Walker’s dramatic implosion: The one-time Iowa frontrunner is now barely registering in the polls
I truly believe Walker thought that all he needed was his tough talk on union busting.
Friday, Sep 11, 2015 12:37 PM CST
Walker’s dramatic implosion: The one-time Iowa frontrunner is now barely registering in the polls
Scott Walker is trying to fight his way back into presidential contention by pretending to have a personality
Simon Malo
...... On the crowded national stage, though, the same boring talking points aren’t good enough. And what’s more, Scott Walker doesn’t have nearly enough time to shake everybody’s hand. He can’t simply outhustle the crowded field of candidates. In fact, even while courting the small group of mega-donors that every GOP candidate is desperate to impress, Walker is facing competition and scrutiny that he has shown himself fundamentally unprepared to confront because he is still playing bush-league politics on a big-league field.
And there’s the growing body of evidence that Walker put little to no thought into national policy issues before entering the race. When facing thorny questions on foreign policy, immigration, and other topics a Midwestern governor wouldn’t be especially well-versed in, his default response has been to take several different positions, and then declare that he won’t be taking a position. His evasiveness and incoherence are made all the more noticeable by the fact that he came into the race with such high expectations. People just assumed he’d know what the hell he was talking about.
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Candidates like Trump and Carson have similar deficiencies when it comes to policy matters, but for now they’re compensating on the strength of their personalities and personal histories. Scott Walker can’t really do that because he has no personality to speak of, but he’s trying to fake it give himself some “edge” with all this talk of “wreaking havoc.”
Right now Walker’s hopes rest on both Trump and Carson collapsing in the polls. He also has to hope that their supporters, should that collapse occur, will come back to Team Walker and not gravitate towards someone like Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, or any of the other “outsiders” in the race. It’s not the vainest of hopes, given that conservatives still hold him in fairly high regard, but it’s still an amazing reversal of fortune for the man who was once the candidate to beat in Iowa................
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