When the governor rebalanced state operations, his wife and sons felt the angry backlash
Tonette Walker clearly remembers turning on the television to watch the 5 o’clock news one dark February evening in 2011 and being shocked by the sight of thousands of protestors surrounding the state Capitol building.
She picked up the phone and called the governor of Wisconsin, her husband, Scott. “Whoever answered said Scott was busy,” she remembers. “That was different, because he always takes my calls. So I insisted, and they finally put me through. I said ‘What are you guys doing!?!’
“And then he told me, and I understood,” she says.
It was her first inkling that being the first lady of Wisconsin was not going to be a cakewalk. “But I don’t think any of us had any idea” just how vicious the fight over Walker’s budget repair bill would become.
