Good-bye Scotty – Digby's Hullabaloo

Good-bye Scotty

by digby

You knew I would have to write about Scott Walker one last time, right? I have to say I’ll miss him. Re-tweeting his epically banal tweets with Chauncey Gardner quotes was some of the best fun I’ve had in a long time. (I know, I need to get a life…)

Anyway, I recapped his short career as this year’s Great Whitebread Hope over at Salon this morning:

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a piece here about a phenomenon I called The Great Whitebread Hope, which is an ongoing Republican establishment fantasy of electing an upper-Midwestern “reformer” in the LaFollete tradition who can bring together all the disparate factions of the party and offer up an image of respectable, mature, pragmatic leadership (and incidentally pick up some badly needed electoral votes from somewhere).

In 2008, it was former Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, whom beltway political mavens had built up for years as an exciting Republican reformer with big “new ideas” (like welfare reform and school vouchers). In the wake of the Bush debacle, he was especially attractive as an “outsider” who could make the American people forget what they’d just endured. Unfortunately, like Walker, on the stump Thompson was frighteningly unprepared, even making embarrassing gaffes about Jews and Israel, and he dropped out in August of 2007. Undeterred by this embarrassment, the establishment once again anointed a Midwestern Governor as the GOP’s salvation for exactly the same reasons in 2014, former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who also flamed out before any votes were cast.

This year it was Scott Walker, who “suspended” his campaign yesterday after having been in precipitous free fall from front-runner to last place and facing the prospect of being booted from the main debate stage and forced to spar with Lindsey Graham at the kids’ table next time out.

If you don’t count Gerald Ford, who backed into the presidency by being appointed vice president and succeeding Nixon when he resigned, the GOP has not nominated a presidential candidate from the Midwest since Alf Landon back in 1936. (And it wasn’t exactly a resounding victory — he only got two electoral votes.) But while it’s true that the modern electoral map is very daunting for the GOP, they seem peculiarly fixated on this region. Walker took the early lead in the Midwestern savior race, but for months people were also talking up Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as similarly excellent choices to lead the GOP out of the wilderness. Back in 2014, as they all made pilgrimages to the Republican Governor’s Association, Politico described them this way:

“[They are] Rust Belt success stories who can revive the party’s Reagan Democrat coalition and speak to the middle class in a way Mitt Romney could not. And Republicans looking to shed the image as the party of the 1 percent say a Midwestern state executive who’s created jobs and balanced budgets might be just what the GOP needs.”

The fact that they seemed to be able to transcend the party’s, shall we say, cruder side was also a big selling point. As Walker put it during his apparently impressive appearance:

“Strong leadership, combined with Midwestern nice, there’s just a certain appeal to that.”

By strong leadership he meant that one should be as crackpot right-wing as one can get away with and not be Michele Bachmann. And Walker was that guy in every way. The New Republic described him this way:

“Scott Walker, the battle-hardened governor of Wisconsin, is the candidate that the factional candidates should fear. Not only does he seem poised to run—he released a book last week—but he possesses the tools and positions necessary to unite the traditional Republican coalition and marginalize its discontents.”

He took his marching orders from The Club For Growth, Americans for Prosperity and anti-immigration guru Jeff Sessions. He had evangelical credentials equal to those of Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. His record of union bashing was second to none.

And he certainly seemed nice, so nice in fact that he appeared to be something of a grinning simpleton at times, particularly on social media, where his tweeting of his dinner menus and constant pictures of himself riding on a Harley were ruthlessly mocked. While all the constituencies in the party who were presumed to be his greatest fans gave him plenty of chances, his gaffes and flip-flops made them doubt his sincerity and abilities.

He had been widely assumed to be the Koch brothers’ choice due to their involvement in the union busting and recall campaign in Wisconsin. And they were admittedly very impressed with him until he started making embarrassing mistakes, like saying that Ronald Reagan’s greatest foreign policy achievement was taking on the air traffic controllers union, and flip-flopping on immigration several times, finally landing on the opinion that even legal immigration should be ended. Not ready for prime time doesn’t begin to describe it and the Kochs have known that for a while now.[…]

The good news for Washington’s pundits and establishment Republicans is that there’s still some hope for their Midwestern hero scenario to come true in 2016. There is another one in the race: Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Whether or not he can make the cut is still unknown, but if there’s one thing you can say about him, it’s that he’s anything but dull. Unfortunately, the Republican electorate seems mesmerized by “outsider” amateurs this year so far and Kasich is the embodiment of a lifelong politician who took some time out to cash in — he’s the fourth richest Republican running — and then jump back in to become governor, and then president. He also has a habit of diluting his hardcore conservatism with some pragmatic deal-making from time to time, which is unlikely to be acceptable unless he adopts some Trumpish attitudes about Mexicans and Muslims to cover it.

But whatever happens this time out, for those who believe in the Great Whitebread Hope as the only salvation for a fractured party that needs someone who can convince the country it hasn’t gone completely stark raving mad, there’s every reason to believe that the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.