This afternoon on Fox News, Your World guest host Chris Cotter interviewed Dave Westlake about the massive protests over the legislative impasse in Wisconsin regarding government employees' collective bargaining rights. As you can see in the screenshots below, Westlake was identified by Fox News as a “Wisconsin parent” and the organizer of a pro-Gov. Scott Walker (R) rally this weekend. Not mentioned once during the segment was the fact that Westlake ran for the senate in Wisconsin in 2010 as a Republican, losing the GOP primary to now-Sen. Ron Johnson.
Slate's Dave Weigel reported on Westlake's organization of the rally earlier today:
That didn't take long: a Saturday rally in support of Gov. Scott Walker's “budget repair” bill, countering the days of union protests, featuring conservative stars Andrew Breitbart, Jim “Gateway Pundit” Hoft, and Herman Cain. (Cain, now a presidential candidate, hired former state Americans for Prosperity director Mark Block last month.) The main organizer is the Virginia-based conservative training group American Majority, funded in large part by the Sam Adams Alliance. That's a conservative 501(c)3 that seeds this kind of activism, and has succeeded since 2006 in building activist infrastructure in several states.
The event's also being put on by unsuccessful 2010 U.S. Senate candidate Dave Westlake, who had one of my favorite gimmicks of the cycle.
[T]here was Westlake, on the other side of the yellow police tape, almost glowing in a blaze orange button-up shirt. It's become the signature color of his unusual campaign, which is staffed by volunteers and funded in part by sales of his blaze orange T-shirts declaring, “I am Dave Westlake.”
The Republican Senate hopeful says he chose the classic hunting color as part of a pledge to be visible to the people of Wisconsin.
“If politicians who are in Washington voting for things that we don't want them to vote for had to wear blaze orange when they came back here, they couldn't hide,” Westlake said. “We could find them and hold them accountable.”
Full video of the Your World segment below: