After issuing a “wake-up call” to party faithful at the state GOP convention, Walker said he would continue to “lay out an optimistic vision going forward” in his bid for re-election.
“I think most voters in the state want to vote for something, not against something,” Walker said on “UpFront with Mike Gousha,” produced in partnership with WisPolitics.com.
Walker said the rhetoric of Democratic candidates is “filled with anger and hatred.”
“We need to respond as Republicans, not with anger and hatred, but with optimism and organization. We’ve got to get motivated,” he said.
Walker said a Democrat winning the governorship could jeopardize the Foxconn deal and turn off future companies from considering Wisconsin as a place to do business.
“I think (Democratic candidates) are going out of their way to say, to forecast, that if any one of them is elected governor, they want to find a way to cut Foxconn out of the deal,” Walker said.
“What other company in America, what other company in the world, would consider coming to this state if that’s the kind of leadership that’s going to be in place?” he said.
Walker also said it might be time to “shake things up” in the Milwaukee Public Schools, in order to achieve his goal of making the state’s high school graduation rate one of the best in the nation.
“Funding from the state is not the issue,” Walker said about MPS.
“You believe it is adequate?” Gousha asked.
“They have the ability to do any number of things, just like school districts all across the state. If they don’t have a board and leadership willing to do those things, that’s not something the state’s responsibility for, it’s theirs,” Walker said.
“The key question is, maybe we need to do something more to change, you know, in the past there’s been changing boundaries, splitting up into smaller pieces, those are things that I think realistically, we have to look at in the future,” he said.
Also on the program, New York Times reporter Megan Twohey, who co-reported the investigation that led to the downfall of Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, discussed the impact of her reporting that helped spur the #MeToo movement.
Twohey, who formerly worked for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, won a Pulitzer Prize for her work, along with fellow Times reporter Jodi Kantor.
“We heard over and over the same line, from women and men alike,” Twohey said. “Weinstein is going to come into the New York Times, he’s going to threaten and bully and basically get the New York Times to kill this story.
“So no, we didn’t expect that our work would help ignite this really worldwide reckoning on sexual abuse and harassment,” she said.
See more from the show:
http://www.wisn.com/upfront
