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Is Scott Walker running? 5 quick takes from Wisconsin governor's memoir

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin sounds a lot like a presidential candidate in his memoir, 'Unintimidated.' Here are five points in the book that amplify the Republican governor's particular lens on politics.

3. Rahm Emanuel may become the 'Democrats' Scott Walker'

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP/File
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) is flanked by Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claud Brizard (l.) and school board president David Vitale (r.) during a news conference after Chicago teachers agreed to return to the classroom on Sept. 18, 2012, after more than a week on strike.

After failing to curb the powerful teachers union, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) in 2012 presided over the largest public school closing in US history. But the strike didn't resolve the school system's $700 million budget deficit or the 17.6 percent raise that the city had committed to paying teachers over the next four years. That's why Gov. Scott Walker says the Chicago mayor may have to take steps similar to the ones he did in Wisconsin to get back to a fiscally sustainable path.

“Chicago schools were closing to pay for the new teachers’ contract. Thanks to collective bargaining, Chicago’s kids are ‘continuing to get the shaft,' ” he writes in his memoir. Making matters worse: A pension crisis that will more than double in three years to $1.1 billion. Only then will Mr. Emanuel be forced to consider Walker’s measures, despite the political risk. “If the unions’ intransigence continues, Emanuel will have no choice but to seek authority from the Illinois legislature to impose the changes on the unions,” Walker writes.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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