What his campaign ended up being worth.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's
early exit from the Republican presidential nomination race rocked the political world Monday. The once golden boy of the Republican establishment, battle tested in Wisconsin and an early alternative to Jeb! Bush, the favorite lackey of the powerful Kochs, had completely collapsed and is out of the clown car before most of the other clowns. Seriously, Jim Gilmore and George Pataki are still in this thing. Ouch. Falls this big lead to one thing: really delicious post-mortem articles. And Walker has generated some doozies, all of which point out that he turned out to be a pretty shitty politician and in the process has alienated an awful lot of big supporters.
The AP details his "cascade of troubles."
Financial troubles. A bloated staff. Repeated stumbles and flip flops. A candidate that professed to be a fighter, but too often, didn't show all that much fight.
The Wisconsin governor, who dropped out of the Republican race for president on Monday after only two months as a formal candidate, did so after making a litany of mistakes and missteps that could make for a "what not to do" manual for future candidates.
And boy, did the press have fun with the "what not to dos" from this campaign. For all the fun, head below the fold.
Politico talks to donors.
“I did not get a heads-up,” said Richard Roberts, a pharmaceutical executive who hosted Walker in his New Jersey home only three weeks ago and gave $100,000 to Walker’s super PAC in June. Walker has visited the Roberts residence three times in the past year-and-a-half.
“I felt like I’d gone to the wall for him,” Roberts told POLITICO. “Yes, I was surprised that he didn’t consider me to be within his inner circle, to give me a heads-up, to trust me.”
Walker’s biggest political patrons, the Ricketts family, which has contributed $5 million to his super PAC, felt similarly blindsided, according to an adviser to the Walker campaign. Todd Ricketts, who has been among Walker’s most aggressive fundraisers, did not get a call until later Monday afternoon.
NBC
takes a comprehensive view, relishing in just how awful a candidate Walker was and how humiliating this early exit is.
There were deep doubts in the GOP establishment about Walker's smarts on policy issues, concerns he reinforced when he would take a position on an issue and then reverse himself, which the Wisconsin governor did throughout his campaign. Last month, Walker gave four different answers in a single week on the issue of whether he would end birthright citizenship. […]
"Walker--unlike Santorum last time--was probably looking at being relegated to the B-list debate squad, which would have been further humiliation. And to endure this for months all this just on the off-chance that Rubio, Bush, Kasich and Fiorina all melt down, leaving him the only presentable candidate? I think his decision was understandable and reasonable," said David Karol, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who is an expert on the presidential nomination process.
And
CNN shows how quick the Walker rats abandoned ship Monday.
"It all really started mostly this morning," recalled Cliff Hurst, who began the day as Walker's New Hampshire co-chair and ended it as Marco Rubio's. Hurst had been eyeing the Florida senator for a while and was one of Monday's earliest poaches. "They didn't really need to say a whole lot." […]
Stanley Hubbard, a Koch donor who seemed to sour on Walker after what he saw as a second unremarkable Republican debate, has moved on. The day after Walker failed to spark his sagging campaign, Hubbard cut four $2,700 checks to Fiorina, Carson, Rubio and Chris Christie.
A bunch of high-level staffers—which all the articles point out he had way too many on the payroll—and strategists and supporters have moved on to Ted Cruz. Rubio got a few and many of the rest are still deciding where to move on to. That includes the Kochs, who might be wishing they hadn't made the decision to sit out the primary and had put their big, fat, monied thumbs on the scale for Walker to keep him in this thing.
Probably the best outcome in all of this for the nation's future is that Walker's future now looks a little bleaker than it did even last week. He burned lots of bridges in his short race, and even more on Monday when he ended his campaign as messily and as incompetently as he campaigned. Oh, and the Kochs got beat. That's pretty sweet, too.