Posted on 09/22/2015 5:58:52 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
From presumed front-runner to quitter, Walker’s fall was fast.
Before there was Donald Trump or Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina, there was Scott Walker — a defiant outsider who portrayed himself as the regular-guy champion of the GOP’s burn-the-Beltway base.
After a promising start last winter, the two-term Wisconsin governor turned out to be a tentative and mistake-prone candidate who badly fumbled core Republican issues — especially birthright citizenship — that Trump and other top GOP candidates handled with relative ease.
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. Several senior Republicans with knowledge of his campaign said the 47-year-old Walker — who won two elections and survived a recall effort without the help of national consultants — was simply too confident in his own abilities and often acted, ineptly, as his own campaign manager.
“The impression I had,” said one veteran GOP operative, “was that Scott was making it up as he went along.”
“It’s no longer about just backing an outsider in principle; people want somebody who is completely outside the system,” says Heather Stancil, co-chair of the Madison County, Iowa Republican Committee — an area that was supposed to be a Walker electoral stronghold.
“It makes me scratch my head; the only thing I can attribute Walker’s failure to is that people do not want someone tainted by any relation to government at all,” she added. “They are so fed up they don’t trust anybody. He said he was an outsider, but he also had that taint of working in government.”
His stunning fall, from top tier hopeful to a so-called “asterisk candidate” who couldn’t break 1 percent in the latest CNN poll, also illustrated the limits of fundraising in a 2016 that was supposed to be dominated by unregulated campaign spending. Both Walker and former Gov. Rick Perry, who dropped out earlier this month, represent a two-man money-couldn’t-buy-them-love club on the sidelines. Super PACs affiliated with Perry and Walker raised millions in the weeks leading up to their collapses — Walker’s alone banked more than $20 million.
But Walker had far less success raising hard money for his campaign and struggled to bankroll staffers in the states and travel.
Walker, a deeply religious evangelical Christian who waged a years-long battle against public employee unions in his home state while touting his back-of-Harley working-class roots, had an impressive entrance into the race. He delivered a powerful defense of economic and cultural conservatism in a fiery speech at Rep. Steve King’s Iowa Freedom Summit in January in which he talked about braving a union sympathizer’s threat to gut his wife “like a deer.”
But angry as Walker was — his super PAC was named “Unintimidated” — he just wasn’t quite angry enough.
Liz Mair, a former Walker aide who was fired earlier this year, took to Twitter on Monday to enumerate the mistakes her one-time boss had made — and said he often seemed overmatched by the velocity and information overload inherent in a modern presidential campaign.
At the top of her list: “Not educating himself fast enough on issues outside governor's remit” and “Not training himself out of tics incl[uding] instinctively answering 'yes' and 'absolutely' to things, comparing lots of things to union fight.”
But his sudden exit from the race on Monday (so sudden many staffers learned of their impending unemployment on Twitter) said just as much about the toxicity of the environment as the flaws of the man. Walker’s charisma-free Midwest pique simply couldn’t compete with Trump’s bellowing, telegenic challenge to the party establishment — during a primal-rage 2016 primary season when any candidate with a connection to government starts at a disadvantage.
Walker’s campaign had been imploding for weeks, but his public low point — and one that made him vulnerable to charges of weakness — was his stumbling response to the birthright citizenship proposal, a quixotic bid to challenge the 14th Amendment guarantee that all people born in the U.S. be given citizenship rights. Over the course of seven days in August, Walker rattled out no fewer than three positions — a call to challenge the amendment, a solid “no” when asked if he planned to challenge existing laws, and a call for the status quo.
“It's okay to flip-flop, but not as frequently as Flipper. Almost everyone (except Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush) has changed positions in this race. Donald Trump used to be a raging liberal (and perhaps he still is),” wrote conservative blogger Ed Straker, hours before Walker’s fall. “But even Trump, once changing his position, didn't go back and forth and back and forth several times within the space of a few days. … He quickly became known as being squishy on immigration.”
Until the summer, Walker seemed to have a sturdy regional strategy that seemed Trump-proof. He staked his chances on Iowa’s deeply conservative GOP caucus electorate — and he had a regional hook The Donald couldn’t dream of — having spent part of his childhood in Iowa. But he struggled to stake out an identity beyond his battles with unions.
“You can say you fought against the unions, and you are a conservative, but eventually you have to have a compelling national policy proposal that captures people’s imagination,” said longtime Republican pollster David Winston. “Walker didn’t have that.”
To say that he peaked early is an understatement: Walker led the Iowa pack in February with 25 percent and sat in third place nationally for much of the year. He plummeted to 3 percent and 10th place in Iowa by September — and fell off the charts last week.
The two Republican debates — which might have served as a safety net for his free-falling candidacy — were unmemorable, and his bland passivity at last Wednesday’s otherwise raucous showdown proved fatal.
On a night when Carly Fiorina rose, instantly, from the ranks of also-rans to second or third place, Walker found himself shut out of the back-and-forth — logging a mere eight minutes of talk time, compared with Trump’s 20 despite his best efforts to interrupt.
“He was a terrible candidate, but he also got Trump-ed,” said one Walker ally.
Bump.
Another post mortem of Walker’s failed presidential campaign. IMHO, it was his staff that failed Walker.
FReep Mail me if you want on, or off, this Wisconsin ping list.
Simple—Thinking voters are sick of weather-vane politicians.
I guess if being anti big union was enough - Walker would still be in this thing.
” was simply too confident in his own abilities and often acted, ineptly, as his own campaign manager. “
Too many people hyped him, and he bought into it.
Being anti-big union, turning around a moribund state economy and kicking democrats' asses three times straight.. all not enough. To be fair, he hurt himself with inconsistencies on amnesty for illegals, but he took bold stands on taxation, funding universities, funding of Planned Parenthood and education choice.
Too bad... he would've done well as President.
His own campaign manager or not, he did far better that that crew of overpaid cretins that is advising Bush.
I posted this on an earlier thread but well worth a look:
My thought... if you asked people at random across the country if they could name one candidate in the GOP field apart from Trump and Bush, you’ll come up blanks. Name recognition bias and fame is certainly part of it but the main reason, if you’re not already well known on the national level, you have to really sell yourself to make it to the big leagues.
Oh sure, there were nobodies like Carter and Obama whom no one heard of before when they burst into national prominence but they’re exceptions to the rule. Politics is unforgiving and if you don’t know how to weather the waves, you can get towed underneath them and drown. That’s what happened to Walker - he never had a good feel for them and once he ceased mastering them, it was inevitable that he was never going to ride them to the top.
With Trump, he’s unique because he already has name recognition. The man is a brand and every one in the country has heard about him. He’s managed to get going and although his poll ratings have leveled out, it hasn’t really been disastrous. And he knows where the public is at. Trump knows how to manage his time well and what separates him from the field - is that he runs his campaign - not a manager, not consultants and not advisers. He really is his own man.
My thought basically is this: the success of Trump vs the downfall of Walker comes down to one thing: you can either run your campaign as only The Donald himself can run it, or in Walker case, you can let your campaign run you and bury you alive. When you come right to down it again, that could be the critical difference between success and failure on the national stage.
People need to pay as much respect, if not more to how Trump is in the head of things as they are commiserating over how Walker couldn’t seem to find the right path to the presidency.
The people of America said and keeps saying they don’t trust politicians, and Perry and Walker are politicians, and they are gone...The three remaining high in the polls are Trump, Carson and Carly....
That should tell you something....
Voters don't like that, now that most are paying attention. JMHO
Walker has always been cozy with the GOPe and open borders crowd who were funding his campaign and propping him up as some kind of conservative wonder boy. That played well in Wisconsin against the virulent left, but when Walker couldn't keep the script straight that was handed to him, the mask came off resulting in low polls from Americans seeing right through him and his benefactors jumping ship who realized they were throwing in dead money.
In first person, Walker was just not appealing. Perhaps it was personality, or maybe he couldn't grab attention away from Trump. Whatever it was, it's probably a good thing that he bowed out now, rather than fail against a weak Democrat.
None of whom have ever held elective office before. Though Carly Fiorina had a failed run for the Senate in California against an entrenched Democratic incumbent.
Too bad... he would’ve done well as President
[snip]
“He was a terrible candidate, but he also got Trump-ed,” said one Walker ally. It sounds more likely that he was Bushwhacked.
Walker and Perry are exactly what the Bush strategy of tying up all the donor money was all about. They can't blame that on Trump. It's only sour grapes to suggest that they might have gotten more fundraising if Trump didn't hog all the media, but it's really Bush squeezing out the donor class that did them in.
-PJ
Walker was just not ready for the national stage, you have to charisma, funding and most importantly killer instincts and a burning fire in your belly to really want to make it. If you don’t have those qualities, you’ll crash fast.
If you’re not a billionaire and you don’t watch where and how you spend, once your tank runs dry, its over.
Walker simply didn’t realize that money will only take you so far and Trump is nowhere near even spending money to remain in contention.
Trump doesn’t need to because he is already famous. For Walker, having the country get on aboard with him was a struggle.
Between the brand and an unknown name, it was simply no contest.
He shot up in the polls after Rush praised him for a couple of days. That must have seemed pretty easy to him, thus the confidence. He never really pushed after that.
The citizens want the invasion stopped.
In his exit speech he outed himself as a Cheap Labor Express employee.
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