Poor Scott Walker. He thought he could use the state budget to slide in major changes to the 100 year old mission statement of the University of Wisconsin (full disclosure: I'm a graduate of UW-Milwaukee) without anyone really noticing anything other than his drastic budget cuts.
Nope. That's what you get when you're now a top tier Presidential candidate. People look at everything. When it did get noticed, Walker did what he generally does in Wisconsin where the press are his poodles; he tweeted out that it was a bug and not a feature of his budget. He called it a "drafting error". When later emails emerged showing that is was, indeed, a feature and not an error, he followed up with another lie (standard Walker operating procedure); that university officials were in full agreement with the change.
Nope.
Gov. Scott Walker and aides scrambled Thursday to respond to revelations that his administration had insisted to University of Wisconsin officials on scrapping the Wisconsin Idea, the guiding principle for the state's universities for more than a century.
In a rapid revision to his own comments on Wednesday, the Republican governor acknowledged that UW System officials had raised objections about the proposal.
They had been told the changes were not open to debate.
While backtracking on earlier comments to reporters, Walker continued to insist in a statement that he hadn't known what his own administration was doing until after the proposal became public and caused a firestorm of criticism.
He's still insisting (standard Walker operating procedure) that he was unaware of what was being done. Walker, a well known micromanager, has worn out that tired, old excuse.
Even worse, his pals at Wisconsin PolitiFact, who normally bend over backwards to find a tiny bit of truthiness in Walkers baloney to rate "half true", have dispensed a rare
Pants on Fire rating over his flailing attempts to 'splain away this drastic change.
"Drafting error"?
Really?
It gets worse.
Walker’s administration had insisted to UW System officials on making the changes, giving detailed instructions on passages to be removed from state law. And eventually Walker himself acknowledged that the UW System had objected to the changes before his budget was put into final form.
His original claim was not only inaccurate, but ridiculous. Pants on Fire.
Ouch.
Democrats have piled on, too:
Democrats called on Walker to take responsibility for what was in his budget.
"He blamed somebody else. To me, there's no integrity there. I'll leave it to somebody else to decide if there's a lie in there," Sen. Janet Bewley (D-Ashland) said of Walker.
Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-Middleton) said he couldn't believe that the governor would not have known of changes to the Wisconsin Idea, which Erpenbach described as being "written in stone" on the university's foundation.
"This isn't something that would be an oversight. This is the governor directly aiming his arrow at the heart of the UW and what it's all about," Erpenbach said.
They know how much of a micro manager Walker is and how absolutely nothing is done without his approval.
Walker, of course, is desperately trying to change the subject:
In Watertown Thursday, the governor said he thought the public debate should be focused on whether to give the university more flexibility and cut its state aid, not the flap over the proposed changes to the Wisconsin Idea.
Asked if there were other things in his budget he didn't know about, Walker said: "No, we knew about things overall. But I'm saying this was not a question of something we put in. This was the way that unfortunately somebody interpreted the direction of keeping it simple. We wanted to keep it simple and not making changes other than add the item we talked about in terms of workforce development."
That's not going to happen.
Stock up on popcorn, folks. Remember, this guy is driving the Republican Clown Car right now.
.