When you're as bad at campaigns as Scott Walker, you should just give up

[riversedge]

Nothing but bad articles out there for scooter. tsk tsk:


When you're as bad at campaigns as Scott Walker, you should just give up
Jeb Lund


The candidate who wants to deny the science behind male-pattern baldness more than the science behind climate change isn’t in it to win it


?w=620&q=85&auto=format&sharp=10&s=f792fae3f4acc6335b2b565fa5af336a
scott walker thumbs up-This man would like to be your president. Photograph: Eric Gay/AP


Thursday 3 September 2015 12.45 EDT
Last modified on Thursday 3 September 2015 12.48 EDT


Comments
232

Scott Walker’s presidential campaign is only a little over 50 days old, and it’s increasingly obvious that Scott Walker sucks. Not for his record or what he believes, although both of those are – to borrow a phrase from William Safire – extremely sucky. But Scott Walker is not good at this campaign thing.

A good campaign introduces a candidate and his best ideas to sympathetic and like-minded voters through a combination of events, press coverage and paid outreach, allowing him or her to attract campaign donations and new supporters alike. A bad campaign forces a candidate to get on the phone to reassure his existing donors that he exists and is going to abandon the “sinking into obscurity” tactic that hadn’t been working. A truly terrible campaign is at hand when the most widely-reported news story is the candidate’s old claim that his bald spot totally isn’t genetic but comes from banging his head against the underside of a cabinet.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way: one of Walker’s selling points was winning three elections in five years (the first one, the recall, then the reelection). In theory, Walker should have been the most experienced, most natural and most effortless Republican candidate. Jeb Bush hasn’t run this decade; Ted Cruz only ran once; Chris Christie is dogged by corruption allegations; Rick Perry has the mental aptitude of two dogs in an overcoat; and Rand Paul was gifted his father’s movement and all his out-of-state donors but none of his charisma at talking about basing an international currency on stuff you dig out of the ground.

Walker should have been able to campaign circles around everyone else in the race. Instead, he’s getting his rear end handed to him by a meringue-haired hotelier and a political neophyte surgeon who speaks with the dizzy wonderment of someone trying to describe their dream from last night while taking mushrooms for the first time........................

[BillZBubb]

1. But he was good enough to win three gubernatorial races in Wisconsin.

[immoderate]

2. Puzzling. But it was always non-presidential years, and I suspect there was no competition.

--imm

[MillennialDem]

3. He's good at midterm campaigns. He has no broad appeal to people who vote in

presidential years though.

It's great (for him) that he can turn out as much of his base for a gubernatorial election as Romney was able to turn out in 2008. The problem is, that's still not enough to win the presidency and especially not Wisconsin.