opinion

Walker fought Family Care, took credit for growing it

Clarification: This post has been updated to clarify a characterization of the 2015 Wisconsin budget.

Gov. Scott Walker’s presidential campaign has hit a rough patch.

Walker was the only Republican candidate to lose ground in every opinion poll taken in the wake of the first GOP debate last week. In Iowa polling of Republican candidates, Walker has slipped behind the real estate magnate/reality television guy, who is someone we all take seriously and whom many people are actually planning to vote for.

Then again, it is August of the year before any elections, so who knows if any of it means anything? My new theory is that we’ve all decided that presidential campaigns take too long and so we’ve collectively decided to spend these first few months on ridiculous nonsense.

I am not sure whether Scott Walker will be our next president, but as I’ve watched him make his case on a national Republican stage, I have found myself reminded of a largely forgotten story from early in his governorship. It’s a small thing, a minor footnote. But it might be worth remembering.

It was the week after Christmas and before New Year’s in 2011, the end of Walker’s first year as governor. (It had been an eventful political year, Wisconsinites will recall.) Our usual political reporter was off with family, and so I was given the job of calling in to a news conference Walker had called to announce an end to the state’s cap on Family Care enrollments.

This was greeted as terrific news. Family Care, which is a Medicaid program that helps elderly people and those with disabilities to stay in their homes rather than go into nursing homes, is a popular program and it helps a lot of people. It gives people access to in-home care and other resources that helps them to live longer and better lives. It costs the state money, of course, but there’s a decent argument that it does have economic benefits in that it allows at least some people to work who otherwise might have no choice but to serve as full-time caretakers for family members.

Walker and Republicans had placed a cap on enrollments shortly after coming in to office in 2011. This end-of-year announcement meant the program would do away with its waiting lists and would expand from 57 to all 72 counties in Wisconsin. It was “very good news,” the executive director of the Aging & Disability Resource Center of Central Wisconsin told me.

So, great. Walker had a change of heart. We reported the news.

And then that night a Wisconsin political reporter, not me, scooped that, in fact, Wisconsin had been ordered by the federal Centers for Medicaid and Medicare to lift the cap and expand the program. It was illegal not to do so.

Walker had called a press conference to take credit for something he’d spent a year resisting, a policy he had changed only when he was forced to do so.

I felt like a sucker for writing a credulous, straightforward account of the policy change. As I remember it, we ran my story in print the next day, only to then have to pick up the Associated Press’s better, less bamboozled report the next day, explaining that Walker had been forced to make the amazing policy change he’d touted as his own.

Well, you win some and you lose some. I remember this story because it embarrassed me; I didn’t say it was the most dramatic chapter of Walker’s time in office. But it was jaw-droppingly brazen in the way Walker sought a tiny, short-term political gain with spin he must have known would fall apart if and when anyone looked more closely.

Now it is 2015 and Walker is running for president. You’ll never guess what happened this year. In the budget he proposed this year, Walker wanted to dismantle Family Care and a related program known as IRIS. Those proposals were altered in the budget process, with some portions of the proposed cuts restored. The program is now going to be overseen by insurance companies.

Maybe Walker should call a news conference to brag that he saved the program. Maybe he should make that part of his stump speech.

Robert Mentzer is storytelling coach and a columnist for Gannett Central Wisconsin Media. Contact: rmentzer@gannett.com, 715-845-0604; on Twitter: @robertmentzer .