× Expand David Michael Miller

Last week was quite momentous for Scott Walker — and for Wisconsin. The former governor announced he accepted a job as president of the Young America’s Foundation (YAF), a Washington, D.C-area organization that promotes conservative ideas among young people. And a day later, President Trump appointed Walker to the board of trustees of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution.

Both announcements were stunners in different ways. Walker is one of the most ambitious politicians ever seen in Wisconsin, someone who foresaw running for president as a young man, campaigned for office in 15 elections over 29 years, and just a couple weeks after his defeat by Tony Evers was back tweeting and campaigning, hoping to run again as soon as possible.

Yet he had accepted a full-time job that won’t start until January 2021, when the YAF’s current president, Ron Robinson, steps down after more than 40 years, and that required Walker to make a four-year commitment to the job, taking him to 2025, when he will be 58.

“This would preclude me from running for governor in this next cycle or running for the U.S. Senate if Ron Johnson’s seat is open,” Walker told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “This will be my sole occupation.”

Why would he abandon his political hopes, which seemed to be as fervent as ever, and wait that long for this position?

Walker told the newspaper that he and his wife, Tonette, spent “a lot of time thinking about and praying about” the move. “It just feels like God’s calling us to take on this mission.”

But the money he will earn might have a bit more to do with that decision. Walker’s past financial disclosure statements show he’s not wealthy. Going into his 2016 reelection campaign Walker “reported a Barclays credit card with a balance of $10,000 to $15,000 at a high interest rate of 27.2 percent; a Bank of America credit card, also with debt of $10,000 to $15,000; and federal loans of up to $250,000 to pay for college for his two sons,” as Politico reported.

And the pay for his new job will likely be very attractive. YAF’s most recent federal tax form, for 2017, shows Robinson earned slightly more than $1 million a year in total compensation. This is a well-funded group, with total assets of $69.5 million, including some $24 million in investments, which earned $2.7 million in investment income in 2017.

It’s a familiar story of the politician who was a good servant to the wealthy and has now earned his reward. Walker became famous for Act 10, which crushed public unions and reduced the benefits of public employees by $3 billion, as he bragged, which paid for tax cuts that disproportionately benefited upper-income people even as he cut the earned income tax credit for the working poor. The net effect was a massive wealth transfer to the more well-to-do. And now Walker can earn enough to join the upper class.

Along with that will come the prestige of overseeing one of the nation’s foremost scholastic institutions. The Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, as its website explains, is “a gathering place for some of the best and brightest scholars and experts from around the world. Their work is the centerpiece of our activity and informs the nation’s public policy debates with nonpartisan and relevant research and information.”

Walker never completed his bachelor’s degree at Marquette University and as governor often seemed opposed to scholarship. He favored drastic cuts in UW System funding and tried to delete “the search for truth” from the guiding principles of the state’s universities.

By contrast, the search for truth is a central concern of the Wilson Center’s scholars.

Walker also slashed the scientific staff of the state Department of Natural Resources and the DNR deleted all mention of climate change from its website.

By contrast, science is a major concern of the Wilson Center, which runs the Science and Technology Innovation Program. The center has also concerned itself with global climate change, co-writing a report on “climate and fragility risks” commissioned by the G7 nations and offering a program on “climate change and conflict.”

Among those who criticized Walker’s record on education was presidential candidate Donald Trump, who declared that “Wisconsin’s doing terribly … the schools are a disaster, and they’re fighting like crazy because there’s no money for the schools.”

Yet it may be precisely this record that appeals to Trump. Just as he appointed pro-pollution lobbyists to run the Environmental Protection Agency and an anti-union lawyer to run the Department of Labor, he has picked someone hostile to universities, scholars and intellectuals to oversee an elite institution of scholarship.

It’s a travesty alright, but the good news for Wisconsin is that the Scott Walker era has ended for at least six years. After that, who knows?

Bruce Murphy is the editor of UrbanMilwaukee.