The prank call to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker mostly reinforces my belief in the uselessness of “stings” as a journalistic tool. As a political tool, they’re extremely effective–conservatives managed to help gin up controversies against ACORN and Planned Parenthood despite the fact that their “reporting” didn’t actually show what they claimed it showed. It’s possible that by making Walker look stupid, he may have been wounded politically. But I’m not sure it’s really told us much we didn’t know. Yes, rich people who give lots of money to politicians can get them on the phone.
Substantively though, Walker’s conversation with someone posing as a fake “David Koch” confirms a couple of things. One is that Walker, despite taking political donations from Koch Industries, doesn’t know them personally very well, since as Ben Smith points out, the impression was terrible. This sort of undercuts the theory of the Kochs as conservative puppetmasters, rather than actually reinforcing it.
Dave Weigel points out that Walker appears to have revealed an idea for tricking Democrats into a political maneuver that would allow them to pass their union busting bill even without them present, andDavid Dayen also notes that the fake David Koch also suggested “planting some troublemakers” among the workers protesting:
Koch: We’ll back you any way we can. What we were thinking about the crowd was, uh, was planting some troublemakers.
Walker: You know, well, the only problem with that —because we thought about that. The problem—the, my only gut reaction to that is right now the lawmakers I’ve talked to have just completely had it with them, the public is not really fond of this…
This is more amusing than anything else, since conservatives spent the last couple of years insisting that anyone at a Tea Party rally hurling a racial slur or carrying a racist sign was a liberal plant. Of course here, you have an actual Republican governor telling a big donor he “thought about” planting troublemakers. Maybe he was just being polite with a donor, but if the situation were reversed I don’t think a Democratic governor mulling over “planting troublemakers” would be given the benefit of the doubt. It would be held up as incontrovertible proof that every incident involving misbehavior at a Tea Party protest was the result of liberal sabotage, that the protesters who spit on Rep. John Lewis were just covert liberal operatives.
Still, I think the call mostly reinforces the notion that good reporting is done through…reporting, not by deceiving people into revealing their “true selves.” The most disturbing aspects about Walker’s agenda, his naked attempt to crush the unions by using a budget crisis he created as pretext, are things that were discovered through people working the phones, digging through rules on parliamentary procedure and budget documents, not because someone walked into the state capitol wearing a pimp suit.
