Scott Walker Fading

'Scott Walker's foreign policy experience is limited to breakfast at the old International House of Pancakes, as he threatens to start at least two wars upon taking office'

Of increasing concern to Scott Walker is what the Washington Post calls persistent "questions about his readiness to handle the problems and unexpected challenges that confront every president" (Dan Balz and Jenna Johnson, Post).

Yeah?

The intrepid Scott Walker's reboot has begun: Let's build a wall between the United States and Canada, said Walker this weekend.

That's big and bold; thanks Scott for keeping us safe.

Of course, those big bodies of water to Wisconsin's north and east—the Great Lakes that glaciers (I mean god) bestowed—they should be quarantined by the U.S. Navy and not because of invasive species and Canadians (they're okay).

Muslim terrorists could board a ship—disguised with 1,550-horsepower Mercury Marine engines (those Muslims are clever heathens)—begin at Thunder Bay, Ontario and leisurely boat across Lake Superior, suddenly storm the Apostle Islands way up north off the Bayfield Peninsula, disembark at Red Cliff and then drive in waiting Ford trucks due south to our doom in Richland and Dane County.

Then, we'll all pay and wish we had listened to Mr. Churchill, or whoever Walker sees in the mirror this week.
---

Balz and Johnson's prose in the Post is Washington-polite talk for Scott Walker doesn't know anything no matter how much money and propaganda Walker gets from ALEC, the Koch Brothers, the Bradley Foundation, the MacIver Institute, the Wisconsin Reporter, Media Trackers, and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, and other Republican Party-front groups.

Paul Fanlund of the Capital Times offers up a must-read narrative this morning.

Here's an excerpt:

Writes Fanlund:

Day after day, our Republican governor comes off as increasingly cartoonish in the national media, a small figure waving his arms behind Trump, seeming to shout 'Me too! Me too!'

Walker, you see, has apparently convinced himself he represents a one-man profile in courage for eviscerating union rights in Wisconsin, even though he was carried by millionaire and billionaire donors and strategists, a Republican-controlled Legislature, a compliant and politicized state Supreme Court and an off-balance and underperforming state Democratic Party.

This self-aggrandizement showed itself in his autobiography, 'Unintimidated,' in which he described his lifelong admiration of Reagan and famously asserted that the president’s decision to fire striking air traffic controllers somehow intimidated the Soviet Union and hastened its demise.

That sort of preposterous claim foreshadowed other bizarre assertions by Walker, such as that facing down angry schoolteachers somehow equips him to defeat Islamic State terrorists. (That nugget was so daffy that it keeps getting recycled, cut-and-paste style, whenever national reporters summarize Walker’s many odd worldviews.)

His recent pattern is to take an outlandishly extreme position—for example, denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants—only to qualify that position, and, on this topic, qualify it again. Read a headline in New York Magazine: 'Scott Walker clarifies his third position on birthright citizenship.'

Timothy Egan of the New York Times nicely summed up Walker’s would-be machismo: 'Scott Walker, the governor whose foreign policy experience is limited to breakfast at the old International House of Pancakes, threatens to start at least two wars upon taking office. He promises to use military action if necessary to coax Iran into doing what he wants it to do. He also wants to pick a fight with Russia, sending weapons to Ukraine and erecting a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.' 

Bear in mind, like Scott says, this a marathon, not a sprint.

Dan Balz: National GOP Rancid - Echoed in Wisconsin

On graphic display in the Wisconsin Assembly budget debate last week is the Republican demographic demise. GOP failings in Wisconsin echo those nationally.

Says Dan Balz today in his For Republicans, the Forces Aren't With Them in the Washington Post.

The American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution convened a stellar cast on Friday to review what has been learned since November. The panel included Robert Lang of Virginia Tech; Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress; William Frey of the Brookings Institution; Bill Bishop, a Texas writer and author of ‘The Big Sort’; Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center; and Ronald Brownstein of Atlantic Media. They presented a wealth of data about what happened in 2008 and offered conclusions that would alarm any Republican hopeful of a quick turnaround in the party's fortunes.

Wisconsin mirrors the nation in setting off Republican political alarms.

Wisconsin is a political anthology of the demographic trend Balz discusses as the GOP problem with blacks and Latinos persists with the GOP still behaving in an overtly hostile manner towards these communities that comprise fast-growing segments of the electorate, with “black women [having] the highest voter turnout rate in November's election -- a first". [See Dissecting the 2008 Electorate: Most Diverse in U.S. History.]

Says Balz:

In the last election, there were more than 2 million additional African American voters, about 2 million more Hispanic voters and about a million more Asian American voters. All are groups in which Obama increased the Democratic share of the vote over 2004. Frey estimated that minority voters in nine states made the difference in Obama's victory margin.

Republicans can't reverse the demographic trends; their only solution is to increase their share of the minority vote. Opposing Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's Supreme Court nominee, because of her pride in being a Latina won't help solve that problem.

So what is the response of Wisconsin Republicans like Mike Nichols, Patrick McIlheran and other GOP talking heads?

Mocking and scapegoating, for example, obnoxious and unanimous Wisconsin GOP opposition to Democratic initiatives on immigrant driver licenses and collecting racial profiling data.

The GOP message to African American and Hispanic voters veers from we don’t like you to you don’t belong here to you’re on your own.

As Balz implies, this isn’t a winning political strategy anymore, never mind its fetid taste.

During the budget debate, Jim Doyle, Tamara Grigsby and Pedro Colón have been the collective punching bag of the GOP looking to stir up white resentment on the economy and to place the blame for the last eight years of national economic catastrophe on one Wisconsin governor and minority constituencies—this has been the GOP playbook since the Southern Strategy.

But Doyle, Grigsby and Colón appear quietly confident that this old divisive tactic is not working.

The future looks bright for a political message based on unity, civil rights and inclusion, geared especially to younger voters who are diverse demographically, less religious, culturally liberal, and less susceptible to GOP racist appeals.

Wisconsin Is Not in 'Holding Pattern'

Update: Obama Ground Report: Canvassing in Waukesha, Wisconsin and Record-low seventeen percent of Wisconsin voters think the country is going in the right direction

The political wisdom of some (the Washington Post's Dan Balz, for example) is the next 10 days in August will see the presidential race in a holding pattern.

Nothing could be further from the truth of course, and this applies emphatically in Wisconsin.

Two dynamics continue here:

- Barack Obama's on-the-ground field operation (that rivals his Internet operation's superiority to the McCain camp's) is hitting the ground running

- Barack Obama will pull away in fundraising, no matter the sleazy finance machinations of John McCain and the rightwing independent slime merchants

In Dane County (Madison), Wisconsin, Obama's field headquarters are being bombarded with requests for yard signs [people are told they have to wait a few weeks].

It's August, and Obama has already amassed a large local volunteer base left over from the February 19 Wisconsin primary that arguably set Obama's victory in the Democratic primary in stone.

On the air waves, John McCain is everywhere in Wisconsin, which is viewed as a major Republican takeover target. The flush and agile Obama campaign matches McCain ad-for-ad. But not in McCain's negativity that McCain views, reasonably on a national level in a certain desperate sense, as his only conceivable path to victory, a la Hillary Clinton.

McCain's problem in Wisconsin, as his campaign has settled on the Karl Rove attack strategy and embraced a Karl Rove clone as chief-message-attack (they are the same for McCain) man, is that Wisconsinites more than most, do not like personal attacks in politics.

I mean Wisconsin is not Tennessee. But you would not know it from John McCain's TV spots.

McCain's people either don't know or don't care.

And we have not seen the large-scale operations Obama has in store yet.

To use a baseball metaphor: Obama is ahead by six runs, it's the bottom of the sixth inning for the home team Obama, the bases are loaded and Prince Fielder just came up to bat.

By the time the convention theater opens in late August and the supposed holding pattern ends, McCain will have already lost Wisconsin, and Obama will have done more than enough to win the nation.