Leaving No. 10 Downing St., headed to the White House?
And so it begins: in the pages of the Washington Post, this pathetic “hit piece” by David Fahrenthold on Scott Walker of Wisconsin — a “human interest” story that has only one purpose: to marginalize the governor and establish for the coastal Democrats that he is not one of “us,” just as the WaPo story about Romney and his dog did. The headline alone gives the game away: As Scott Walker mulls White House bid, questions linger over college exit.
We can’t have “questions lingering” about a man who might one day be president now, can we? So here we go with this thoroughly nasty piece of work that brings shame and disgrace on both its writer and the newspaper:
In 1990, that news stunned his friends at Marquette University. Walker, the campus’s suit-wearing, Reagan-loving politico — who enjoyed the place so much that he had run for student body president — had left without graduating.
To most of the Class of 1990 — and, later, to Wisconsin’s political establishment — Walker’s decision to quit college has been a lingering mystery. Not even his friends at Marquette were entirely sure why he never finished. Some had heard that a parent had fallen ill, or maybe there was some financial strain. Others thought he had simply had enough of school. Walker clearly liked college politics more than college itself…
Walker’s own explanation has been short and simple. He got a job. He meant to go back. But he just never found the time.
To the Kredentialed Klass, a college degree — preferably from an Ivy League school — is the sine qua non of life itself. Sure, a couple of very prominent media personalities lack one themselves, including the recently defenestrated Brian Williams; the current host of Meet the Press, Chuck Todd, didn’t graduate from college, either. But no matter: this is the presidency we’re talking about!
Today, Walker, 47, is the governor of Wisconsin and a strong contender for the GOP’s 2016 presidential nomination. He is known for an astounding political hot streak: Since 1993, he has run 11 races for state legislature, county executive and governor — including a highly unusual recall election in 2012 — and he has won them all.
But before that streak came a string of defeats — the campus election, his failure to finish college and his first campaign for state office.
A “string of defeats” that includes a college election? The man whaled the tar out of the Democrats and their union thugs three times in four years and Fahrenthold has to go back to Marquette? To further emphasize that this is an in-kind journalistic contribution to the Democrat Party, the Post dropped this little squib while its subject was out of the country and unable to respond:
Walker was not available to comment for this article, according to a spokeswoman for his new political committee, Our American Revival. He is visiting London this week, conducting a trade mission and bolstering his foreign policy credentials.
“Bolstering his foreign policy credentials” — the gall of the man.
Still, the dog-whistle hits just keep on coming. Might Walker be a religious nut? Check!
The real story of Walker’s start in politics begins seven years earlier, when he left his home in tiny Delavan, Wis., where his father was a Baptist minister. In 1986, Walker arrived as a freshman at Marquette, a Catholic school in the heart of urban Milwaukee.
Was he politically ambitious? Check!
Walker was known for something else: his political ambitions. If you met him, they were as plain as the photo of him with Ronald Reagan on his dorm-room desk.
“He would comment that, you know, ‘I’m going to be president of the United States someday,’ ” said Patrick Tepe, a former dorm mate who is now a dentist.
Unlike, say, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. But, hey — they are Ivy Leaguers! They get to say things like that.
As a freshman, Walker was elected to the student senate. He plunged into the job, leading a hard-charging impeachment inquiry into charges of misspent money. But in his classes, some professors said they never saw the same level of focus on schoolwork. In introductory French, for instance, Walker routinely barged into the room after the lesson had begun, loudly making excuses.
“He would talk to me, you know, say, ‘I’m very sorry, I had very important business’ ” with the student government, instructor Marc Boutet recalled. “I’m like, ‘En francais ! En francais!’ ”
Boutet said the other students tired of the daily disruptions. They started preemptively stealing Walker’s favorite desk, so he had nowhere to sit when he arrived. “I think I gave him a D-minus,” Boutet said, adding that he saw Walker years later, and the two laughed about the class. French, Boutet said, “was not his thing.”
Unlike another Ivy Leaguer, John Forbes Kerry, to whom French is very much his quelque chose. But, it seems, Walker was such a terrible student he wasn’t even that interested in politics. Hypocrite!
Even in politics class, Walker could appear disengaged. “He seemed utterly bored,” said Michael Fleet, who taught him in a class on the politics of the Third World. Fleet said he’d hoped to get Walker into debates with the liberals in the room. But it didn’t work. Walker would only give occasional short speeches that made conservative arguments.
“It wasn’t always on key. It wasn’t always in response to anything,” Fleet said. “He wasn’t engaged. It was like he came in with a script.”
Campaigning, on the other hand, was something Walker seemed to enjoy. But he had trouble winning. As a freshman, for instance, he ran for a higher office in student government and was defeated by a write-in candidate.
The story goes on and on in this vein, recounting in gleeful detail how Walker was defeated as a sophomore in his quest for the student-government presidency, allowing Fahrenthold to sneak in this little religious-nut dig:
Walker lost, 1,245 to 927. His friends say he handled it with grace, telling them the loss just meant that God had another plan.
The piece concludes with Walker’s failure to finish at Marquette, and his subsequent electoral challenge to a black Democrat, Gwen Moore, making an issue of crime, which of course means that he hates black people:
“His campaign was one big dog whistle,” said Moore, who is now a member of Congress. She believed Walker’s anti-crime message was a way to speak to white voters’ fears of blacks without saying them aloud. “He had sort of insinuated sort of the worst stereotypes about black people [and] innate criminality.”
Walker lost that election too. But, as the story notes, “that was the last time Scott Walker lost an election.”
If that’s the best the Democrat-Media Complex has got, Walker will demolish them. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer group of Kredentialists. After eight years of Barry and the Choom Gang, Ivy Leaguers to a man and a woman, how could we do any worse?
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