They All Had Experience

I've heard many pundits state that Ron Johnson's barrage of attacks on Russ Feingold as being a career politician is taking a secondary toll on Scott Walker, who is also a career politician.

Walker's supporters have been working overtime in trying to damage control. A prime example would be Patrick McIlheran's piece from Sunday's Crossroads sections in which he declares Walker the only one who has a chance to beat Tom Barrett in November. He throws everything except the kitchen sink, hoping something will stick.

He backs this up with a blogpost on Monday. Showing his desperation, he cites Aaron Rodriguez (who has blogged for Walker's campaign site), Brian Fraley (paid Republican operative and former Walker campaign staffer) and Badger "we got guns" Blogger.

The general meme they are trying to push is that being a career politician isn't always a bad thing. It just means that he has experience.

But given the deplorable state of the county, with buildings collapsing, hurting and killing people; the systematic failure at the mental health complex; the massive pension loan debt as well as the unpaid repair bills Walker has stuck tax payers with; and the state having to take over programs to protect tax payers from a class action law suit stemming from Walker's ineptitude, it becomes obvious that Walker might have the experience, but not the track record of being successful.

To show the gentle reader what I mean, consider the following:

• Captain Edward Smith had experience, and still drove the Titanic into an iceberg.
• General George Armstrong Custer had experience, until Little Big Horn.
• Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus had experience, but didn't know what to do when someone dropped a match.
• George H. W. Bush had experience, and yet he ran us into one of the worst economic recession ever recorded.
• King Louis XVI had experience, and was also a good conservative, until he lost his head.

As you can see, experience doesn't mean much if you don't learn and grow from that experience. Considering the shape of the county, Walker hasn't learned a single thing.