Scott Walker Was a Wuss All Along

Let’s face it.  When all is said and done, Scott Walker was a wuss all along, which is why he is heading for the wings after making a strong start in the polls on a vaguely worded theme that he had nothing to follow-up with. Today, in The New York Times, Nicholas Confeessore claims that Walker’s crash landing as he exited the Republican nomination race was proof of the inability of Super PAC funding to affect presidential races.

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth.  Super PAC backing that supported Scott Walker’s relatively late entry into the Republican horse race for the White House –  he hinted early but pounced late – only proves that even Super PACs don’t know how to handicap a presidential race.  No one does.

Proof may be found in two terrifying words: Donald. Trump.

No one, left, right or center, could have anticipated the impact that Trump has had upon the Republican strategy of putting so many candidates into the race that their antics would simply use up all of the public attention for the presidential campaign, leaving the Democrats hard pressed to get their message across.

In the meantime, however, the conservative money people didn’t just back one entry in the horse race.  They backed them all, and then sat back to see how they would perform.

Scott Walker, in following Rick Perry toward the egress from the race, proved only that he doesn’t know how to manage a presidential campaign. His funds were drying up because his investors read the tea leaves, realized that Walker didn’t have the sand to go toe to toe with Trump, and turned off the spigot.

Nicholas Confeessore points out that the Super PACs have raised $256 million, while the candidates themselves have only raised $78.4 million by the candidates themselves….but that $256 million (and growing) Republican war chest is sitting out there waiting for the winner to claim the prize and use those funds where it counts….fighting the Democratic nominee for the brass ring.

The idea that either Scott Walker or Rick Perry pulled out of the race because they couldn’t finance themselves is nonsense. They could have borrowed the money from the Super PACs and paid off those debts later on.  It’s done all the time in political campaigns. The reason that Walker and Perry bowed out was that they were very bad candidates who were not able to strike fire with the electorate, and didn’t have a clue how to stealing front-runner Donald Trump’s thunder.  They made blunders in the early going, reversed themselves, and left themselves open to derision which, when Trump is around, isn’t hard come by.

This year’s Republican pre-primary reality TV extravaganza is a rather like a season of Celebrity Apprentice.  As a matter of fact, the primary debate process is this season’s Celebrity Apprentice, complete with Donald Trump giving the losers their walking papers, as he smugly rules the roost.  Walker came off as arrogant, confused, ineffectual, and incapable of challenging the adults in the room for a fair share of the attention.

There’s an interesting dynamic at work here. The three “business people” (Ben Carson isn’t really a business person in the manner of a Donald Trump or a Carly Fiorina) on the current slate are used to fighting for attention.  The politicians on the podium are accustomed to conferring their attention on others. It’s a completely different mindset.

There’s a story in volume two of Robert Caro’s five-volume biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, in which he describes how Johnson, as a lieutenant commander in the Navy during World War II, just couldn’t get into the habit of saluting superior officers when, as a powerful congressman, the admirals had been forced to be deferential to him. Johnson’s  solution was uniquely Johnson.  He engineered a job that took him as far away as possible from superior officers, without exposing his life and limb to the dangers of combat, until he finally went into just enough dangerous situations so that he could return to Washington with the patina of a combat veteran.

In many respects, Scott Walker has been following Lyndon Johnson’s game plan, but he rushed the fences, attempting to grab the brass ring long before he was seasoned enough to hang onto it. Now almost an anathema in his home state and very unlikely to win re-election as Governor, or anything else for that matter, Walker stands exposed as an intellectual lightweight (in which respect he was NOT like Lyndon Johnson) who had neither the right plans to turn America around (assuming that it even needs turning) nor the right stuff to do the job with.

But the Super PACs have not been hurt at all by Scott Walker’s petulant departure. They kept their powder dry and their money in the bank instead of pouring it down into what has turned out to be a dry hole. Far from getting hurt, the Super PACs (which is basically an euphemism for the Koch brothers) have demonstrated the exercise of financial power in the political process:  you either walk their line, or you go home.