Responsible? Who, me?

Back in third grade, my classmates and I placed little slips of paper with the titles of books we had read into envelopes stapled to a board in the classroom. We had stars placed on the envelopes for every ten slips of paper. Being of a competitive nature even then, I wanted to see how many books my friend Debbie had read. As I was looking at the titles, I dropped those slips of paper into the “blower” in the classroom, a place where they could not be retrieved. I felt terrible, and guilty for taking the slips out of the envelope, but I told Debbie what had happened. I will never forget her forgiving response: “That’s OK, I know I read them.”

I tell this story not to show that I was a good kid, and Debbie a better one, but to demonstrate a truth we all know. Part of growing up is learning to take responsibility for your actions, and part of being a responsible adult is not blaming others for your own shortcomings.

Yet there is one person who is (not officially) running for President, who is (not really) running our state, who refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions.

The latest example is Scott Walker’s nonchalant telephone (of course) response to the significant increase in his disapproval rating in the latest Marquette poll. He attributed the increased disenchantment to publicity about the budget he proposed and said, “There’s a lot of hype about what may happen,” adding that ultimately he thinks the “people are going to be overwhelmingly pleased” with the final version of the budget.

Two points here.

1) The “hype” is actually discussion of Walker’s proposals. If he is now calling this “hype” does that mean he does not stand behind his original budget? Where is Walker taking responsibility for his own proposals?

2) People will be “overwhelmingly pleased” with the final version of the budget only if it is far different from the original executive budget, many parts of which Wisconsinites overwhelmingly rejected in the Marquette poll, including 70% opposition to the proposal to cut UW funding by $300 million and 78% opposition to cutting public school funding by $127 million in the first year of the biennium. Somehow, this opposition is supposed to be offset by a $5 savings on property tax bills and a freeze on UW tuition.

And where was Walker when he made this comment? Not at a sitdown with Wisconsin newspaper reporters or on a locally-produced Sunday talk show, but on a conference call from Spain, where Scott Walker was allegedly completing a trade mission. (We still haven’t heard any reports about successes from the “trade mission” to Great Britain for which Wisconsin taxpayers paid $128,000 earlier this year.) Scott Walker has been spending precious little time in Wisconsin defending or supporting the budget proposals that have wreaked such havoc in the legislature.

No, our sometime governor has a bad habit of moving on before a task is completed, leaving wreckage in his wake without acknowledging it. As Sen. Jon Erpenbach put it on Sunday, “I don’t think the governor is engaged in the state of Wisconsin by any means. I think he lands, does his laundry, gets back on the plane and leaves.” Sen. Erpenbach had received the second memo from the state budget office about errors in the budget (the first was four pages, the second 110 pages) and was concerned that Mr. Walker had delivered such a sloppy budget.

It looks to this observer as if Mr. Walker wants the legislature to clean up after him, that is, to be the responsible party in the picture.

This is similar to Mr. Walker’s modus operandi when he was the County Executive in Milwaukee County. While there, he proposed budgets that were unrealistic in terms of cuts to services, and the County Board, as the responsible party, passed veto-proof measures to counteract at least some of the service cuts. It was not enough to overcome everything, however; the State of Wisconsin had to step in to run the county child welfare system, county-run mental health facilities and parks deteriorated because of deferred maintenance, and inadequate maintenance at the O’Donnell Park garage caused the death of a teenager going to Summerfest when a slab fell from the garage. Yet Mr. Walker did not step up to say, “This happened on my watch, I am responsible.”

We have now seen this at the state level as well. As a key component of his 2010 campaign, Scott Walker promised that the state would add 250,000 new private sector jobs in his first term, a promise that became a debating point in the 2014 gubernatorial race. Walker did not acknowledge that the meager pace of private sector growth had anything to do with his policies. Instead he blamed poor job growth on demonstrations concerning Act 10, on the recall effort, and on the Affordable Care Act, this even though he had a compliant legislature loosening regulations and reducing taxes on corporations. Four years after Scott Walker declared that jobs were his top priority, Wisconsin’s economy continues in the doldrums, with no more than 140,000 new jobs since the depth of the recession, and he has stopped talking to the state about economic growth. This is another way to evade responsibility.

Mr. Walker also has chosen to ignore the consequence of his support of ever-larger dairy farms and ever-decreasing enforcement of environmental regulation. He has gone so far as to claim that Wisconsin is cleaner than when he started as governor. The people living near the sand mines of western Wisconsin and the scientists studying the dead zone of Green Bay would certainly beg to differ. Ignoring the real consequences of your actions means you are not taking responsibility for them.

We know that Scott Walker has not shown himself fit to govern the State of Wisconsin in part because he does not take responsibility. He has never shown that “The buck stops with him.” It’s always the media, or “the left,” or something else interfering with his great plans. How can he possibly consider himself fit to serve as President of the United States?