to the national comeback we need to make. And you know, Republicans are just sick of losing. (Laughter.) Conservatives – we want to win again. And we want – and we need a path on how to do that.

And one of the things that – you know, one of the TV interviews that you did for the book this weekend, they referred to you as the most polarizing figure in American politics. And, you know, one of the things that I’ve found – that I learned about you that I found was fascinating was this phenomenon you have in Wisconsin of what are called the “Obama-Walker voters” – that in your recall election, the gubernatorial recall, exit polls showed that roughly one out of six people who voted for you also intended to vote for Barack Obama. And the polls show actually that about 11 percent of people in Wisconsin support both you and Barack Obama.

Now, there are no two politicians in America more polarly opposite philosophically than you and Obama, yet you’ve got one in ten in Wisconsin that support you both. How did you win the Obama-Walker voters and how can we win the Obama- Walker voters, not just in Wisconsin, but their equivalents in other states and nationally?

GOV. WALKER: Yeah. Yeah, that was an – it’s an interesting name because it’s – I like the Packers. The president likes the Bears. For any of you who watch football, that’s about as far apart as you can get. And politically, it’s pretty similar as well. And yet, you know, today – well, not today, the polls probably changed the last few weeks, but last month, the president and I had very similar polling even a year after. The difference, of course, you know, one party loves us; the other party doesn’t. And it’s those persuadable voters in the middle in Wisconsin and other battleground states that make the difference.

We found and we found it not only in our campaign, but we found it in talking to voters afterwards, is what – more than anything, particularly in times of crisis, my firm belief is what voters want more than anything isn’t just Republican or Democrat leadership. It’s leadership. They want to feel like leaders are standing up and making bold promises and then delivering on them. That is so important. I think so many people, and understandably so, feel so let down by promises made by politicians in the past in either political party that they become very skeptical and very cynical about that.

And so while some of those same voters maybe early on, in 2011, were in that, you know, that polling that gave me mid-30s, over time, as they saw that we didn’t back off no matter what the attacks, no matter what the abuses, that we stayed on track, repeated – in fact, I used to joke, I repeated our message so often I sound like a broken record until Matt and Alex reminded me that nobody knows what a record is anymore. (Laughter.) So I sound like a repeating iPod or a scratched CD or something.

But the – but we kept our focus. We didn’t get distracted. We kept coming back to why the reforms were necessary and then, in turn, how they were successful. And I think once that started to set in, voters started to say, you know, what, I may not agree with every step the governor take, I may not even agree with more importantly – I think probably a lot of those persuadable voters would say I may not agree with the method he chose, because I think so many of them blamed me for, you know, the protests and everything else, which is a little ridiculous considering I had nothing to do with the protests. But they did. And I remember for a while, there were some of my – both political and policy advisors, who for a while were trying to get me to consider actually coming out and issuing an apology. And I said, I’m not going to do that because I did what I thought was right and I’m not apologizing for something that I thought was right.

But what I did do, and I said it repeatedly, I even talked about it at length in the book, is acknowledge that I made some mistakes, the biggest of which was the fact that I was so eager to fix these problems, to take on these challenges, to get moving on it, that I didn’t make the case early on in my administration as to why it was necessary to do that. And that was one of the lessons learned. If you’re going to take on big, bold challenges, you need to make the case, but then not use it as an excuse not to take action. That’s an overall message to anybody at the state, local, or federal level.

But, Marc, per your point about, you know, conservatives, the other part is I think how in Wisconsin and other battleground states, of which many of my neighbors in the Midwest, voters more than anything want leadership. They want leaders to stand up and firmly say what they’re going to do, to lay out those policies, and then have the courage to stick through them and to see them through, and then to prove that they work. I mean, over time, they’re not sustainable if they don’t work, which is I think one of the mistakes this president has made is you can’t make your decisions on policy solely based on your political team. You’ve got to invoke and involve your policy team to make sure that whatever promises you make politically, you’re capable of upholding.

And that’s why I knew, much more on the political side of things, I knew that in the end these policies would work. And good policies are good politics.

MR. THIESSEN: But to press on that point just a little bit because right now conservatives are getting a lot of advice to say we’re – Republican Party is too extreme right. We’re never going to win the center if we don’t moderate our policies and soften our rough edges and come to – move over to the center a little bit. And you managed to win the center without doing any of those things. And one of the points you make in the book, which I thought was fascinating, is that not only is that not the best advice; it’s the exact opposite of what those people in the center want.

GOV. WALKER: Exactly. There’s two key points on why moving that way is not good. One is respect and one is focus. On the respect side, I think voters overwhelmingly, particularly in that persuadable middle, what they want is people they can respect, leaders they can respect. Even if they don’t agree with them on every issue or every tactic, they want to know that these are men and women that stand by their convictions, that have beliefs, that certainly listen, don’t just lead. But they want to understand that when the chips are down – because think about it. It makes sense to me. I remember years ago when I first ran for office, I – someone asked me a question and I gave an answer. And the way she asked it, she asked it so that it was a trick for a politician to answer it the way she wanted it – sounded like she believed. And I didn’t. And I said, well, I just – the way you asked that question, I appreciate the fact that you have that belief, but this is my belief. And there might be 100 other issues we agree on, but you deserve to know what my position is. Well, she said, you passed the test.

She said, that even though we don’t agree, she said, what’s more important to me was that if we do agree on all these other issues, I want to know than when push comes to shove, you’re not going to change just because you think it’s worth it to politically pander out there.

So I think for those persuadable voters in Wisconsin, in Iowa, in Ohio, in, you know, Virginia, and all these other states out there, what they want more than anything is the respect to know that there are leaders out there willing to lead, willing to follow through on.

The other one in terms of focus or discipline is that I also think – and we talk about this in the book, not just about Wisconsin, but about the optimism I see in many places around this country, which is out in the states, where today we have 30 Republican governors, and that is increasingly those governors – maybe not as big of a battle as we took on, but in state after state – and I mention many of these in the book – you’ve got Republican governors who are real reformers, who are leading with optimistic, relevant messages and showing they have the courage to act on them, but they’re focused on the things were elected to be focused on. So they’re talking about economic and fiscal challenges that our states face.

And that’s the other part of it is don’t moderate – if you’re pro-life, don’t suddenly flip your position because I think for undecided or persuadable voter, they’re going to have more disrespect for you that on something as fundamentally principled as that, somehow you’re changing just because you think it’ll get you a vote. That will not earn you a vote. That’ll earn you the disrespect of the very person you’re trying to get a vote from.

But they also want to know that that’s not the only issue you focus in on and that if they care about the economy and they care about fiscal issues, that you have a plan and an agenda and a focus that’s going to connect to the things that they’re concerned about as well.

You have to – the two have to go hand in hand. Stay firm to your principles, but make sure you’ve got a focus that addresses the issues that overwhelmingly the people want us focused on. And today, in our states, in our country, it’s still, sadly, the economic and fiscal crisis we face.

MR. THIESSEN: One of the most revealing stories in the book, I think, is one where the protesters disrupted the ceremony for the Special Olympics. And they came – literally, there was a ceremony outside the capitol and they came dressed as zombies and stood between you and these disabled kids. And I was fascinated by your response to it. You just ignored them and continued on with the event. And afterwards, Charlie Sykes, a great talk radio host, he said, you know, you should have gone all Chris Christie on them. And you write in the book, you say, “Chris has a unique gift, but if I’d done that, it would have been about the protesters and me and I wanted to keep the focus on the Special Olympics athletes as best I could. It was their day.”

And that gets to an interesting question, you know, we’re hearing – you know – Chris Christie just won reelection in New Jersey, which is a state that hasn’t voted Republican in a quarter century. You’ve won in a state that hasn’t voted Republican in a quarter century. And you both have very different paths out of the political wilderness. He – Chris Christie is moderate in policy and immoderate in temperament. You are very moderate in temperament, but immoderate in policy.

Which is the better path for the Republican Party? (Laughter.)

GOV. WALKER: Wow. I was with the – I was at the game on Sunday with Chris, so let the record stand, Chris and I are good friends. Wish he would have been a bit more of a generous host and let the Packers win against the Giants. But – not just because of the economy, but I think in general, where we have appeal goes – in a way it parallels the question you just asked before, which is stay to your principles, because I still believe in the end in most of these races, but more importantly just in governing, that people who are still up in the air who are looking to try and figure out which path is the right path will respect people that have a clear, principled focus of where they want to go and how they want to get there.

But be mindful, as I mentioned in that raking story before, that, you know, the demeanor you have has an impact. And I don’t know – that’s why I chuckle a little bit to contrast. I think in New Jersey, the way that Chris has reacted to things actually fits. Having been to New Jersey before, I think it’s – (laughter) – in fact, Chris and I have often joked are very similar, particularly in speaking out to things. I just have a Midwestern filter. That’s the difference here. I’m willing to speak out, but I’m not going to call you an idiot. I’m just going to say that’s a ridiculous question and move on, whereas maybe on the East Coast it’s a little bit different.

But I think going forward, we need to make sure, not only for the future of the movement, but I think for most Americans, they want principled leaders who they believe believe in something, that stand for something, and are willing to stand for that. Because I think more often than not, people realize that even on the issues where people are, you know, litmus test, where they’re perfectly aligned with a candidate, the biggest fear that most voters have in American politics today is that somehow people they vote for based on those particular issues will change because something better comes along – that they will change – and I’m not saying this about any particular candidate or official, but I think that’s just a general concern that most voters have – that if something better comes along, if someone with more influence or more money or more power comes along that they’ll suddenly change their beliefs or they’ll change their issues out there.

And I just firmly believe – I think it’s true in our state, but I also think it’s true across the country – that for voters who are still not firmly locked into one side or the other, those are the sorts of leaders they’re looking for.

MR. THIESSEN: You’ve been criticized by some in Washington for saying that the Republican Party’s 2016 nominee should be outside of Washington, which is perhaps not surprising coming from folks in Washington. But one of the things in the book –

GOV. WALKER: I’d be surprised if they didn’t get upset about that, but –

MR. THIESSEN: But one of the things you talk about in the book, which – when you were coming up with the solution to the budget crisis and you – none – your staff didn’t come to it. You came to it. And the reason was you were looking at it through the prism of being a local official, whereas they were looking at it through the prism of being a state official. And you had been in the situation of being a local official who is constrained by collective bargaining and you knew what you could do if you were free from those constraints. And so you saw it from that bottom side up. How important is that similar experience of being a governor to being an effective president? That you can see things having been a governor – just like you saw it as a local official to being an effective governor, being a governor to being an effective president. Why is that experience important?

GOV. WALKER: Yeah. And I think that’s a great insight from what we discussed about what I found early on, my team, particularly my secretary of administration who’d been a former speaker and longtime lawmaker involved in state government, said, wow, why didn’t I see that? And I said, well, it’s because your perspective is different. He was state focused. I’d come from a county standpoint – knew enough about state government to know how to make it happen, but had a completely different focal point.

Yeah, without a doubt. It’s why the other day, when Jonathan Karl asked me what would my ideal candidate be, I said it’s either a current or former governor. It doesn’t mean I don’t like people here in Washington. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t potentially exceptions to that. I would dare say my home state friend Paul Ryan is probably one of those rare people in Washington that actually has the kind of courage we see in the states right now and thinks more like an executive than he does like a member of Congress. But having said that, I just look not just for the political future – you know, obviously, a lot of people talked about Hillary Clinton is the likely nominee, who is a product by and large of Washington, not just of late, but for decades -- that to have a team that goes up against that nominee who is completely focused on being outsiders taking Washington on, successful reformers in the state, just for purely political reasons I think that’s very compelling.

But I’d say in a larger sense, more importantly, you really want a change. You want a change. And let’s face it, I mean, saw Arthur Brooks before. Arthur makes a compelling case in his work about the need to invoke a moral rightness about what we’re trying to do not so much on social issues, which is true as well, but on economic and fiscal issues – that there is a moral imperative in America today that handing kind of the debt, deficit problems on to our children and grandchildren is just fundamentally immoral and that it is not right and just. And that if we’re going to invoke that, the people, I think, who are best equipped to take that on are people who come at it from that kind of perspective from the outside looking in. And in particular, add to it, if you look at governors or former governors, they’re people who don’t just come in with outside perspective. They’re people who by and large have successfully initiated, enacted those sorts of reform at the state level.

MR. THIESSEN: Building on that, one of – a lot of conservatives criticize Barack Obama for waging class warfare and for invoking fairness pretty frequently. And one point that you make in the book is that people fundamentally – and Arthur talks about this a lot, too – people fundamentally make decisions on the basis of fairness. We are endowed by our – created by our creator as seeing the world through good and evil, right and wrong. And so you actually successfully won the fairness fight in your fight over in Wisconsin. You didn’t shy away from saying that’s the wrong way to go. You took the fairness fight head on and won it.

So could you talk a little bit about how you did that and how we can do that more on a national basis, win the fight over fairness?

GOV. WALKER: Yeah. Yeah. A great story that’s in the book was a story of a young woman in Milwaukee, about three and a half years ago, named Megan Sampson. Ms. Sampson was a teacher – a first-year teacher in the Milwaukee public school system, English teacher. Early on in the spring of 2010, she was – she got notified that she was the outstanding teacher of the year for all the English teachers in the state of Wisconsin – the entire state. Exactly the kind of teacher you’d want in any school, let alone Milwaukee, which is our largest and one of those classic urban school districts that, like many others across the country, is under distress for a variety of reasons.

And so here you had this great teacher, new teacher, dynamic teacher, gets told she’s outstanding teacher of the year. And a week or two later, she got another notice. But it wasn’t when the award ceremony was. She got notice she was being laid off.

Now, when I point that out to people, they say how could that be, you know? Outside – anybody who doesn’t follow local government would say how in the world could that be? But in 2010, before I was governor, when Democrats controlled the governorship and the both houses of legislature in Wisconsin, they cut aid to local governments, including schools as well. The difference was they didn’t give those local governments and schools any tools to offset those reductions in state aid. So what did a school district like Milwaukee have do to? Lay teachers off. And under the old system of collective bargaining, before our reforms, what happened? If you were the last hired, you were one of the first fired. If you’re the last in, you’re the first out.

The reason I tell you that Megan Sampson story is I didn’t – early on, as I mentioned before, I was so focused on fixing things, I didn’t explain why. I didn’t talk about what we were doing. But once it became clear I wasn’t making that connection, I started telling the stories of Megan Sampson and of others like them out there – that it wasn’t just a fiscal issue. This was fundamentally a fairness issue. And we tell that story. What I point out is the book is for future battles, not only in my states, but in other states and here in Washington, if conservatives are going to win those battles, we got to make it about fairness. And you tell the story of Megan Sampson, you say how could she be laid off? That’s not fair.

If I’d said that up front, people would have said, Governor, you need to fix that. If I told the story early on about how there’s a school bus driver – not school bus – city bus driver, transit bus driver in the city of Madison who makes more than $150,000 a year, more than the mayor and anybody else over there because of overtime abuses under the union contract, most people would have said, that’s not fair. You’ve got to fix that.

If I talked about the correctional officers, who, because of the union contract, were able to call in sick on their own shift and then come back and work the next shift on overtime, people would say that’s not fair. You need to fix that.

What we learned after the fact is when we started telling those stories that people just said, that’s not fair. And we can win that. You know, right now, we kind of concede that all too often, at least in the national debate, to a president who says people need to pay their fair share, instead of standing up and making the case that what we’re talking about is truly about fairness, and it’s about treating people with equal opportunity.

The outcome is up to us, but the opportunity should be equal. That’s what great about America. That is uniquely, not just a conservative or Republican ideal. That is an American ideal. We should be the ones that say that we’re standing up for that, just like our ancestors fought for it so many times in the past.

MR. THIESSEN: You’re a fiscal hawk. You took a $3.6 billion deficit and turned it into a $760 million surplus. So you stand next to none in terms of cutting spending and reforming government and putting fiscal house in order. But you say in the book and there’s a chapter in the book on the lessons of Wisconsin. One of the lessons is austerity is not the answer and that too often conservatives present themselves as bearers of sour medicine, and we should be offering positive, optimistic agenda.

Now, it’s very hard to make fiscal responsibility hopeful and optimistic, right? But you’ve managed to do it in Wisconsin. And so, you know, tell us how you did it and how can we do this in Washington? How can we get our fiscal house in order with a hopeful, optimistic agenda, as opposed to everybody has to do with less?

GOV. WALKER: Absolutely. It’s one of the things that bothers me the most. In fact, after last year’s recall, I had a national reporter say to me, tell us about your austerity measures. And I cringed because I said what I did was not about austerity. If it was, I would have just cut things across the board. And I probably would have faced a recall; in that situation, I probably would have lost because people would have said, you know, you hurt schools and social service programs just as much as you hurt everything else out there. You hurt everybody. What kind of a vision is that for the future of our state?

Instead of austerity what we did was reform. We invoked reform. And that is much more aspirational – I said it’s about breaking the false choice that is too often apparent in local, state, federal government between either you have – you either have to have massive tax increases to fund the services that are essential, or you have to cut core and essential programs.

For years Tonette and I had – as I mentioned, had two sons in the public school system in Wauwatosa. As homeowners in our community, we were told either our property taxes had to go way up or schools would suffer. That’s a false choice. Nowhere in the rest of society, nowhere in the private sector do you make that sort of choice out there. You don’t say times are tough, so we’re going to double the price of our product. Conversely, you don’t say I’m going to cut the quality in half or people would run to your competitor. Yet that’s routinely the expectation of the choices we’re limited to in the public sector and the government sphere.

So what we did was say we’re not going to accept that false choice. And that’s why we looked at real, long-term structural reform. It was tough. And let’s face it: The reason it was tough was not because of the outcome, was not because of the results. It was because on top of that – the other thing that I haven’t mentioned yet in great detail is we decided that our public employees were going to be put into a system now where schools and local governments and state government could ask for a little bit more in pension and health care contributions, although still arguably much less than their counterparts in the private sector, that if they were going to be asked to pay a little bit more, as well as some other changes that come about with collective bargaining reform, that in return we should give them something because, by and large, they’re good, decent, honorable people.

And so what we did was we gave them the freedom to choose – the freedom to choose whether they wanted to be on union or not. And that was the real reason why you saw not only the original protesters, but why you saw descending on my capitol protesters from around the country and leaders from around the country in the union movement and the liberal movement was because they knew that if you gave people that choice, they’d looked at what happened when Mitch Daniels did it on a limited basis for state employees in Indiana. They took the choice. They took the freedom. And they no longer had their hands automatically on that money.

And I’m convinced all along, I write about it in the book as well, that they would have – many of those leaders would have thrown their members under the bus. They would have made them pay almost 100 percent of their pension (and?) health care if I’d just given those automatic union dues back to them. Because that was the source of their power. And we broke that, what many would argue is a corrupt system that in no way stands up for the taxpayers. We empowered not just the taxpayers, but for the workers to be able to choose for themselves. That was really at the heart of it.

And so once you – that’s where all the attention and the protests and the money that came in was really driven for that. Once you got passed all that and saw that the reforms worked, that’s where you made some tremendous inroads. Not only did it help us politically survive the recall and not – I should add, not only did I survive the recall, but last November, even in our state where Barack Obama carried the vote by almost the same percentage that I did, and Tammy Baldwin, a very liberal Democrat, was elected to the United States Senate, Republicans gained two more seats in the Wisconsin State Senate and one more seat in the State Assembly, where we have a 60 out of 99 vote margin in large part because our state candidates share the same optimistic reform- minded agenda as I had in the recall election. And that was something the voters wanted more of because that’s aspirational. That’s something that people can say, it makes my life better because of the things they’re doing.

MR. THIESSEN: Now, you argue that conservatives should become champions of the vulnerable. And too often liberals are able to portray conservatives as defenders of rich and powerful and that we make it too easy for them to do that. And that’s one of the reasons, you say, why we lost the 2012 election. Can you talk a little bit about that?

GOV. WALKER: Yeah. There’s – obviously at great length we talk about the Romney and Ryan campaign and some of my frustrations. But one part in particular, though, was the whole discussion about both the 47-percent comment and even, about the same time, remember, there was also a discussion about Governor Romney, who, again, I want to qualify, is a fine man, would have been a wonderful president, but I think was given some poor advice all along the campaign. And at one point, remember, he said, why don’t – I’m paraphrasing – I don’t essentially need to worry about the poor. They have a safety net. I need to focus on the middle class.

And in the book, I write about how that just kind of jarred me because most people I know in my state, having campaigned now twice in the last three years for governor – so I’ve talked to a lot of voters – most people on my state who are temporarily living in poverty, who are temporarily dependent on the government, don’t want to be.

It’s not something they aspire to. I point out, as well, in the book, I grew up in a small town called Delavan. I don’t ever remember anybody in my town, in my class saying to me, Scott – when I was growing up – someday, when I get older, my dream is to become dependent on the government. I don’t remember that. And for all the people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, particularly in my state over the last few years, who come here from other countries, be it from India or Mexico or Germany or anywhere else around the world, I can’t tell you anybody I’ve recalled meeting who came here from some other country and said the reason I came to America was to become dependent on the government.

Whether you’re born here or you come here from somewhere else, the American dream is not to become dependent on the government. The American dream is that what’s special and makes us exceptional is that no matter who you are, no matter what class you’re born into, no matter where your parents and your family are from, in America you can be and do anything you want. Unlike so many other places around the world, you’re not limited by the class or the income or the geography that you’re born in. There are limitless potentials in America.

And to me, one of the things I think – again, not only from a political standpoint, but from a policy standpoint it is so important for us to lay out a message, an optimistic message not just to people as a whole, but to point out to people who are temporarily living in poverty today that we’re the ones that want to lift you out of that. If you’re poor, we want to lift you out of poverty. If you’re living in despair, we want to give you true hope.

And the missed opportunity, I think, in that presidential election was one that I’ve talked about many times before and we talk about in detail in the book, is I think there was a great contrast that got completely skirted over. It was completely overlooked. The easy way to define this is to say the president and his allies, Barack Obama and his allies seem to measure success in America today by how many people are dependent on the government, by how many people are on food stamps and unemployment and Medicaid. That’s how they measure success.

We should measure success by just the opposite, by how many people are no longer dependent on the government, not because we push them out to the street, out to the curb, but because we understand that true freedom and prosperity does not come from the mighty hand of the government. It comes from empowering people with the dignity that only comes from work to control their own lives and their own destinies. That’s what we should be invoking.

I said it before in the luncheon and I’ll say it repeatedly every since is that one of the points I make – if you don’t remember anything else about that concept, it’s simple: In America, we take a day off to celebrate the 4th of July and not the 15th of April because in America, we celebrate our independence from the government, not our dependence on it. (Applause.)

MR. THIESSEN: We’re running out of time, but let’s take one or two quick questions and then we’ll get books signed. So right here on the front.

GOV. WALKER: Good to see you.

Q: (Off mic.) – to say thank you to your wife and boys for their sacrifice and their support and for giving Scott Walker to Wisconsin and hopefully you’ll bring them to D.C. (Laughter, applause.)

Q: Thanks, I’m Garrett Mitchell and I write “The Mitchell Report.” And I want to ask you a question about the office of presidency. I’m not going to ask you about your ambitions, but I’m interested in your perspective on the presidency itself. And not to talk about policy or politics, but about process. I think it’s fair to say that we have witnessed or we are in the process of witnessing two consecutive two-term presidencies that, let’s just say, will not go down in the record books – in the part of the record books most presidents would like to be in.

You couldn’t find two more different people – one executive background, another legislative, their politics are different. Their personalities are different, et cetera. But the presidency does not seem to be doing well. And I’m wondering to what extent and in what ways you think there are process-related things that the next president, whoever he or she is and from which party, can think about that would begin to sort of repair the capacity of the American presidency and that would include any thoughts you might have along the way about a kind of new federalism.

GOV. WALKER: The heart of your question I haven’t thought much about, so I’ll only give you this brief response, less about the presidency itself and more about the federal government because it goes to the heart of your end question is I think it’s some of the frustrations failures you allude to are less about the power or the use of the powers of the presidency than they are about the overextension of the federal government. And obviously, from a state standpoint, I see it more clearly. But I think the federal government is too big, too large, too intrusive in our lives, and not only that from a philosophical standpoint, from a practical standpoint too ineffective, for exactly those reasons.

And I think that’s part of the challenges of the presidency. It’s certainly part of the challenges the Congress has. And I think, while there are many great things about America today that thankfully transcend the power structure here in Washington that are based more on Americans than they are based on American leaders, at least in elected positions, so I’m still very much optimistic about the country. I do think our founders – thinking about heading out to Philadelphia in a little bit to speak at the Constitution Center – would cringe if they were to see the size and scope and expense of the federal government today.

And so from a federalism standpoint, I think the further you get power away from the people, the more difficult it is. We talk about this in the book, making a reference to, I think it was Buckley at the time where he talked about –

MR. THIESSEN: Milton Friedman.

GOV. WALKER: Oh, no, it’s Friedman. It’s Friedman, you’re right. Friedman’s quote about, you know, if you don’t like your city, you can move to another one. If you don’t like your state, you can move to another one. If your government’s lousy at the federal level, you’re kind of stuck because there aren’t a whole lot of choices out there. I’m greatly paraphrasing that. But it was –you know, to me that’s the greater essence of what I – I think the founding principles were about was – and Reagan invoked this. One of my favorite quotes of Reagan in his first inaugural address was we should all remember the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government. And we need to remember that today.

And no matter who the president is, no matter who’s on leadership in the coming years, we would all do a whole lot better if more of those powers and principles were pushed back down to the states, but more importantly, as the Tenth Amendment says, not just to the states, but to the people. Too much power is amassed here in Washington and the federal government.

MR. THIESSEN: Take one more. Gentleman right there.

Q: Governor, my name is Zach Comis (sp). I’m actually a constituent of yours from West Milwaukee, so west side of Milwaukee. My question is, as you travel across the state, you often talk about the need to work on the skills gap. And that’s a really big issue that’s affecting our economy. And I’m wondering why, then, you chose to propose $100 million property tax cut in this last budget, which reduced the average homeowner’s tax by about $13, when that money could have gone to improve our public school system, our technical college system, that could really work on the skills gap that you talk about.

GOV. WALKER: Yeah, it actually builds off – it’s a great question. It builds off of the tough but prudent decisions we made two years ago because in the budget we actually invested $100 million more into worker training, exactly in those areas you talked about. And we put about $300 million more into public schools. But we did it with some strings attached. To say we wanted it targeted to certain areas, in our technical colleges, even our University of Wisconsin system with the new flex option degree, one of the first public institutions in the country to use MOOCs, free online, and others things like that. Those were all targeted towards areas of great need that we have, whether it’s in advanced manufacturing, in health care, in IT, in those areas.

We saw on top of that, though, is when the recent numbers came out even bigger than we originally projected for our surplus, we immediately put that into property tax relief because had we not over the last few years – had property taxes grown at to the level they were projected to grow under my predecessor, over a four year span they’d be about $680 more per property than they are today. So for us, we thought it made sense for the third year in a row to send a compelling message to our working families, to our seniors, to our farmers, to our small business owners that we were going to continue to keep property taxes in check, even as we make investments in worker training, in both public and in private education opportunities and in higher education, all of which, though, were targeted towards accountability measures.

MR. THIESSEN: Governor, I know your time is limited and I know a lot of folks that want to get their books signed, so let’s move to the book-signing portion of the event.

After Governor Walker finishes signing books, we’ll begin our panel with Steve Hayes and Bob Costa. If you’re not getting a book signed, I encourage you to stick around. If you are getting a book signed, please form an orderly line down the center of the room. And if you’re not getting a book signed, please avoid the center aisle.

And thank you, Governor Walker, for a great talk. (Applause.)

(END)