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Roland Dodds

Roland Dodds is an educator, researcher and father who writes about politics, culture and education. He spent his formative years in radical left wing politics, but now prefers the company of contrarians of all political stripes (assuming they aren't teetotalers). He is a regular inactive at Harry's Place and Ordinary Times.

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37 Responses

  1. Will Truman says:

    I, for one, am bummed that I shall likely not again have occasion to use the Faceless Scott Walker Feature image.Report

  2. Saul DeGraw says:

    I don’t know how shocked I am. Yeah he was pretty big in the news for the past few years but I think Leeesq was right in describing him as not being ready for prime time. Walker seems to have risen to power and survived recalls and elections because of issues that might be unique to Wisconsin. From what I’ve read and heard from my Wisconsite friends, Wisconsin is going through white flight a lot latter than the rest of the nation. Walker’s big base is the WOW suburbs and exurbs of Milwaukee. This area is filled with people who lived in Milwaukee until fairly recently but fled over the past decade or so for reasons resembling white flight from the 1960s and 70s.Report

    • Roland Dodds in reply to Saul DeGraw says:

      @saul-degraw Walker is yet another in a long line of Republican white knights that simply didn’t materialize. Much like Perry, he was strong on paper and just couldn’t put the right pieces together nationally.

      I am glad to see this one go however!Report

    • I’m not sure I buy the “late white flight” thing as being of monumentally significant. It appears to have h as ported later, but Milwaukee proper has been majority-minority since the 90’s which is similar to St Louis and Cleveland, behind Detroit but ahead of others.

      Also, Milwaukee and Madison are two of the most segregated cities in the country and that didn’t happen overnight.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to Will Truman says:

        I think the real issue with Milwaukee and Madison is that they were very white places when suburbinzation started in the 1950s and 1960s. Even though lots of people were leaving them for the suburbs, there wasn’t the narrative of leaving the big scary city where those people live like there were for other cities that lost a lot of people during the same period.Report

  3. Brandon Berg says:

    Say what you want, but Scott IV was fantastic.Report

  4. Troublesome Frog says:

    I think Walker’s union/ISIS thing is just a straightforward version of the strategy, “Use every question as an opportunity to talk about the thing you’re proud of instead of answering.” See Ru9/11dy Gi9/11uli9/11ani (9/11). It just happened to be hilariously tone deaf. That strategy irritates me enough that I really love it when it backfires that way.Report

    • Alan Scott in reply to Troublesome Frog says:

      That’s a reliance I never really understood.

      Rudy’s noun-verb-9/11 was a strategy that might have worked because “I helped shepherd our country’s biggest city through a horrific terror attack” isn’t a particularly divisive accomplishment.

      But Walker’s cry was “I fished over Unionized workers”. That’s only going to appeal to the rabid. And, well, once you’re appealing to the rabid, you’re actual set of accomplishments is secondary after the degree to which you can capture their outrage. Which means that your specific accomplishment is completely forgotten when Donald Trump promises to deport Brown people to the moon.Report

  5. Damon says:

    “Scott Walker is the second of many Republican candidates to drop out of the race due to financial difficulties, ”

    NPR this morning stated he quite because the polling after the last debate had him below 1%. No mention of his fundraising problems, but wouldn’t anyone in a field of 11+ have fundraising problems?Report

    • North in reply to Damon says:

      Walker did an aggressive strong early spending campaign strategy that ran straight into a wall when Trump upstaged him. Walker’s strategy was to aggressively spend in Iowa to build momentum then use that momentum to lure in donors to refund his campaign. When Trump outflanked him to his right Walker’s momentum vanished and the donors never refinanced him. Walker’s super PAC has plenty of money but his campaign was basically in significant debt, when you run out of money your campaign ends.

      The other candidates have been pursuing different strategies. Bush simply has massive resources to use. Rubio and the other establishment wing candidates have been running relatively frugal campaigns and are going for an endurance match. Cruz is shadowing Trump with a basket out to catch the voters when Trump implodes. Walker’s strategy was basically the one that was perfectly designed to be fished over by the Trump phenomena. If Walker could have been more memorable in the debates or hadn’t racked up such a long list of punts on various policy tests he might have been able to survive it but he wasn’t and he did so his campaign croaked.Report

      • Kolohe in reply to North says:

        One thing I didn’t realize until looking it up is that Walker didn’t officially start his campaign until July, meaning he’s not on any of most recent quarters (ending June 30) FEC filings receipts or expenses. (pdfs)

        Someone elsewhere on the other thread or another forum pointed out that Walker had the same tic as Giuliani – “a noun, a verb, 9/11” had become “a noun, a verb, the unions”. But I’m wondering if the real problem was getting in too late – a mistake Giuliani also made, but in hizhoner’s cycle ‘too late’ was at least 9 months later in the cycle.Report

      • Roland Dodds in reply to North says:

        @north Dead on. In a world where Walker could have been the populist right winger in the race, his chances may have been different. Trump made sure that was not to be, but Walker’s own poor performance on the stump just couldn’t get people motivated as he needed them to be at this stage in the race.Report

      • Damon in reply to North says:

        Thanks North. I really haven’t been paying that much attention to the particulars of the Repub candidates, finding them all pretty much unacceptable. 🙂Report

    • Kim in reply to Damon says:

      Specifically, the latest polling had him at 0.
      And the trolls weren’t even running that poll.

      The Establishment Candidate is DEAD!
      Long Live Trump, and may he Sink or Swim on his own.

      The trolls have exited the building.Report

  6. crash says:

    Being from Wisconsin, I never thought he had much of a chance. He’s so… uncharismatic, for lack of a better word. I also thought he was not ready for prime time, as mentioned above–but neither is Trump. However, Trump is, if not telegenic, at least interesting/media-generating. Walker just couldn’t package his views, such as they were, in an attractive way (for many definitions of “attractive”). Guy’s a total wet noodle.

    Of course, there’s still the matter of how he got elected here in the first (2nd, 3rd) place. Don’t ask me. Off-year elections plus other stuff, I suppose. I only wish he had spent some more time on the national stage embarrassing himself so we could be sure to vote him out in three years. Might happen anyway.Report

    • North in reply to crash says:

      Rumor is he won’t run again though at this low point of course that’d be the rumor.Report

    • Kim in reply to crash says:

      Koch, Koch, and more Koch.
      Why was he the leading candidate for the Republican Party?
      Koch, Koch and More Koch.Report

      • Roland Dodds in reply to Kim says:

        @kim I have read in the last few hours that the Koch bros basically pulled the plug on contributing to his campaign and that really signaled the end. I don’t know if that is the case, but it would make sense given his quick exit from the race.

        Each Republican candidate need their sugar daddy, and Walker was left waiting for the dance without a date.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to crash says:

      Trump has been on prime time so by definition he is ready for prime time. Even though his politics changed from rich and at least nominally liberal Democratic party member to rightist populist who believes in America’s welfare state for senior citizens who earned it and hates immigrants, Trump has had the image of a bombastic guy who says what we wants for decades. This turns out to have a lot of advantages when it comes to waging a populist campaign because nobody is really that surprised when you say things for shock value and because you know how to do things with flair. Trump is much more of a showman and natural demagogue than Walker because he has decades of practice.Report

  7. Kim says:

    Walker died the death of a thousand cuts.
    I may have mentioned a while back, that lucky often has a name.
    In this case, unlucky has a name.

    Walker was heavily invested in winning Iowa, but didn’t have much of a national profile.
    But really, to poll at 0??Report

  8. Walker is the most divisive Wisconsin politician in living memory.

    Only if you have a really short memory.Report

  9. But Walker’s over-the-top policy prescription — which went far beyond what was necessary — cleaved the state in two.
    Did he think he was governor of Michigan?Report