After news of her resignation broke, Erickson said Walker’s team blew it, condemning “the voices who decided to stir this pot.”
“Given Liz’s work history, I will put it to you this way — Team Walker has botched this,” he wrote, adding that it adds fuel to the fire of the “‘not ready for prime-time’ theme already developing” around Walker’s potential campaign.In a column for the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney remarked that Mair’s departure fits a pattern for the Wisconsin Republican in that he will fight special interests only if he is already enemies with them.
“But when he gets pushed around by a political power broker, or a well-heeled lobby group that’s ‘on our side,’ Walker rolls over,” Carney wrote.
“It is evident Walker needs to win Iowa and staffers aren’t more important than the candidate,” Jonah Goldberg wrote for National Review. “But principles are. If Walker didn’t want a critic of the Iowa caucuses on his payroll he shouldn’t have hired one. But he did.”
As I wrote yesterday, Liz Mair is someone I have known for quite a while and for whom I have great respect. We don’t always agree on issues but she was absolutely correct about Iowa. Walker should have shown some spine and not let the arcane caucus mongers in Iowa dictate who should and should not be working for him. What most people who support Walker at the moment like about him are the steel nerves he exhibited dealing with Big Labor opposition in three elections. This episode isn’t a deal breaker for most supporters, but it does allow doubt to creep in. The governor had been on a roll and didn’t need a self-inflicted wound, however minor.
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