Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s recall: Big money fuels small-government fight

MADISON, Wis. — Every day at the cutting and sewing business he runs with his father, Ross Brown listened to Glenn Beck rail on the radio against Big Government, Big Labor and Big Money. In his years of middays with Beck, Brown had morphed from apolitical adolescence to college student with his own talk show on the campus radio station and on to businessman with 15 employees and not enough money to offer them health insurance.

Then, one day three years ago, at the apex of the debate over President Obama’s health-care plan, Brown heard a caller to Beck’s show bring the fiery rhetoric to a screeching halt: Enough complaining, she said. What could she actually do to change politics?

Graphic

More from PostPolitics

On scandals -- real and imagined

Joel Achenbach

THE FIX | At the moment, the three scandals consuming the Obama administration don't quite measure up to Watergate.

Holder’s claim on the ‘Fast and Furious’ criminal citation

Glenn Kessler

FACT CHECKER | Attorney General Eric Holder said a U.S. attorney made his own decision not to pursue a criminal prosecution of Holder. But he got that wrong.

Part 4: ‘Why don’t you just make yourself legal?’ | Immigration: Pathway to now

VIDEO | The future remains uncertain for 11 million people living illegally in the U.S. Though immigration reform seems closer than it has ever been before, can Washington and the Obama administration effectively repair 30 years of broken policies?

• Immigration: Pathway to now

Read more

Brown never heard Beck’s reply. He was too busy listening to his own answer. “It was a real aha moment,” he says. He would start his own tea party group, We the People of the Republic, to fight for personal liberty and small government. They’d do it the old-fashioned way — albeit with new tools, such as Facebook and Meetup — with no money, no fancy offices, no politicians in their pockets.

Three years later, one of the tea party heroes they worked to elect, Republican Scott Walker, is governor of Wisconsin, and Walker has done what few other tea-party-supported politicians have managed — making a big show of whacking government spending, stripping state workers of collective-bargaining rights and squaring off against Democrats in a no-compromises battle stance. For the first time, Brown, a square-jawed 27-year-old with a radio host’s booming voice, could taste victory.

But Walker’s initiatives over the past year set off a firestorm of protest, drawing the nation’s eyes to Madison, the state capital where public employees and tens of thousands of supporters launched a recall petition against the governor. A million signatures later, a recall election is expected to be held June 5.

Millions of dollars are pouring into Wisconsin from wealthy conservatives nationwide, and labor unions are preparing to pump resources into the campaign of whichever Democrat faces off against Walker. (A primary in early May will determine that.)

Those millions are for TV ads, mostly — more than $700,000 already from one group, Americans for Prosperity, which was founded by David and Charles Koch, the ubiquitous funders of conservative causes. But that’s not how Brown and the 60 or so folks who join him for dinner meetings do business. Along with another small tea party group, the GrandSons of Liberty, We the People organized thousands of volunteers to inspect the 1 million signatures that forced the recall vote.

The budget for Brown’s Verify the Recall campaign was $15,000, raised from donations of $3, $10 and $20 from Wisconsinites.

“All those millions?” Brown says. “Why is it necessary? We got our message out to every corner of the state, no problem, for $15,000. People hear about big unions busing people in or, on our side, the Koch brothers sending in big money. It’s all part of the game to them. But it’s not a game to us.”