Scott Walker Who????

How Scott Walker became an asterisk

From presumed front-runner to quitter, Walker’s fall was fast.

By Glenn Thrush

Before there was Donald Trump or Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina, there was Scott Walker — a defiant outsider who portrayed himself as the regular-guy champion of the GOP’s burn-the-Beltway base.

After a promising start last winter, the two-term Wisconsin governor turned out to be a tentative and mistake-prone candidate who badly fumbled core Republican issues — especially birthright citizenship — that Trump and other top GOP candidates handled with relative ease.

Several senior Republicans with knowledge of his campaign said the 47-year-old Walker — who won two elections and survived a recall effort without the help of national consultants — was simply too confident in his own abilities and often acted, ineptly, as his own campaign manager.

“It’s no longer about just backing an outsider in principle; people want somebody who is completely outside the system,” says Heather Stancil, co-chair of the Madison County, Iowa Republican Committee — an area that was supposed to be a Walker electoral stronghold.

“It makes me scratch my head; the only thing I can attribute Walker’s failure to is that people do not want someone tainted by any relation to government at all,” she added. “They are so fed up they don’t trust anybody. He said he was an outsider, but he also had that taint of working in government.”

His stunning fall, from top tier hopeful to a so-called “asterisk candidate” who couldn’t break 1 percent in the latest CNN poll, also illustrated the limits of fundraising in a 2016 that was supposed to be dominated by unregulated campaign spending. Both Walker and former Gov. Rick Perry, who dropped out earlier this month, represent a two-man money-couldn’t-buy-them-love club on the sidelines. Super PACs affiliated with Perry and Walker raised millions in the weeks leading up to their collapses — Walker’s alone banked more than $20 million.

But Walker had far less success raising hard money for his campaign and struggled to bankroll staffers in the states and travel.

Walker, a deeply religious evangelical Christian who waged a years-long battle against public employee unions in his home state while touting his back-of-Harley working-class roots, had an impressive entrance into the race. He delivered a powerful defense of economic and cultural conservatism in a fiery speech at Rep. Steve King’s Iowa Freedom Summit in January in which he talked about braving a union sympathizer’s threat to gut his wife “like a deer.”

But angry as Walker was — his super PAC was named “Unintimidated” — he just wasn’t quite angry enough.

Liz Mair, a former Walker aide who was fired earlier this year, took to Twitter on Monday to enumerate the mistakes her one-time boss had made — and said he often seemed overmatched by the velocity and information overload inherent in a modern presidential campaign.

At the top of her list: “Not educating himself fast enough on issues outside governor's remit” and “Not training himself out of tics incl[uding] instinctively answering 'yes' and 'absolutely' to things, comparing lots of things to union fight.”

But his sudden exit from the race on Monday (so sudden many staffers learned of their impending unemployment on Twitter) said just as much about the toxicity of the environment as the flaws of the man. Walker’s charisma-free Midwest pique simply couldn’t compete with Trump’s bellowing, telegenic challenge to the party establishment — during a primal-rage 2016 primary season when any candidate with a connection to government starts at a disadvantage.

Walker’s campaign had been imploding for weeks, but his public low point — and one that made him vulnerable to charges of weakness — was his stumbling response to the birthright citizenship proposal, a quixotic bid to challenge the 14th Amendment guarantee that all people born in the U.S. be given citizenship rights. Over the course of seven days in August, Walker rattled out no fewer than three positions — a call to challenge the amendment, a solid “no” when asked if he planned to challenge existing laws, and a call for the status quo.

“It's okay to flip-flop, but not as frequently as Flipper. Almost everyone (except Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush) has changed positions in this race. Donald Trump used to be a raging liberal (and perhaps he still is),” wrote conservative blogger Ed Straker, hours before Walker’s fall. “But even Trump, once changing his position, didn't go back and forth and back and forth several times within the space of a few days. … He quickly became known as being squishy on immigration.”

Until the summer, Walker seemed to have a sturdy regional strategy that seemed Trump-proof. He staked his chances on Iowa’s deeply conservative GOP caucus electorate — and he had a regional hook The Donald couldn’t dream of — having spent part of his childhood in Iowa. But he struggled to stake out an identity beyond his battles with unions.

“You can say you fought against the unions, and you are a conservative, but eventually you have to have a compelling national policy proposal that captures people’s imagination,” said longtime Republican pollster David Winston. “Walker didn’t have that.”

To say that he peaked early is an understatement: Walker led the Iowa pack in February with 25 percent and sat in third place nationally for much of the year. He plummeted to 3 percent and 10th place in Iowa by September — and fell off the charts last week.

The two Republican debates — which might have served as a safety net for his free-falling candidacy — were unmemorable, and his bland passivity at last Wednesday’s otherwise raucous showdown proved fatal.

On a night when Carly Fiorina rose, instantly, from the ranks of also-rans to second or third place, Walker found himself shut out of the back-and-forth — logging a mere eight minutes of talk time, compared with Trump’s 20 despite his best efforts to interrupt.

“He was a terrible candidate, but he also got Trump-ed,” said one Walker ally.