Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge
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I just received Scott Walker’s new book and went to it right away. It is an interesting look at the time in and around the Wisconsin “protests” (I use quotation marks around the word ‘protest’ intentionally).
I expected more of an autobiography of Walker, and that is really the story that I wanted. It is always interesting to me to see how the formative years of people affect how they make decisions and treat others later in life. That is not what this book is about.
What this book is about is still an interesting topic. Walker goes in depth to explain just how bad former Governor Jim Doyle had left the State of Wisconsin’s finances due to accounting tricks and other gimmicks.
More importantly, Walker takes a deep dive to explain the scam that the unions were running with their automatic withdrawals of dues, monopolistic health insurance practices, overtime abuse, and other things – and how he was going to fix it.
Walker then goes in depth to explain what it was like during the “protests” and what was going on behind the scenes. He used the term “theater of the absurd” and that really hit home. Most (all?) of the “protests” were absolutely absurd.
As I was reading the book, I had to admit that I wasn’t really learning much of anything as far as the nuts and bolts of the legislation, “protests”, senators fleeing, and all the rest were concerned. I was actually at the capitol for much of the protests and have been following all of these things daily and I knew about all of the litigation and all the rest. But what was of interest to me were the personal stories of abuse that Walker and the Republican legislators were subjected to, including their families. Also of interest was Walker’s strength that he found in God and that he never wanted to go back or apologize to anyone for anything. He was doing what he thought was right, and decided to do his best and let the chips fall.
Walker also explains in detail the campaign during his recall and that this ad turned the tide:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYFrt_jwdCk
Walker also takes a jab at Obama for not showing up to support Barrett in the recall election.
Toward the end, Walker seems genuinely angry at the Romney campaign for bungling, well, everything and goes into detail about what he did wrong, and how these things can be corrected moving forward.
I recommend the book so you can get an inside view of what the “protests” were like here in Wisconsin a few years ago, and to understand how Walker implemented his reforms to swing the state from an enormous deficit to a surplus today. His faith is featured throughout the book and he makes no apologies for what he has done.
It is an easy to read book that won’t take you long to plow through, especially if you find the subject matter interesting as I do. I hope to see a full autobiography on him in the future. Hopefully when he is sitting in the White House.
Cross posted at LITGM.
I have to say, the left came out that episode looking pretty vile.
There were a lot of vile things that went on. The worst was when the “protesters” disrupted a Special Olympics awards ceremony. But Walker kept his cool and just talked over them.
The strategy of the left was horrible. Instead of outing the loons that had Hitler and profanity on their signs, they just let them keep right on marching. Of course what did we see when the recall election came around on the pro-Walker ads? You guessed it. People disrupting Special Olympics ceremonies and Hitler signs. Most of these ads came from special interest groups, not the Walker campaign.
How he kept his head above the fray is an important subject in the book and one I probably should have mentioned in my review. I would have gone ballistic but that is why I am a two bit blogger and he is the Governor.
Speaking of vile, check out the Amazon reviews of his book.
That really agitated people on the Left. I was surprised to learn, while Googling, that a very respected automotive columnist from WI was gathering petitions there.
But from my vantage point on the outside looking in at the time, it seemed all the “protestors” were bussed-in union activists who did more harm to their cause than any good.
Especially after seeing all the garbage left in the state capitol building.
MikeK – reading some of those reviews makes me think that most of the reviewers never read the book, I learned by experience to take amazon “reviews” with a grain of salt.
Bill, of course they never read the book. Amazon needs some way to deal with this as it is not new. Maybe a heading pointing out that one and five star reviews without a “buy” symbol are suspect. This is an effort to force down the early sales.
Correct, those reviewers clearly did not read one word of the book.
Our beautiful capitol building was absolutely trashed by those filthy pigs and it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean up. I will never forget how sad I was when I saw that mess.
MikeK – I was thinking about that problem today – and the old programmer in me came out. Have say, a random set of 25 questions (or 50, whatever) – “print the first sentence on paragraph 2 page 126” – without the answer the review won’t be posted.
It wouldn’t be perfect but it would eliminate 90% of the false ones.
I read a book on the Apollo program – posted a review and got into a pissing match with one of the “reviewers” – finally remembering the adage of wrestling with a pig in the mud.