Walker Hype Crash

Where the Scott Walker Hype Machine Went Wrong

By Jack Shafer

With analytical coolness, the press descended upon Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s expired presidential campaign Monday to explain how the candidate traversed the space from front-runner to dead meat in just a couple of months.

Almost to a one, reporters concluded that Walker had been done in by assorted money woes and fumbling performances at both candidate debates, both of which drove him to the bottom of the polls. Oh, yes, and the unexpected Donald Trump sensation. USA Today’s coverage of the Walker drop-out best conveyed this consensus view as it patted the last few shovelfuls on his candidacy.

What was missing in the post-mortems was any acknowledgement of the gusto with which most news outlets viewed the Walker campaign a couple of months ago. On July 13, USA Today Washington Editor Susan Page all but stumped for Walker in a now-embarrassing piece titled “Who’s a Contender? Why Scott Walker Is, and Donald Trump Isn’t.”

Page wasn’t alone in her Walker appraisal. Last November, Mother Jones prepared its reader for the possibility of a Walker presidency. In January, RedState called Walker the GOP’s “presumptive” favorite. “Walker Tops Among Conservatives,” McClatchy reported in early March. By April, the New York Times marveled that “Scott Walker’s Ties to Donors Put Him Ahead of Rivals” and noted the significance of Walker being anointed as the future beneficiary of Koch brother money. In June, a month before Page tallied Walker’s winning positives, Reuters was declaring him “the clear favorite of conservative voters” and NBC News was calling him “one of the strongest Republican candidates.” In early July, a piece in POLITICO Magazine predicted a Walker victory.

I have long admired the work of Susan Page. Take it from me, she committed no puffery in her USA Today article. She found space to mention Walker’s weakness in foreign policy and his tendency toward flip-floppery. But her focus was on his strengths as a candidate: He was a battle-tested campaign survivor—the first U.S. governor to win a recall election. He was geographically well-endowed, too, by virtue of his state’s proximity to Iowa, where the first caucuses will be held (and where he had lived in his youth, making him an honorary favorite son). He was leading the polls in Iowa. He commanded a national fundraising base and was considered a hero to conservative activists for winning the battle against labor in Wisconsin.
Walker had “room to grow,” she wrote, unlike Trump, who was approaching his “ceiling.”

Whoops.

If anybody correctly predicted the breakdown of the Walker campaign in August, prior to the CNN debate and his disappearance in the polls, I missed it. The failure of the political press corps to sense Walker’s demise is excusable, of course. Nobody can predict the future. But that doesn’t prevent journalists from routinely exercising their predictive skills in assessing the contours, strengths and weaknesses of campaigns. The failure of the press to sniff out the impending Walker collapse in advance reminds us that nobody in the press possesses a crystal ball.

This brief meditation on the Walker coverage is intended to provide readers with a cautionary tale on how to read future stories—as they arrive—about how Donald Trump is finished and Hillary Clinton is inevitable. Everything a journalist says about a candidate’s prospects or even his or her place in the political order should be heavily discounted. Like the sportswriters assigned to the Kentucky Derby, they excel at gathering useful information for their readers to use to make their bets. But the actual coverage of the chaos that is a horse race is so daunting that sportswriters don’t attempt to write about the race in real time. Any veteran observer of the Derby, the Belmont or your local pony track knows that a snapshot of the horses in the first curve or the backstretch doesn’t necessarily tell you that much about how the race will later end. If only political writers were as humble.

I would suggest that journalists stop handicapping the political ponies except I doubt if they could write stories at all if such a ban was enforced. The careful collection of facts is important to political journalism, but so much of the final product relies on pure speculation. All summer long, journalists worked hard to collect Walker facts and then used those facts to speculate that he would remain (in Susan Page’s words) a contender. I sympathize with the press corps, of course. What were reporters and pundits supposed to do, report a multitude of facts about the Walker campaign and give no indication of where they might lead? A journalistic ban on speculation might block faulty projections like Page’s piece about the “contenders,” but it would produce copy drier than salt.

Perhaps news reports—especially presidential campaign news—should come with product liability notifications. “Nothing in this report should be read as a solid prediction of the future,” the notification might say. “Our journalists have no access to functioning crystal balls. Our assessments of who is up, who is down, who is campaigning smartly and who is campaigning stupidly, are all subject to change. When our assessments prove faulty and we promise to change them, don’t expect an explanation of our changes or any announcement of our failing. You were gullible to believe us in the first place.”

A little wordy, yes, but it does drive home that the only socially acceptable form of bullshit left in this world is the prediction.