Phony Brown Bag Filled with Phony Rhetoric

Last month I pointed out that Scott Walker's latest political gimmick, the brown bag lunch campaign, was a total knock-off on something that was done in 1998. In fact Walker's phony brown bag gimmick is almost an exact copy of the 1998 version, complete with a template letter from the candidate's wife. Today the Associated Press is reporting on Walker's shameless recycling of other people's ideas. Walker's recycled brown bag campaign is bad enough, but he will need a lot more than a brown bag to hold all of the phony rhetoric that he is spewing out during it.

The entire premise of the recycled brown bag campaign is that Walker is supposedly a tightwad with money. It may be hard to make that pitch to the public when both recent news and his past record totally refutes the fake image that he is trying to create of himself.

• Walker paid the New Hampshire-based direct mail consultant (that helped him recycle the brown bag gimmick) SCM Associates some $336,000 last year according to the new AP report. It certainly doesn't sound like the Walker campaign is "brown bagging" it when it comes to buying recycled political gimmicks.
  
• Over the weekend, the AP also highlighted how much of a big spender Scott is on the campaign trail. According to that report, Scott Walker's campaign has spent $25,000 on meals at restaurants. Some of those bills included $2,182 at Middleton's Ruth's Chris Steakhouse and $805 at Timmer's in West Bend. Perhaps I'm not cultured enough to know, but I don't think that his kind of fine dining usually comes in a brown bag.
  
• If Scott Walker is such a brown bagging spendthrift it certainly doesn't show in his official capacity either. He broke a campaign promise that he made in 2002, giving himself a $50,000 raise in 2008. In addition, his spending based on his own proposed budgets has increased 35% during his time as county executive.
  

Whether it is his latest campaign gimmick or his actual record as county executive, there aren't enough brown bags to hold the many levels of phony rhetoric flowing from Scott Walker.