Scott Walker has come up with a
nifty excuse for not talking about policy issues he doesn't want to talk about, in this case, the refugee crisis as Syrians flee to Europe:
Walker’s reason for not taking a stand is that he says it would be hypothetical for him to do so since he is not currently the president.
“I'm not president today and I can't be president today,” the Republican presidential candidate and Wisconsin governor said when asked by ABC News during a press gaggle on Monday what he would to address the current refugee crisis if he were president currently. “Everybody wants to talk about hypotheticals; there is no such thing as a hypothetical.”
By this reasoning, he can't talk about anything he would do as president that he can't currently do as governor of Wisconsin. After all, a Scott Walker presidency is extremely hypothetical at this point, so anything he would do a year and a half from now as hypothetical president would be somewhere out beyond extremely hypothetical, and according to him, hypotheticals don't exist. So he can tell us what he would do about the minimum wage, because that's relevant in Wisconsin. (Not hypothetically, he thinks the minimum wage is a
"lame idea" that
"doesn't serve a purpose" and anyway, he thinks
$7.25 an hour is a living wage.) But anything that goes beyond Wisconsin, anything that Scott Walker cannot do right this minute but only in hypothetical-land, by his own logic, Scott Walker cannot say what he'd do about it.
Except ...
What is not hypothetical, Walker said, is that the next president needs to defeat ISIS, which he said is at “the core of the problem” of the current migrant crisis and has resulted from a failed foreign policy under President Obama. [...]
When pressed for his position on the current refugee crisis, Walker said, “I'm talking about what I would do as president, that'll be a year and a half from now. I'm going to take on ISIS as president.”
So, more than 300,000 refugees are a hypothetical problem for a Scott Walker presidency but ISIS is not. What about the refugees created when Walker's hypothetical response to ISIS further destabilizes the Middle East? Can we talk about them? Or is military action the only foreign policy Walker can talk about in a non-hypothetical sense?
I guess we'll see, as the campaign drags on, what Walker considers hypothetical and what he considers real enough to be worthy of his attention.