Show me the money, then we can talk.
If you're looking for some enjoyable weekend reading, don't miss Scott Walker's campaign manager, Rick Wiley, unloading in a
post mortem interview with Politico about the demise of the Wisconsin governor's campaign. Wiley lamented how hard they worked to get Walker ready for the first debate (spoiler alert—this is really the best quote of the piece):
"It is really, really difficult. ... I'm just saying, you know, like it's a f---ing bitch, man. It really is."
Hmm. Maybe that says a little something about the mettle of the candidate.
Wiley spent a lot of the interview detailing the fundraising operation—when it was flowing and when donors suddenly closed their wallets, much to his surprise. But perhaps the most telling quote of the piece came in the last paragraph:
"It is stunning to me," Wiley added, "that you can lead everywhere and then have a debate performance that's panned as OK, and then all of a sudden you just plummet. ... We were going to try to ride it out in Iowa, and we just didn't quite make it."
Wiley's bafflement speaks to the disconnect that takes place between a campaign and voters on the ground when big donors throw money at candidates based on their own pet projects. The money inevitably lulls campaign lieutenants into believing their candidate is actually
connecting. Wiley explains Walker's fall from grace by suggesting that a certain narrative spontaneously took hold based on media reviews of Walker's debate performance, as if the guy hadn't been flailing as a candidate for months. Follow below for more.
In fact, he had been floundering basically ever since he stepped off stage from his debut speech in Iowa toward the end of January. From that moment on, Walker became a gaffe machine. Every time he opened his mouth unscripted, he stepped in it. Something I summarized here a couple months ago when stories arose that he was trying to avoid doing free-form voter forums in New Hampshire—apparently terrified that he might actually have to answer questions.
If there's anything Scott Walker learned after his big Iowa speech in January that catapulted him to the national stage, it's this: don't take questions. That's precisely when his star began to fall—when he began talking off the cuff in February. First he turned vaccinations into a states' rights issue, next he dodged the question of evolution while speaking at a thinktank in the UK, then he compared unions to ISIS, and finally he roared into March by delivering the devastating news to the GOP base that a president couldn't singlehandedly overturn Roe v. Wade.
All of that was before Walker started pondering an end to birthright citizenship and giving serious consideration to
building a wall on our northern border to keep out all those nettlesome Canadians.
The question is, what part of all those gaffes was lost on the Walker campaign? They essentially put a sock in his mouth, shipped him off on foreign tours, and cut off the press from him.
It must have been the proverbial tin ear created by a gilded class of donors that also led the campaign to think union-busting would resonate nationwide. But as NPR's Shawn Johnson reported, Walker pushed the union issue at multiple campaign stops and it bombed every time. After missing the mark at a college campus in Illinois (cuz college kids are super into union busting), he made another try in Las Vegas.
JOHNSON: The governor doubled down in a speech in Las Vegas, promising to end federal employee unions, institute a national right to work law for private unions and gut other labor protections dating back to the days of FDR.
WALKER SOUNDBITE: Now, nobody else in this race is talking about this.
JOHNSON: In fact, they were not, and maybe for good reason.
Exactly. But the insular campaign missed it all. They didn't really smell trouble until... you guessed it... funding dried up.
“It culminated with a trip through Texas, the three days leading up to Labor Day weekend, where ... we're supposed to raise half a mil and we brought in $184K,” Wiley said. “That, coupled with we were in the mail with [a] mailing to our donors, and that was the first time that [an internal] file had lost money. ... So, at that point, we can say, ‘OK, we have a huge revenue problem.’”
A "revenue" problem, yes, but Walker's campaign had been going down in flames for months. Yet all the green lavished on them by
the Kochs and others kept them from seeing the forest through the trees. Turns out it takes more than donors to win a campaign.