The Milwaukee Post

Republicans in Wisconsin are riding high right now as they control virtually all of state government and the opposition Democrats are in such tatters that the Dem state chairman is being forced to quit. But all is not hunky-dory in GOPville. There are two wings in the party. It's not really conservative vs. liberal as much as it is trailer park vs. dilettante. The two sides have gotten along wonderfully the last four years as they stood for a common cause (Scott Walker) and against a shared enemy (liberals who had wrecked the state). But that peace is shaky right now. There is a very large pack of what I call "white glove conservatives." They hang out in the think tanks and private clubs. But they don't like to get their hands dirty with issues they consider trivial. (The messy stuff.) Like the Kenosha casino. This white-glove crowd is focused on issues like school choice and trans- portation funding reform, the "important" issues. The trailer park wing isn't focused on stuff like that as much as it is on creating jobs and permanently taking away the power base of the left. This group wants to pass right-to- work legislation, is adamant that Governor Walker approve the Kenosha casino and is dubious about any attempts to make educa- tion "accountable" to a bunch of outside bureaucrats. The peace has been broken. The Republican leader of the state Senate, Scott Fitzgerald, firmly in the white-glove crowd, recently wrote a screed on a white-glove web- site, Right Wisconsin, that is run by a white- glove talk show host, Charlie Sykes. Fitzgerald called for Walker to reject the proposed Hard Rock Casino in Kenosha, whining that the state could lose money from other tribes, we'd be dragged into court and, well, there are more important things to deal with. Fitzgerald's screed was more than just an insult to the conservatives who support the casino. It was condescending and hypocriti- cal. For four years, Governor Walker has declared Wisconsin "open for business." Job creation has been his most public priority. But now that the state has a chance to add thou- sands of private-sector jobs and get a $1 bil- lion construction project, the white-glovers are turning up their noses. They don't like casinos. They don't like gamblers. They don't like Kenosha. And, most of all, they don't real- ly like the people that care about this issue. Consider me one of the trailer parkers. If Walker rejects the Kenosha plan, it will be a betrayal of four years of rhetoric. It will make his job creation mantra nothing but hollow rhetoric. Wisconsin isn't going to get billions in high-tech investment. Our chance is to get iron mines, casinos and warehouses. These aren't glamour industries but the jobs pay good and there are thousands of them. Walker, as long as he's been governor, has acted like he cared about those kinds of jobs. Rejecting Kenosha because the competing Potawatomi tribe is threatening fiscal blackmail is an utter sellout. More importantly, Walker will drive a deep wedge between the two conservative groups. While the white-glove crowd will happily go back to the "real" issues, there will be viscer- al anger from the trailer park gang about hav- ing been conned into thinking that the cur- rent group of Republicans cared about people like them. Do guys like Scott Fitzgerald even grasp why Republicans lose presidential elections? It's because a lot of middle-class Americans think the GOP is a bunch of rich elitists who didn't give a rip about them. Mitt Romney's inane "47 percent" proved this to a lot of vot- ers. Here in Wisconsin, the middle class is right now firmly with Walker and the Republicans. He has persuaded people that he cares about jobs and the reason we fell behind is because of the anti-business radicalism of Wisconsin Democrats. Throwing Kenosha under the bus undoes this. The thing is that Scott Walker has never been a "white glove conservative." He ran for the state Assembly against a candidate who had establishment support. He ran for Milwaukee County executive on the wave of a populist wave fueled by a rotten government pension deal. He was part of the conservative wing in the state Assembly and was a bare- knuckles fighter as county exec. As governor, he horrified the state establishment by trying to break the backs of the public-sector unions. For him to reject the Kenosha deal because of the budget headaches it will cause and the dis- traction it presents to his presidential race will mark a change in who he has been and how he is perceived. Back home in the trailer park, a lot of us unwashed right-wingers who don't get grants from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and don't hang out at five fundraisers a week think it'd be great to pass right-to-work legis- lation, approve the casino and cut state spend- ing to balance the budget. Fitz, Right Wisconsin and the WPRI might think those things are too pedestrian for them. The Republicans have enough Jeb Bushes and Mitt Romneys. The white-glove crowd loses elec- tions. Scott Walker needs to remember who his real friends are. January 23, 2015 • Milwaukee County Post • 9 OPINION MARK BELLING STANDING UP for MILWAUKEE Phony 'white glove conservatives' don't want to dirty hands with Kenosha casino By OWEN ROBINSON During the his first State of the Union address after his party and ideology suf- fered crushing electoral defeats from state legislatures to the U.S. Senate, President Barack Obama continues his leftist push by pushing for $320 billion in tax increases to fuel even more spending. Obama wants to continue his jihad against "the rich" in favor of the middle class. He does not appear to care that his policies to date have seen the rich get far richer while the middle and lower classes stagnate, thus making the gap wider than it has been in decades. Obama is not one to be concerned with the results of his policies when he is seek- ing to advance his leftist ideology. The president proposed increasing the capital gains tax to 28 percent. It was 15 per- cent when he took office in 2009. He also wants to impose a massive fee on certain financial institutions and closing a so-called "trust-fund loophole," which would actually just be a huge new inheritance tax that would particularly hurt people like farmers who pass on their land to their children. The good news is that since the Republicans now control Congress, most of those proposals will not go anywhere and Obama knows it. In his typical cynical way, Obama is proposing them for purely political reasons to build the political narrative for the 2016 election that the Republicans are the "party of 'no.'" It is a crass and condescending form of politics, but it is the kind that Obama is comfortable with having come from the notorious Chicago political machine. One of his proposals, however, is particu- larly troubling not only because of what it is, but because it is something that appears innocuous enough that the Republicans might actually pass it as part of a political quid pro quo. Obama is proposing a $500 tax credit for families in which both parents work. It sounds nice enough. It is supposed to. Obama's proposal is positioned as a way to help families with working parents to afford child care since both parents are away from the home working. The problem is that we used to be a nation that advocated policies that encour- aged a stable family unit where parents could afford to, and were encouraged to, raise their own children. This policy incen- tivizes parents to do just the opposite. While not everyone can afford it, having a two-parent family where one parent can stay home with the children is substantially better for the children and the family than other circumstances. History and studies have shown time and again that children are better off when they are raised in an in-con- tact family with ample parent-child nurtur- ing time in those first few precious years. Many of our government policies, like the Family and Medical Leave Act and vari- ous subsidy programs, are specifically designed to make it easier for parents to spend more time at home — especially dur- ing a child's early years. Obama's proposal to subsidize parents only when both are working works counter to generations of government policy. Much like some welfare programs incen- tivize parents to not marry, this tax credit would encourage both parents to work. All such policies discourage the family unit and make it more difficult for families to afford to raise their children instead of spending thousands of dollars on child care. Instead, we should be advancing govern- ment policies that make it easier for parents to afford to stay home and raise their own children. It is better for the kids and better for society. No parent who is unemployed is going to choose to get a job for a $500 tax credit. Nor is a $500 credit going to make much of a dif- ference in a family's ability to afford child care. But this is another brick in building a taxpayer-funded infrastructure that encour- ages every adult to work and let the "profes- sionals" raise our kids. It is another brick in the path to being a society that turns to our government overseers for our needs and wants instead of turning to each other. It is not a path on which we should trav- el. (Owen Robinson's column runs weekly in The Post. He can be reached at owen@bootsandsabers.com.) Obama's effort to break down the traditional family (Mark Belling is the host of a daily WISN radio talk show. His column appears weekly in the Milwaukee Post.) Robinson Casino debate reveals there's a rift in the GOP

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