Big swinging schtick – Digby's Hullabaloo

Big swinging schtick

by digby

Oh boy. Hearing all these wingnuts talk about Iran is enough to make me take to drinking before noon. What a bunch of phony macho posturing. None says it better than our Great Whitebread Hope who thinks fighting ISIS is as easy as barely winning a recall election in Wisconsin:

WALKER: As president, on my very first day going forward, I would pull back, I would terminate that bad deal with Iran completely on day one. I would then put in place crippling economic sanctions against Iran, and I’d convince our allies to do the same. This is not a country we should be doing business with.

I love how he says that he’ll “convince our allies” as if he’s going to haul out the waterboards if they don’t do what he wants. As anyone who’s been following this story with even the slightest attention knows, one of the reason this was so important to get done is that our Iran allies and our enemies alike were basically saying either come up with a deal or we’re going to start selling whatever we want, fuck you very much. But remember, Walker’s been busy dodging indictments and tweeting about his meatloaf dinner so he probably hasn’t had much time to bone up on the details.

Speaking of his meatloaf dinner, I wrote a piece about Walker’s brilliant electoral strategy for Salon today. (Hint: it’s truly innovative — run to the right in the primaries and then tack to the middle in the general. Unlike every other Republican presidential candidate of the past 50 years. Well, except for all of them.)

Yes, yes, I know you think that the idea of securing the base in the primaries and then moving to the middle is the moldiest of stale strategic tropes. And you’d be … right. Why anyone thinks this is worth remarking upon is the most remarkable thing about it.

Now it may be true that Romney “started in the middle and moved rightward” but I don’t think anyone deludes themselves that this was the preferred strategy. It just so happened that Romney was a pretty moderate governor (by modern GOP standards) who wanted to stay in the middle so he could get elected. Unfortunately for him, the GOP base forced him so far to the right he ended up sounding like a cross between Pat Buchanan and Scrooge McDuck before the whole thing was over.

It’s understandable that the campaign is pretending that this is some kind of novel strategy, but the truth is that someone with Walker’s record who shares a major media market with the Iowa caucuses shouldn’t have to work this hard to get the far right’s endorsement. The truth is that for all of his wingnut bona fides (and they are very, very real), the right wing of the Republican Party, particularly the social conservatives, don’t trust him. Recall that the grand poobahs summoned him to Washington to explain his various tiny deviations from their approved talking points just this past May.

Read on. This was supposed to be an easy lay-up for Walker. But he’s just not that good ..