HOWARD DEAN ADMITS: The Left is Scared of Scott Walker
It’s easy to identify which conservatives the left fears the most. It’s those they attack most viscerally. Scott Walker is the conservative currently in their crosshairs.
On MSNBC‘s Morning Joe, Howard Dean lobbed the first of what will surely be dozens of barbs Scott Walker’s way. While in London, Walker declined to answer a reporter’s question about “evolution”. This caught Dean’s attention for obvious reasons – for leftists, a conservative who might believe in creation is a conservative they can portray as a whacko. With that as the backdrop, Howard Dean questioned Walker’s intelligence.
Scott Walker, like many Americans, didn’t finish college. He left Marquette University in his senior year to pursue work with IBM and the American Red Cross. Nothing unusual at all. Millions of Americans do the same thing. Except that he happens to be arguably the most vetted and successful public executive in America right now; and a leading contender for the Presidency. For that Dean drew his line in the sand.
In Dean’s view, Walker’s lack of a college degree brought into question his lack of scientific understanding, his worldliness, and even hinted that the Wisconsin Governor might be “unknowledgable”. Or to translate the liberal dog whistles, Dean essentially claimed that Walker was a bitter clinging backwoods skygod worshipping hick ignorant of the larger world in which we live.
It’s important to note that the last President lacking a college degree was Harry Truman. Not too shabby. Following Truman, the two most educated Presidents have been Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. If there is any correlation at all between academic resumes and Presidential competence, the examples of Carter and Obama suggest a laundry list of of college degrees is an undesirable prerequisite for the Chief Executive position.
That’s what a President is, even if Howard Dean doesn’t get it. A Chief Executive. Someone who can acquire talented experts and apply them towards addressing issues. A President sets milestones, inspires, and leads. A President recognizes when things aren’t going well and employs those with the best aptitude to fix it. He chairs the meeting, listens to the options, and directs the way forward then follows up. A President has the larger idea, the vision of the end state, and ensures that the country gets there. That’s what a Chief Executive does.
Howard Dean mistakenly views the Presidency as being Technocrat in Chief, heading up an army of goodie-two shoe know-it-alls that can dictate everything from the size of your soda to the amount of money government allows you to keep after taxes. Which ties in with Dean’s use of “science” and “worldliness” as his key complaints against Walker.
Science. The same science that is “settled” when it comes to climate change but somehow isn’t even though incontrovertible forensic science proves that Darren Wilson was justified in shooting Michael Brown. Or that claims the Keystone XL Pipeline to be less safe than the current method of shuttling crude oil from the Dakotas — via rail — despite several high-profile derailments one of which nearly wiped the town of Casselton, North Dakota off the face of the planet. Science that believes government stimulus creates an economic boon by removing capital from the economy and dishing it out to administration cronies. Science that economist Jonathan Gruber insists is too complicated for voters to digest and thus Obamacare’s books must be cooked to appease the average American “voter’s stupidity”.
And worldliness. The same worldliness expressed in “coexist” bumper stickers and insistence upon “tolerance” except when the topic is the definition of marriage, vaping, or anything pro-military and especially American Sniper. Or that nods in agreement when Obama cites the Inquisition, Crusades, and slavery as evidence that the western world is unqualified to denounce atrocities of the Islamic State even after they burned a war prisoner to death.
A worldliness that’s quick to pretend that a YouTube skit caused rioting in Benghazi, Libya resulting in the murder of a US Ambassador and his essential staff, but won’t criticize Andres Serrano for taking a $5,000 grant from the US government, submerging a Crucifix in human urine, photographing it, and calling it art. And that produces books like Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas and it’s presumption that flyover state ignorance explains voter rejection of the Democrat Party platform, and not glaring examples of what happens when Democrats run wild in places like Detroit, New Orleans, and Illinois.
Those versions of science and worldliness are just too much for the rubes in flyover states and their whacko governors to understand, or so the Howard Dean-types suggest. Why? Walker represents an alternative that challenges the left’s stranglehold on popular discourse.
Scott Walker represents a threat to the snobbish vision the left expects everyone to accept. A guy like Scott Walker makes it harder for the left to sit back and smugly push their point of view as though their ideas were unsullied and pure.
Walker after all has won the governorship in a blue state three times – two elections and one recall. He’s gone toe to toe with progressives and the union goons and Occupy thugs that serve as their shock troops. They’ve fought him and lost every time. In the wake of their defeat, Scott Walker has transformed Wisconsin into a political and economic success story. After six years of Barack Obama the left has what to offer voters?
It’s no wonder Howard Dean admitted that progressives are shaking in their boots over Scott Walker.
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