Scott Walker might be gone from the presidential campaign, but don't be fooled. He's still highly relevant. He's relevant because he ... um, you know ... he still has that ... who am I kidding. Fine, I just despise the mean-spirited little git and his departure leaves me with some urgent cackling to do. Was he really worse than any of the other Republicans? Maybe it was personal. I disclosed in a prior post I wrote about him,
This guy wants to be president: I hardly recognize Wisconsin, that Wisconsin is a former home state and yes, I left before Walker ever entered public life, but I'm still painfully aware of the before and after picture. It would be ridiculous to blame Walker alone for what happened to the place, with the chronic corruption, politically biased courts, withering attacks on the rights of workers, women, and non-white voters, and the economic deterioration. It's not all on Walker of course, but as I pointed out, Walker was at least an early adopter of an ALEC model bill type of agenda. So absolutely I enjoyed this bit of irony:
Click to enlarge this screenshot of an article about Walker's withdrawal and notice the banner ad. I assume the ad was context sensitive and not random, but still, delightfully ironic. And yeah, I clicked the ad in hopes his campaign is paying by the click-through.
No, I didn't take much notice, and no delight, when Rick Perry dropped out. Might be just former home state bias, but I think it has to do with personality. Perry is a nutjob, but Walker is ruthless in screwing over opponents, which he does just because he can. If we were to apply the test Jeb's older brother made infamous, the "would you have a beer with this candidate?" test, well, the answer is never a literal yes for us teetotalers, but Walker sure fails the proverbial having a beer test. In fact, I would agree to being alone with Donald Trump in all his insulting glory and me just having to sit there and take it to avoid having a beer with Walker. Or Ted Cruz, the other really noxious personality running. Or Cruz and Trump together to avoid being with Walker. Scratch that. Maybe not both Cruz and Trump. And no, I wouldn't say that about all the Republican candidates. Some seem like personally nice people I'd get along with just fine as long as we didn't have to talk about policy. Proverbially have a beer with Jeb? Sure. Ben Carson, probably no problem. It's not partisanship. I think I'd like President Obama if I met him in person, but if the conversation revolves around his interest in golf, I'm looking for an exit. The beer test is a bad reason for picking a candidate, but yes, biases out in the open, Walker is an awful person and I felt a gleeful breeze blowing when he dropped out. But why did he have to drop out?
How did I get Walker so wrong? I thought he had as good a shot at the nomination as anyone, he was a good campaigner so I thought, so he seemed a serious possibility to win the general election. I wouldn't have bet on him to win, but I would have confidently risked some cash on him finishing in the top five. I'm thinking his problem was immigration, or rather his multiple positions thereupon. I knew the Republican base wasn't going to be bothered by the destruction of worker rights or rolling back equal pay laws, but they care a lot about immigration, above any other issue right now in fact, and Walker was flip-flopping. He was also dodging questions on other subjects, doing his best Mitt Romney impression, about whom Republicans had a sour taste. I'm not reality-challenged enough to think my posts and tweets and such made the difference, but I do claim to have accurately identified his vulnerability and done my bit amplify it. Republican primary voters, or at least those voting in the donor primary, didn't care that much about going after the labor movement, which left Walker with flip-flops and "me too" positions to run on.
That's the issue that undid Walker. Strategically, TPM's Josh Marshall and David Kurtz have an interesting theory, and it does explain how I was fooled about Walker being a strong campaigner: "Live By the Koch, Die By the Koch?"
As much as I said he was pretty obviously done, Scott Walker's departure from the race sure seems abrupt and even premature. It's hard to have much hope when you go from a first tier candidate to significantly under 1%. Still, not only is it early but the race is so unsettled and chaotic, couldn't he have held out a bit longer? But David Kurtz reminds me of a key point about Walker. Going back to the early days when he was the new Governor of Wisconsin, Walker was always a creature of the Koch Brothers and like big donors.
Walker had the big donors, the Kochs and some Wisconsin billionaires, behind his gubernatorial campaigns. His campaign fund was flush, and we'll never know how much dark money was spent on him, especially since a partisan judge shut down the investigation into illegal coordination. The Kochs seem to be holding back to fund the general election campaign as long as some acceptable candidate gets nominated (though I'm guessing they'll spend heavily to beat Trump). So Walker ran out of money after dropping in the polls.
Speaking of stopped investigations, I wrote about Walker's corruption too, in hopes that word would leak out to Republicans about Walker's potential problems. He seems to have been spared from further criminal investigation, but the fact investigations were stopped by partisans means Walker doesn't get the closure of prosecutors announcing that there is insufficient evidence to prosecute. Democrats would have pounded Walker with that.
If anyone wants to attribute Walker's decline to Trump, feel free. Trump, certainly more than my puny efforts, exposed Walker's weakness on immigration. He also stole Walker's thunder on being a hardcore conservative who believes what you believe (assuming you're an angry white man nativist worshiper of wealth) and will plainly say so. Perry was going down anyway because of how he embarrassed himself in 2012, but Walker probably is a Trump casualty.
One more passing thought. I wonder if running for president is a whole different campaign than running statewide, and not just a campaign on a larger scale. One thing Walker and Perry had in common was they appeared to be strong campaigners. Walker I can sort of see is dependent on big money to overwhelm less well-funded opponents though he did do some things right, but Perry did some smart stuff. Some of the political science about ground game campaigning came from experiments Perry allowed political scientists to run with his campaign. He gathered information about more effective ways to reach voters his opponents didn't have. It's like it all went away when he got on a national stage. It has me wondering if a presidential campaign is just that different from what works in one state.
cross-posted at MN Progressive Project