Crisis Makes Leaders

For anyone to call for Scott Walker’s withdrawal from the governor’s race is either a die-hard Mark Green supporter or a pundit suffering from writer’s block.

Both Congressman Green and Milwaukee Country Executive Walker represent the best of the Republican Party. Green was the only Republican House candidate to defeat a Democrat incumbent in 1998. Walker made history by winning office in the largest and among the most heavily Democrat counties in the state.

Both are personal favorites of White House guru Karl Rove.

Frankly, I suspect both Republican campaigns for governor hold a fairly shallow pool of die-hard supporters. That’s not saying either campaign is lacking. Rather, it is testimony to the strength of each campaign and their personal appeal. Nearly all voters who lean Republican are barely watching, much less taking an oath of support for either campaign.

Digging deeper into GOP soil, donors and grassroot workers have the guilty pleasure of knowing either candidate possesses the star-power to defeat Democrat incumbent Jim Doyle.

The politics of Milwaukee County may prove to be a burden during these dawning days of a governor campaign. But, it’s just that, the break of dawn. High noon for most normal folk will not occur until sometime next year, perhaps 365 days from today, when nomination papers are being circulated.

Walker, as an executive, has the power to turn crisis into opportunity. When Tommy Thompson left the Bush Administration, he reminisced that as governor he could make a phone call in the morning and see results by the afternoon. But as a cabinet secretary, he lamented that many reform measures he proposed stagnated in Congress.

Another executive of a grander scale, President Bill Clinton, wrote in his memoirs that the greatness of a president is defined by their leadership during crisis. Think Lincoln and the Civil War, FDR and everything, Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Reagan and the Cold War, and today, Bush and 9/11.

Walker has that opportunity to parlay today’s county crisis into tomorrow’s governorship.