If the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, gets elected president of the United States, he might want to think about giving the president of the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur C. Brooks, the Medal of Freedom. Or at least sending Mr. Brooks a really nice thank-you present.
Governor Walker's presidential announcement speech, delivered July 13 and repeated by Mr. Walker essentially word-for-word over and over again on the campaign trail, tracks remarkably closely with Mr. Brooks' book The Conservative Heart: How To Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America, whose publication date was July 14. The following side-by-side comparison details the similarities in language and substance, which have not been reported elsewhere:
"Conservatives define success by how few people need help from government programs, not how many we can enroll for government help." —Arthur Brooks, The Conservative Heart, page 19 |
"Washington seems to measure success by how many people are dependent on the government. Instead, we should measure it by just the opposite: by how many people are no longer dependent on the government" — Scott Walker, presidential campaign announcement speech |
"We need to stop focusing just on what we are against and boldly proclaim what we stand for." — Arthur Brooks, The Conservative Heart, page 16 |
"Traveling the country, I've heard people say that they are tired of politicians who only tell them what they're against and why they should vote against someone. Americans want to vote FOR something and FOR someone. So let me tell you what I'm for." — Scott Walker, presidential campaign announcement speech |
"empower them to reclaim their lives through the dignity of real, valuable, honest-to-goodness work" — Arthur Brooks, The Conservative Heart, page 83 |
"empowering people to live their own lives and control their own destinies through the dignity that comes from work" — Scott Walker, presidential campaign announcement speech |
"Fight for people, not against things...When Ronald Reagan made his case to the American people, he didn't spend a lot of time talking about who he was fighting against. He spent most of his speech talking about who he was fighting for." —Arthur Brooks, The Conservative Heart, pages 190, 193 |
"Americans deserve a President who will fight and win for them.... It doesn't matter if you're from a big city, a suburb or a small town, I will fight and win for you. Healthy or sick, born or unborn, I will fight and win for you. Young or old - or somewhere in between - I will fight and win for you" — Scott Walker, presidential campaign announcement speech |
The Declaration of Independence defines the very center of the American experiment — the coin of the realm — as none other than the pursuit of happiness. — Arthur Brooks, The Conservative Heart, page 25 |
"Someone who will stand up for the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." — Scott Walker, presidential campaign announcement speech |
"The Boston Tea Party took place on December 16, 1773. The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776. There is a reason why we celebrate the 'Spirit of '76' not the 'Spirit of '73.'" — Arthur Brooks, The Conservative Heart, page 177 |
"there is a reason we just took a day off to celebrate the 4th of July and not April 15th." — Scott Walker, presidential campaign announcement speech |
For Mr. Walker, the similarities may be slightly embarrassing. Probably only slightly, because no one pretends presidential candidates come up with all of their own language, message, or ideas. Developing ideas for politicians to use is pretty much the entire point of think tanks. Hillary Clinton gets plenty of her ideas from the Center for American Progress. There's enough variation in the wording that Mr. Walker doesn't have a full-fledged Joseph Biden-Neil Kinnock problem. There is something to be said too, though, for the appearance of originality, or at least for giving public credit acknowledging the source of such extensive inspiration. [Update: Mr. Walker told CNN about the speech, "I really wanted it to be my voice....I wanted it to come from me."]
For Mr. Brooks, it's good news, though not without some risks. He can show donors to his think tank that his work has concrete impact. The potential downside is that if Mr. Walker loses the election, Mr. Brooks and his ideas take some of the blame, or that if another Republican candidate wins, Mr. Brooks and his think tank suffer for being associated so closely with Mr. Walker.
The biggest risk in that regard is Jeb Bush. Mr. Bush is mentioned favorably once in Mr. Brooks' book. Mr. Walker isn't mentioned at all. But there are a few lines that sound like veiled criticism of Mr. Bush's campaign for 4% growth (which only took a high public profile after the book was done, but still). Mr. Brooks writes, disapprovingly, "Conservatives...come across as wonky, unfeeling materialists whose primary focus is money. The left talks about the human experience while the right talks about GDP growth, tax rates, and spending levels...Republican politicians started fixating on economic expansion as an end in itself. They spoke as if growth were all that mattered...When you are about to argue that the main benefit of free enterprise is that it creates economic growth, you just pulled out a rhetorical cigarette. Bad habit. Catch yourself and substitute your new argument in its place."
The likeliest transmission belt between Mr. Brooks and Mr. Walker is a columnist for the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen. Mr. Thiessen was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The acknowledgements to the Brooks book say, "Many sections of this book started as conversations with Marc, who expanded, improved, and converted them into written prose." Mr. Thiessen also was the co-author of Mr. Walker's 2013 book Unintimidated: A Governor's Story and a Nation's Challenge. Mr. Thiessen did not reply to an email asking if he had worked on Mr. Walker's stump speech and asking about the similarities between the speech and Mr. Brooks' book.
If Governor Walker was looking for a source of ideas, the Brooks book is not a bad place to start. (An earlier book by Mr. Brooks, The Road To Freedom: How To Win The Fight For Free Enterprise, was reviewed here back in 2012.) The Conservative Heart credits "free trade, property rights, the rule of law, and entrepreneurship," along with "America's global diplomatic and military presence," for allowing billions of people worldwide to lift themselves out of poverty. It faults the "war on poverty" here in the U.S. for wasting a trillion dollars without appreciably reducing poverty levels. Perhaps the money even made things worse by encouraging dependency and discouraging two-parent families.
Mr. Brooks' big and profound idea is that happiness results from "earned success through honest work." The book is best — quite fine, actually — when it sticks to that idea. When Mr. Brooks wanders away to other topics, he winds up on shakier ground.
At one point, Mr. Brooks faults conservative leaders for voting to cut food stamps, terming that effort "both a moral and political mistake." But these so-called cuts, as usual in Washington, weren't actual cuts, just modest reductions in the planned rate of growth. The food stamp program is fraud-prone, now covers everything from full-calorie Coca-Cola to restaurant meals to polar-bear meat, and cost $430 billion in the first six years of the Obama administration. Moving people to self-sufficiency necessarily would involve some reduction in food stamp spending; one would think Mr. Brooks would be cheering that on rather than lecturing Republicans about how immoral that is.
The weakest part of the book is about the American Revolution. Mr. Brooks uses a phony Samuel Adams quote. He acknowledges "scholars dispute whether Adams actually said this." But there is no such "dispute," because no reputable scholar claims the quote is genuine. He calls on contemporary conservatives to move from an "opposition," "protest" minority approach to a majority social movement. He describes this as "moving from Sam Adams to his cousin John Adams." That ignores the key point that Samuel Adams had majority support throughout much of his career, including during the Revolution as a Massachusetts representative at the Continental Congress and after the Revolution as the elected lieutenant governor and then governor of Massachusetts. Mr. Brooks claims "there was no appeal to economic efficiency" in the Declaration of Independence, downplaying the part where the Founders faulted King George III "for cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world" and "for imposing Taxes on us without our Consent." If Governor Walker is tempted to talk about Samuel Adams on the campaign trail, there are better sources.
For a campaign about the dignity of work and the pursuit of happiness, though, Mr. Walker has a fine source in Mr. Brooks's book. Maybe the presidential candidate should consider adding it to his online campaign store in addition to the baseball hats, coffee mugs, and T-shirts with campaign logos that are already there.
