December 7th: one year anniversary of Walker detailing budget plan

MADISON -- December 7th, 2011 is not only the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It's also the one year anniversary of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker detailing his budget plan, and plans to rid the state of collective bargaining rights, in an attempt to save the state more than $100 million from state labor unions. Democrats say this was a sneak attack on the state.

Democratic Party staffers have sifted through 700 hours of video from Walker's campaign events, and could not find any specific statement on his union plan until this time last year - a month after he was elected Governor, when Walker said "the way to get things under control is to get wages and benefits under control for state employees."

Now, Democrats are saying this was a sneak attack. "He never talked about this. This was a sneak attack. This is a one year anniversary of a sneak attack on Wisconsin values," Graeme Zielinski with the Democratic Party of Wisconsin said.

The Republican Party condemns that characterization. "We think it's absolutely shameful that Democrats accused Governor Walker of a sneak attack on the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor," Ben Sparks with the Republican Party of Wisconsin said.

Meanwhile, the central argument in the recall campaign against Walker is that he was not up front about what he would do with his job as Governor while he was campaigning for it. "It's not so much what he did, but that he had something in mind that he kept from the public until he was elected," UW-Milwaukee Governmental Affairs Professor Mordecai Lee said.

FOX6's Mike Lowe pressed Gov. Walker on the fact that he wasn't necessarily up front on his plan to rid the state of collective bargaining, back on March 4th.

Mike Lowe: "Do you think the problem comes from the fact people didn't see this coming, in the sense that you didn't mention collective bargaining during the campaign?"

Scott Walker: "Oh, we did. In fact, we can point to a flyer the unions put out, talking about collective bargaining from my campaign team and the things we put out. What I did throughout the campaign is to say to balance the budget without tax increase we have to have wage and benefit reform.  I said any of number of times when I was interviewed and in forums, that I'm willing to look at the full range of options, so I didn't say on this day at this time I'll specifically do this, but there was no doubt I talked about the fact I was open to all of these options. Did I run an ad on it, no."