Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has captured international attention with the political battle sparked by his budget bill that would remove collective bargaining rights from many public employees. With Tea Party backing for his union-busting platform, he is even spoken of as an up-and-coming 2012 presidential contender.

Republican party leaders worry that even with a vulnerable President Obama, current possible frontrunners Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin and Ron Paul cannot win. As replacements, they are looking over three recently elected governors in traditionally Democratic states: Chris Christie in New Jersey, Florida's Rick Scott and, incongruously from famously progressive Wisconsin, Scott Walker.

Walker has advantages. Unlike Christie, he has a pliable Republican state legislature with which to work. Scott is smarter and, alone of the three, brings real private sector experience. But Walker is doing what has distinguished his entire career: making the most of a big chance.

As an undistinguished state representative from a safe, white and wealthy Republican Milwaukee suburb, Walker did little but run relentlessly for higher office. Other market-oriented Republican conservatives retooled party platform and image to become more gracious to minorities and the poor. They softened welfare reform with generous childcare, health insurance, wage supplements and transitional employment. Walker sat on his hands. As party peers championed Milwaukee school choice, charter and neighbourhood schools, he remained on the sidelines. A reliable vote, he focused instead on raising funds and cultivating party heavies for the time his chance would come.

From my position managing a non-profit employment group, and later as the city-wide board member for Milwaukee public schools, I interacted with Walker in the legislature. To Republicans like Walker, I was useful as, to my knowledge, America's only white socialist who is for educational vouchers. They, in turn, legislated generous funds for Milwaukee schools.

Walker had candidly no interest in poverty, education, effectiveness or anything except state funds for his district. His district's largest share of the state budget came for a racial integration programme that bussed Milwaukee minority students into his suburb. Unpopular with his voters, it nevertheless subsidised his school district, thereby reducing constituents' property taxes. Simultaneously against spending and taxes, but for massive state subsidies for his district, Walker publicly opposed the programme, but – behind closed doors – made sure it continued.

His big chance came with unexpected suddenness when the Democratic Milwaukee County Executive, along with cabinet appointees and most county legislators, disgraced themselves. Through clandestine manipulation of obscure pension fund formulae, they voted to enrich themselves by millions each. Outraged voters recalled almost all of them – and elected Walker, who ran on the single promise to freeze taxes.

Taxes, in fact, increased 35% during his eight years as Milwaukee county executive. Services nevertheless collapsed. Parks deteriorated, bus routes disappeared and county mental health programmes became notorious for repeated abuse of patients.

By 2010, however, Wisconsin voters were more interested in tax reduction than public management. Walker trounced the popular Milwaukee mayor by a landslide. Then came his biggest chance of all, to move just as he had from legislator to county executive, and from county executive to governor – and, perhaps, from governor to president. Walker's relentless drive for higher office, and especially his focus on national fundraising, belie his image as the poor son of a preacher who takes his lunch to work in brown paper bags. But his high-profile assault on labour unions' collective bargaining have put him, early and immediately, into the presidential landscape – with several commentators making the comparison with Ronald Reagan's "Patco moment".

Unions have already conceded to all his demands to reduce health insurance and retirement benefits, with no wage increase to make up for lost income. Walker's only suggestion to aggrieved workers is to save money on union dues, while prohibiting those same unions from recovering lost benefits at the bargaining table.

In a taped conversation, an investigative reporter posing as the nation's largest rightwing donor congratulated Walker on making Wisconsin the first domino in a cascade of rollbacks on pensions and healthcare. Walker responded by comparing his own stance to Reagan's 1981 firing of air traffic controllers – a decision to which he grandly attributed the fall of communism and the Soviet Union. Wisconsin state workers are his air traffic controllers; Obama his Gorbachev; American labour the "evil empire".

Not mollified by unions' and Democrats' concessions, Walker is clearly going for the biggest prize yet, his moment in the national limelight and a shot at the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Calvin Coolidge did much the same, riding opposition to the 1919 Boston police strike all the way to the 1920 Republican vice presidential nomination. As Walker told the telephone voice he thought the rightwing funder, "There's no doubt about it: we're ground zero … This is our time to change the course of history."

He may have overreached. Like other Americans, Wisconsinites complain about taxes, government, and overpaid bureaucrats. Fundamentally, however, they believe in civic freedoms, including employees' rights to bargain for the conditions and compensation of work. Wisconsin was America's first state to enact workers' compensation insurance, and the first to give government employees the right to organise. It may become not the first domino, but the place where the onslaught against workers rights finally was brought to a halt.