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politics and politicians Title: Scott Walker: God's Gift to the Democratic Party Walker is surging thanks to his performance at this week's Conservative Political Action Conference, where the union-busting governor inspired raucous applause with his "I was a dick in Wisconsin, and I can be one in Washington, too!" stump speech. Walker's address was a broadside against a litany of conservative bugbears, from Planned Parenthood to the media to tax day to the subversive act of voting without a photo ID, etc. But the money line came during a Q&A session. Asked how he would take on radical Islamist terrorists, Walker referred to his experience taking on pro-union protesters in his home state: If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world. Walker's seeming comparison of peaceful union activists to head-chopping Islamic terrorists drew a predictable response, with progressive groups like American Bridge sending out alerts denouncing his comments, along with outrage from the Democratic National Committee. But the National Review also called it an "unforced error," with writer Jim Geraghty taking special offense at the fact that Walker had forced him into a place where he had to defend, of all people, union activists. Even Rick Perry, not exactly a kumbaya-chanting paragon of tolerance, chided Walker for crossing a line: These are Americans... You are talking about, in the case of ISIS, people who are beheading individuals and committing heinous crimes, who are the face of evil. To try to make the relationship between them and the unions is inappropriate. In response to all of this, Walker's campaign quickly backtracked from his statement, sort of. Campaign spokesperson Kristin Kukowski said that Walker was "in no way comparing any American citizen to ISIS," which sounded like a retraction. But Walker himself denied making any offensive comparison, and blamed the whole thing on the media. "You all will misconstrue things as you see fit," he said. This echoed earlier comments, made in the wake of Rudy Giuliani's "Barack Obama doesn't love America the way you do" flap, about "self-manufactured 'gotcha' moments from the media." Meanwhile, the polls spoke for themselves. Politicians who make major accidental gaffes usually don't see a bounce in the numbers, but what little data there is suggests Walker surged on the strength of this past week's performance. The Quinnipiac poll, admittedly a small sample size and one taken extremely early in the game, shows him at 25 percent and lapping presumptive favorite Jeb Bush, who's now limping along at 10 percent. This came on the heels of another interesting poll. Remember how much abuse Rudy Giuliani took (even I got into the act) for accusing Barack Obama of not loving America? Well, the Huffington Post took a poll asking America what it thought, and it turns out that while 47 percent think Obama does love America, the rest think he doesn't, or they're not sure. This remarkable poll also showed that only 11 percent of Republicans believe the President of the United States loves his country. All of this data speaks to Walker's remark being a smart short-term move, not a dumb gaffe. Conventional Wisdom would hold that no candidate who's on record comparing hardworking, law-abiding Americans to mass torture-killers would stand a chance in a general election. But in so holding, Conventional Wisdom would be missing the current point of the exercise from Walker's perspective, which is to win the nomination. And the sad fact is, you can probably win the Republican Party nomination doing things like comparing unionized state workers to ISIS, or hinting that the president hates America. The entire narrative of modern conservative politics casts the United States as a fast-disappearing Eden of freedom and democracy that's under siege both here and abroad, surrounded by a constellation of enemies united (for some never-fully-explained reason) in their passionate hatred for the simple, God-fearing, freedom-loving American. It's not just terrorists who hate us for our freedom, but lefty college professors, dilettante Hollywood actors, undocumented immigrants sucking up tax dollars in the form of entitlements, Al Sharpton, Jonathan Gruber, feminists, environmentalists who want to forcibly abort babies to keep more room free for trees, scientists who think global warming is real, the Manchurian President Barack Hussein Obama, etc. The blurring of lines distinguishing these domestic political irritants and armed foreign murder cults is rhetorically popular and has been for a while. You can hear this pretty much every time you turn on afternoon talk radio. Here's Rush Limbaugh's answer, when asked which is the greater threat, the liberal or the terrorist: Both of them both liberals and terrorists have a lot in common. The one thing that they hate the most is freedom
A leftist and a terrorist a leftist and a totalitarian are one and the same. Fox's Eric Bolling not long ago blasted campus activists for tweeting "Je Suis Charlie" when (according to him) many of those same people were anti-speech zealots who had disinvited speakers to their schools. "The same people want to wear these pins and tweet 'Je suis Charlie,' I am Charlie," he said. "No you're not! You're more Al-Qaeda than you are Charlie!" And then of course there's Ann Coulter, who famously said this in a tirade against college activists: "Even fanatical Muslim terrorists don't hate America like liberals do." None of this is saying anything new people who aren't Fox fans long ago grew used to being called traitors, America-haters, sympathizers with Osama bin Laden and so on. The problem is that no candidate carrying this narrative around past the convention can win a general election. Even Mitt Romney, a politician so sunny and loquacious that he can make it sound like he's selling you a vacuum cleaner when he's actually calling black voters freeloaders, ended up capsizing his campaign on rhetoric like this. The announcement that he never intended to "worry" about the 47 percent of Americans he believed incapable of taking personal responsibility exposed Romney as a politician who had no vision for the whole country. Even if you're lying about it, you have to at least pretend to have a vision for everyone. Yet the Republican Party's own rhetoric sells half the country as a kind of domestic enemy. It's a nearly impossible balancing act for a general-election candidate. Scott Walker as a political performer is pretty uninspiring. He doesn't have George Bush's pretzel-mouthed Texas charm or Sarah Palin's hockey Mom magnetism. He can't fall back on an ethnic American dream parable like the one Marco Rubio can run on. He's just a doughy, finger-pointing white guy of the type the Republican Party has been churning out to fill state assembly seats or run in back-bench congressional districts seemingly since the beginning of time. He's exactly the kind of politician the modern Democratic Party is set up to beat. This was supposed to be the election cycle that featured an inclusive new conservative vision, one that reflected the country's changing demographics and would make the Democrats work harder for everyone's vote. Instead, they're churning out the same old us-against-everybody narrative, filled with the same insulting bromides about how they have a monopoly on patriotism and are apparently the only people in America paying taxes. If that's where this is going if the Republican Party runs with someone like Walker instead of having the courage to tell their voters to stop calling the rest of us terrorists and traitors then they deserve to lose again and lose badly. Forget about how offensive it is, that schtick doesn't work anymore, not even for them.
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#16. To: Willie Green (#0)
Walker can not get into the BIG LEAGUES of American politics, particularly at the national level. He resides in a self-made cul-de-sac: The root of this paradox is that Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, is an outlier among the political class in not having graduated from college, at the same time that a solid two-thirds of the country lacks a four-year degree. Such is the domination of not just college grads, but specifically Ivy League grads, at the upper echelons of our government that the nations political competition can be seen as one big intramural battle at the Harvard or Yale Club. But here comes Scott Walker, who dropped out of Marquette in 1990. For all that we celebrate the do-it-my-own-way pluck and creativity of the nations great entrepreneurs who didnt graduate, we tend to consider a four-year degree an indispensable stamp of respectability and capability. It shouldnt be. Scott Walkers example stands for an important point: Success in America shouldnt have to go through a BA. This is something that the nations elite has trouble grasping. Howard Dean expressed the liberal id on this question the other day on Morning Joe. Discussing the flare-up over Walker ducking a question on evolution in London, Dean said, The issue is, how well-educated is this guy? And thats a problem. The Washington Post ran a piece headlined, As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit, although no questions linger over his college exit. He left to take a full-time job with the American Red Cross. Mystery solved. The dirt, such as it is, from the Post report is that Walker had trouble showing up on time for French and was bored in a class on the politics of the Third World. Can we at least contemplate the possibility that the class on Third World politics was genuinely boring? The Post characterizes Walkers failure to graduate as one of a string of defeats he suffered at the time, yet the defeat was simply getting on with his life. Do we really believe that Scott Walker would be any more or less impressive if he had to choose from some of Marquettes current offerings finished up his final credits by acing such classes as Economic and Social Aspects of Film, Sociology of Gender and Sex, and Principles of Peer Facilitation Among College Students? Perhaps, if hed been more diligent in his studies, he would derive great pleasure from being able to read Flaubert in the original and discuss with fluidity the 1966 coup in Nigeria that brought to power Maj.-Gen. Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi. But clearly none of this interested him, as indeed it wouldnt interest anyone but the most devoted Francophiles or Africanists. As a practical matter, Walker used college as vocational education for what was his true passion: politics. He took up political science, but studying political science has about as much bearing on becoming a politician as studying marine biology does on becoming an Olympic diver. Politics is something you learn by doing. Walker ran for student office repeatedly at Marquette, then for real office almost as soon as he left school, building a career that has made him more successful and influential than world-class political-science Ph.D.s. We shouldnt overlearn from Walkers example, of course. For many people, its better to graduate from college than not. But not for everybody. It would make more sense if we had a postsecondary system that had ways of training and credentialing young people that wasnt so overwhelmingly dependent on a four-year degree, which is controlled by a lazy, inefficient and tuition-hiking academic establishment. If Scott Walker wins the Republican nomination, Democrats will of course attack him as anti-education, but they will be falling into a trap if they make his lack of a degree an issue. When it comes to college, Walker is a representative of the 68 percent, and a symbol of all that is possible even without a diploma hanging on a wall.
It's my observation that entrepreneurs are frequently quite ignorant of issues outside their narrowly focused area of expertise. I would prefer a candidate with a more "well-rounded" perspective that a college education provides.
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