These two guys get it right, where Walker is concerned.
He is the backup Establishment candidate if Jeb Bush fails.
They have it wrong in this regard. The social conservative lane is BIGGER than the establishment lane. They say it is the other way around, and they are wrong on the numbers. Ted Cruz might be the first choice of Tea Partiers, and I suspect not, but I am the quintessential social, religious conservative, and he is far and away my first choice.
The WP refuses to say the obvious. Money is the major issue.
Ted Cruz will NOT get the billionaire money. That will go to Bush and Walker, Walker being far better and much less looney than Bush.
Cruz will get millions of small donors AND SOON or his candidacy will be in jeopardy. The Iowa caucuses are a year away. He gets donors by June or he’s in trouble.
That surprised me at first and my initial reaction was to disagree. But after reading the entire article and giving it more thought I have to agree. Walker is the candidate that the establishment will embrace to a point so that they can say, "See? We really are conservative" while at the same time doing all they can to make sure Walker gets the Veep spot at best. And if they fail and Jeb does a crash and burn then they can move him to the top as someone they can live with.
I’m lukewarm on Walker until he shows me the money. Ted Cruz is the guy we need.
Sure, in the same way that in 1980 Reagan was the backup establishment candidate if George Bush (as they called Papa Bush back then) failed.
Essentially, what you've got are a lot of boutique or niche candidates. Reagan had appeal that went beyond those niches or specialty groups that later developed. He wasn't confined by categories that didn't yet play a large part in Republican politics.
Something similar is true of Walker now. He's hardly in the same confined Establishment or moderate lane with Jeb Bush (the lane Christie or Romney would have been in). He's also not narrowly oriented to Evangelical or social conservatism on the one hand or freewheeling libertarian economic conservatism on the other. Nor is he in the Tea Party niche with Cruz.
That's what Jonah Goldberg was getting at a few days ago when he labeled Walker "vanilla" -- meaning that he was a generic Republican who wasn't owned by any of the various blocs that make up the party and wasn't beholden to any one particular group. A lot of people read "vanilla" as some kind of insult and didn't get the point Jonah was making.
The unfortunate thing about GOP politics now is that if a candidate isn't wholly given over to one of the large blocs that make up the party, many assume that he or she is the Establishment candidate. That's not necessarily the case now, any more than it was the case with Reagan 35 years ago.
His Iowa speech toward the end was too preachy.
My choices at this point would be Rand Paul, Walker, Palin, Fiorina.