Why I Am Rooting For Scott Walker

Scott Walker officially announced his intentions to run for the highest elected office in the land yesterday. He was looking for an additional boost to his slightly sagging poll numbers, and it looks like that is exactly what he got. I’ve written extensively about Scott Walker over the past year and it is safe to say that Governor Walker and I don’t really see eye-to-eye ideologically. Oddly enough though, as his candidacy gets underway, I find myself kind of rooting for Scott Walker to have a strong start to his campaign.

Are you guys done with your collective, dramatic gasps?! Ok then. There are couple of reasons why someone like me would root for someone like Walker. First off, Walker’s launch if successful would take attention away from the incredulous public spectacle that has been Donald Trump’s foray into presidential politics. It’s an embarrassment to the process that someone who offers no substantive solutions and only bigoted, simplistic platitudes to the conversation can be this close to a major party nomination for president. For all of Trump’s near-incoherent ramblings about the inherent criminality of illegal immigrants, the only thing that he has offered is the building of a fence across the Mexican border, a “solution” that elicited groans from many in attendance at Trump’s Las Vegas speech Saturday night.

So far it looks like Scott Walker’s announcement has taken some of the shine away from Trump, which is a very good thing. How do I know this is the case? Well while Walker was trending all day yesterday, Trump was getting into twitter beef with escaped convict Mexican drug lords and saying we should have invaded Mexico instead of Iraq. You know, the things people say and do when they’re desperately trying to hang on to the last miniscule shreds of attention and exposure from an increasingly disinterested public.

More important than taming the Trump sideshow, the announcement means that the training wheels are now off for Walker nationally and he’ll be exposed for the incredibly limited, toxically divisive not ready for prime time player he has been since he first became governor in 2010. Both flawed state Dem gameplans and being insulated by Waukesha County, one of the richest and most conservative counties in the United States has allowed Walker to become as successful as he is in the state of Wisconsin. But a record of being hyper-partisan can only take one so far. Walker needs to make himself stand out as a candidate with fresh solutions to the nation’s woes.

The problem is that during the run-up to his announcement, Walker has tried to bolster his conservative cred with moves that included a reversal on immigration that allowed him to blend his views with the rest of the Republican primary candidates and a view on gay marriage which featured the laughable advocacy of a national constitutional amendment to redefine marriage. This is not to knock Walker for making a move towards the right. In fact it is expected from Republican primary candidates that they make a move to shore up base votes. But Walker has stated recently that the GOP needs bold, fresh ideas in this election. His actions in the past few months though have proven that his fresh ideas are about as stale as the rest of the Republican field, or 3-month-old bread. At this point the comparison is interchangeable.

We’re not even going to get into his actions and views on foreign policy, which included missteps like putting words in the British Prime Minister’s mouth and comparing the citizens in the state that he governs to Islamic terrorists. He has proven that his foreign policy leaves much to desire and hasn’t provided anything innovative that makes him stand out from the field. If he does not have anything else to offer and is weak in other areas, voters will go for the candidate that is similar to Walker yet stronger where Walker is weak, and they’ll have plenty to choose from.

One could argue that these incidents are all aberrations and that he’ll right the ship towards the end of the summer. After all he’s been making inroads across important primary states, slowly raising his national profile. not to mention the election is still almost 16 months away. But the bottom line is unless he has some dynamic, game changing plans in that brown paper bag he always talks about, Walker will just blend in and fade out like the Tim Pawlentys and Jon Huntsmans of yesteryear.