The first Republican presidential debate of the 2016 election cycle has come and gone without Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker making much of an impression at all.
Walker pretty much stayed on the sidelines during the two-hour debate. It seemed that he had scripted four or five excerpts from his stump speech that he would use regardless of what he was asked. He may have been the only one of the 10 candidates on stage who didn’t exceed his time cues, indicating either Midwestern politeness or lack of things to say.
Walker’s strategy may be to stand out by not standing out. He called himself “aggressively normal” and refrained, in Reaganesque fashion, from criticizing his fellow Republicans while focusing on the Democratic opposition. The idea may be to play to his lack of strength in foreign policy, and many domestic issues as well, by appearing to be above the fray.
If that’s what he and his handlers are after, then it’s not the kind of strategy that lends itself to immediate results. He’ll have to repeat the performance in the next string of debates so that pundits — and, more importantly, the handful of big donors, who matter more than anyone these days — start to take notice of how he’s different from the others.
But the overall impression he gave in his first outing was of a lightweight, someone not comfortable enough with his own knowledge and experience base to really engage with the issues, much less his immediate opponents.
I’ll give him points for a clever line when he said the Russians and Chinese probably know more about Hillary Clinton’s emails than members of Congress. Clinton’s inexplicable bungling of her emails as Secretary of State has handed the Republicans an issue. But Walker’s most galling line out of his stump speech, which he used again last night, is when he says he “didn’t respond in kind” when 100,000 protesters surrounded the state Capitol during the Act 10 uprising.
Walker usually makes that remark in the context of talking about his faith. The underlying assumption seems to be that in the face of those throngs of marauding teachers taping posters full of correctly spelled words to the walls of the Capitol with painters tape so as to avoid leaving glue residue behind, he bravely turned the other cheek.
What Walker never says is that in the middle of all that controversy he told a blogger posing as one of the Koch brothers that he had actively considered hiring thugs to circulate in the crowd and foment violence in otherwise peaceful protests. Thinking he’s speaking privately, Walker says that the idea was rejected because he feared it would be discovered and create a backlash. Praise the Lord.
A good question for Walker at the next debate would be why he didn’t reject that idea as just plain morally wrong and fire the person who suggested it. Or better yet, the question might be about what sort of people Walker surrounds himself with, given that others in his previous inner circles have gone to jail over things like ripping off veterans.
In the debates Walker seems to have decided he wants to be Ronald Reagan. But Reagan had decades of immersion in issues before he ran for president and won in 1980. And it’s worth noting that even then, perhaps a little unfairly in retrospect, Reagan was also considered a lightweight. Whether Walker is only perceived as not ready for prime time or actually is unready for the big leagues is still an open question. But more journalistic prodding into Walker’s claims that his faith governed his response to the Act 10 protests is warranted.
