Over at Dom’s Domain Politics, Dom has an excellent writeup of Friday’s debate between Gov. Scott Walker and challenger Mary Burke, with Dom rightly noting Burke won the debate hands down.
There are smart ways to discuss wages, Ebola, abortion, environment and drug tests without attacking Walker and just giving voters a chance to hear different positions on important topics. None here. It took Burke statements in the debate to pursue other deceptions – like Walker’s claim that the state has a work problem not a jobs problem or how his concern for inner city violence hardly meshes with his $76 million cut in shared revenue that massively hurt city police departments.
The game table may have looked stacked against Burke, but she was unaffected, comfortable with all comers and actually managed to dismiss how often Walker tried to drag Jim Doyle into the debate. This is happening a lot, as you will see below.
She clarified fiscal issues as Walker didn’t. How if you haven’t paid your bills or if you delay moneymaking projects you could have a surplus state budget today and a $1.8 billion projected deficit for tomorrow. She revealed his only first in the nation – the biggest cuts to education funding among all the states.
She not only won and outdid him on insights into economic repair, she topped with more believable conviction their common and politically required optimism about Wisconsin’s future. She seemed determined to make inroads not only with her base but also with people who previously believed in Walker, not by attacking him but by exposing that his approach to tax cuts was ham-handed economic ineptitude.
The breakdown of the debate is good, but the second part of the article in even better, where Dom calls out the Journal-Sentinel editorial board and especially Dan Bice for their absurd and leading questions. Compare the debate questions (or non-questions) and the J-S editorial staff’s kid-gloves treatment of Walker the day before, and it’s a damning indictment of the political media in Milwaukee.
Burke has definitely passed the “competence” question for the Governor’s job, and done it a lot better than the current occupant of the job has.
I suppose she has had 7 years of unemployment to plan how to get the rest of Wisconsin employed. If the highest qualification needed to be governor is “generally competent sounding answers” then sign her up.