-By Warner Todd Huston
On Friday night Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin spoke before Americans For Prosperity’s event Defending the American Dream Summit and the crowd was loving it, I have to say.
Walker entered the room to a standing ovation and got an even bigger standing O when he finished and his comments of how the most progressive state in the union rolled over into conservative, fiscal sanity is quite a story.
I don’t think enough people really grasp what a major shift this is for the Badger State. Wisconsin is practically the birthplace for American socialism yet now it has an all Republican government and executive and has led the country in fighting back against the rapacious government employee unions that are destroying each and every state on the country.
I live tweeted the Governor’s speech, so below are the key points and high applause lines that Walker delivered to us last night.
- (AFP Prez. Tim Phillips introducing Gov. Walker) Guv Walker did something outrageous, he KEPT his campaign promises
- Governor Walker took the stage to a standing ovation from the crowd.
- They ask me, why’d I do the things I did? Because of our two sons.
- It’s not just elections that matter it’s what happens after them that is important to our children.
- Madison is 30 square miles surrounded by reality.
- I decided to take the oath of office in front of our state constitution. (No other Gov. took the oath in front of the display of the Wis. State Constitution)
- I did it because Part of the Wis. Constitution talks about frugality. I want to honor that.
- Our state faced a fiscal disaster and after the election I went and fulfilled my promises to fix it.
- I was interviewing to be the CEO of a troubled govt. So I started fixing it on the VERY first day in office.
- I had a saying, “people create jobs, not the govt.”
- We lowered property taxes, we changed the administrative burden for small business to grow and prosper.
- We passed some of the most aggressive tort reform in the nation. The great part of it is, it’s working!
- And in the recall I was proud to run on my record. It worked in Wis. and it can work in our nation’s capital!
- We have in Wis. when you win the Superbowl you don’t win the Washington trophy, you win the Lombardi trophy!
- Year before I was in office our business ranked 41, this year we are in the top 20 for the first time.
The crowd can’t wait to hear the Gov. speak
- My Chamber of Commerce does a survey of state employers. 10% thought we were going in the right direction. Now it’s 94%
- It’s not the govt that does this, we need govt to move out of the way to let small business to do it.
- If you let you businessmen know your state govt is stable, it goes a long way to help.
- Because of reforms worked, we avoided massive layoffs of state workers.
- By reforming collective bargaining we we freed up local govt to be able to make fundamental changes.
- We have been able to put money in rainy day funds and we will continue to do that.
- The message to my legislature was “put up or shut up.” We’re going to show that we honor the voters that put us in office.
- It’s our duty to think more about the next generation than to think about the next election.
- The best thing we did was to make our govt work better than it did before. Small govt is better.
- The false choice is “we either need to raise taxes of cut services.” This is just false.
- The worst example of this is education.
- False choice, either your property taxes go up or your education goes down. It’s just a false choice.
- But I said we need to do a better job with the money we have!
- Now in Wis we can hire and fire based on merit so when we have good teachers we can keep them there!
- WE are the ones that care about the kids. Our reforms reward performance!
- The reason I have great hope for America. In moments of crisis there have been men and women of courage…
- … who have thought more about their children and grandchildren than they did their own political careers.
- So let THIS be our time to say WE were there. We were there to stand up for freedom when it was threatened.
- (Scott Walker leaves the stage to standing ovation.)
More photos of the night can be seen at the AFP Facebook page.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.
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