Thursday, May 3, 2012

Walker fails Packers' history, compares self to Vince Lombardi

Analogy conveys wrong image of Walker's dismal jobs performance

Within a piece on Fox News' website that finally recognizes that the recall movement is more than about unions, Gov. Scott Walker tries to make an unlikely comparison between himself and another famous figure in Wisconsin history.

Apparently not content with trying to emulate Ronald Reagan, Walker insists he's also like former Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi:
"Vince Lombardi, when he took over the Green Bay Packers, the Packers were 1-10-1," said Walker, who took office in January 2011. "He didn't take them to the world championship the next year. It took a couple of years. But eventually once they got there they were one of the premiere teams in the NFL. And we can be a premiere state."
There's just one problem with that analogy -- it assumes that Lombardi's first year as coach was not-so-great, that it took time for him to turn things around in what would come to be known as "Titletown."

In fact, Lombardi took a team that had only won a single game the year before and transformed the organization into one with a winning record, going 7-5 in his first year as head coach.

Lombardi's turnaround of the Packers was so significant that it earned him the Coach of the Year award.

Gov. Walker, on the other hand, could only win a recognition like that in his dreams. Taking over a state that was on the path towards recovery, Walker instead sent it rolling backwards, including a loss of over 23,900 jobs from March 2011 to March 2012. Taking another look at the Packers analogy he made, it'd be like if Lombardi took over the franchise -- 1-10-1 the year before -- and performed even worse.

Gov. Scott Walker is grabbing at straws. His insistence that he's done any good for job creation within the state of Wisconsin is laughable. But positing that he's anything like Vince Lombardi...well, that's just blasphemous.

This, on the day of prayer of all days!

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