The Unartful Dodger

There’s a lot that Scott Walker doesn’t know these days. Ever since the Wisconsin Republican governor’s name began appearing alongside Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, and Chris Christie in the headlines, he’s become the latest politician to contract a sudden case of know-nothingism.

First, he literally (figuratively) punted when asked about his belief in evolution. “I’m going to punt on that one as well,” he actually said when asked the question at a London trade conference. But he clarified that “he loved the evolution of trade.”

It’s clear that Walker’s evasiveness, or most political slipshoddery for that matter, originates from the real difficulty in crafting a response unoffending to any of the motley coalitions of support that politicians have to assemble to win elections. Doing that in just a few seconds is hard, but then again, so is becoming president.

The last few Republican presidential primaries have been especially treacherous ground, with its Scylla and Charybdis of socially conservative evangelicals and fiscally conservative independents who believe in things like evolution. It’s impossible to please both sides—either a candidate gets skewered by activists early in the primaries, or survives with enough immoderate sound bites to sink the ship in the general election.

The etch-a-sketch strategy has so far proven unsuccessful for John McCain and Mitt Romney not because Americans can’t handle any kind of political reinvention, but because they can’t handle the clear artificiality of most.

Threading the needle, then, is a most essential part of politics. Artful dodgers are rewarded over their less dexterous competitors. And that’s partially the reason Obama, with just two years in the Senate, could displace the decidedly less savvy Hillary Clinton in 2008.

It’s a more superficial criterion than we might want out of our democratic process, but it remains inescapable. And, amid all his flubbing, fumbling, and punting, Scott Walker is failing at it.

There can be little space between shrewd political navigation and fatal equivocation, and perhaps Walker’s neither-here-nor-theres would have received less attention if Rudy Giuliani weren’t, in the words of David Alexrod, “a fading politician, kind of lighting himself on fire.”

Giuliani, the former New York City mayor who won his last election a whopping 17 years ago, delivered a speech to a private dinner last week that Governor Walker attended, where Giuliani declared that he “did not believe that the president loves America” since “he wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”

Were Giuliani less peripheral, it might be worth parsing what possible mix of simple stupidity, racism, and xenophobia might have brought that quote forth. But the focus was naturally on the governor’s reaction as a test of his future campaign acumen.

Now, I’ve never been a fan of the idea that the sins of the speaker redound onto an audience, especially since the former mayor wasn’t expected to speak at the event, and it would hardly have been possible to predict these antics even if his name had been on the docket. But even if we assumed some sort of culpability on Walker’s part, he should have been able to defuse that easily.

In reality, Giuliani threw the governor a softball, solvable by a simple response along the lines of “I have no reason to doubt the president’s love of our country” (perhaps with an “even if I think his policies are an unmitigated disaster” clause appended for the good of the base).

Part of artful dodging is knowing when to stand firm. But Walker failed miserably, only answering, “You should ask the president what he thinks about America. I’ve never asked him so I don’t know.”

Is it really so hard to believe that the country’s leader might possibly love it? Or, if that line of thought doesn’t work, isn’t it pointless to get involved in a game of psychoanalytical jujitsu to retain the support of someone as unimportant to Walker’s presidential prospects as Giuliani?

Not just that, but he made it worse by telling the Washington Post that he didn’t know whether the president was Christian: “I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that. I’ve never asked him that.”

What might have been the softest of softballs became another disaster. In fact, nearly any single word of the English language would have made a better answer. Examples include “yes” or “obviously” or “really?”

There’s little you can say about the future. But if I were a betting man, I’d bet against a President Walker.

Idrees M. Kahloon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an applied mathematics concentrator in Dunster House.