After Gov. Scott Walker appeared on CBS's Face the Nation, touting the voters looking for someone who's going to lead and "make touch decisions" as the reason he survived his recall election, the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka pointed out that what Walker did was not lead. He was following the same right wing agenda as his Republican counterparts, who are allowing the American Legislative Exchange Conference, known as ALEC, to write their agenda for them.
As Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley pointed out, part of the reason Walker survived his recall election is that the voters did not like the idea of recalling their elected officials for any reason, short of criminal offenses, "And right now Governor Walker has only had three people in his administration indicted." As O'Malley also noted, for all his talk of leadership, Walker's state has the worst job creation record in the country.
Transcript via below the fold.
SCHIEFFER: And we're going to turn now to Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley. He would be a Democrat, and Richard Trumka, who is the head of the AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions that represents 12 million workers.
You took a big part in that recall election out there, Mr. Trumka. And I've got to say, any way you cut it, it was a defeat for big labor.
TRUMKA: Well, who it was a defeat for were the people who got hurt, were the working people on the ground in that state. It's true that the people in Wisconsin didn't recall Governor Walker, but he spent over $50 million on this. He has lost control of the state senate so his agenda is stopped dead in its tracks.
He has the worst job-creating record of all the states that are out there right now. And people are looking at that.
(CROSSTALK)
SCHIEFFER: But having said all that, he won.
TRUMKA: What did he win? He got the right to serve the rest of his term. What he hasn't done is create jobs. Again, he has the worst job-creating record out there.
And he talked a lot about making tough decisions. There's a difference, Bob, between making a tough decision to create jobs and making decisions that are political decisions. He didn't lead here, he followed. The American Legislative Exchange Conference, right after 2010 election, brought 2,000 state Republican legislators together with governors and said their goal was to reduce the vote -- the progressive vote in 2012 by 10 percent. Less votes. Less democracy.
So he went after unions. He went after immigrants. He went after seniors. He went after students. He went after all of those things. And he didn't do what he was supposed to do. And that's try to create jobs. We wish he had the best job-creating record in the country and we wish we could help him get there.
SCHIEFFER: Governor O'Malley, do you agree with Governor Romney about the lessons of Wisconsin, what you just heard him say? What do you think the lessons were?
O'MALLEY: Oh, I think the biggest lesson in Wisconsin is that 60 percent of the people do not believe that recall elections were proper for policy differences, short of some criminal offense.
And right now Governor Walker has only had three people in his administration indicted.
O'MALLEY: He had his top communications person take an immunity deal, but he himself has not been named in that investigation.
And I think the sense among people in Wisconsin was we should among people in Wisconsin was we shouldn't have recall elections for policy reasons.
However, they did put the brakes on his hard-right-wing agenda by putting Democrats in charge of the State Senate. And for all his talk about making tough decisions, they aren't the tough decisions that actually create jobs. He had the worst rate of job creation in Wisconsin of any state in the nation, and so he overcame that with billionaire help to put on eight or 10 times as many ads as his opponent and made up a new set of numbers.
