The Republican nomination for the presidency in 2016 may be Scott Walker’s to lose. If your response, as it might be, is “Scott Who?,” then you’re not paying attention yet.
I just spent a week among people who are: 550 conservative and Republican voters who traveled on National Review magazine’s semi-annual cruise.
The cruisers are consumed with politics. And overwhelmingly — and I mean no one else was even close — their favorite for 2016 is the governor of Wisconsin.
These NR readers don’t precisely match the GOP electorate, but they’re a pretty significant leading indicator. They are, to a person, conservative, and they know a great deal about the ways that conservative ideas and Republican politics interact — and clash.
One might expect that they would gravitate to the most nakedly ideological candidates. Not so.
They are worldly people, and having tasted sweet victory in the November midterms, they’re not looking for a purity-test campaign of the sort we saw in 2012.
They want someone who reflects their values and beliefs, who’ll stand up for conservative principles — and who has proved he can win.
Walker appears to hit this trifecta. On Nov. 4, he was re-elected in a state Barack Obama carried twice.
Most important, in 2011, he won a decisive victory in a recall election forced by public-sector unions.
They wanted to destroy Walker after he’d successfully championed measures limiting their collective-bargaining rights with the state, creating greater flexibility when it came to the hiring and firing of teachers, changing the structure of their pensions and ending their ability to collect dues from union members who disagreed with their politicking.
The response to Walker’s legislative efforts was tumultuous. Democratic lawmakers literally fled the state to prevent a vote on the measures. Seventy thousand people marched on the statehouse in Madison and occupied it. The press coverage was uniformly hostile.
Yet Walker stood his ground, and the legislation passed.
The recall was designed to be the revenge of the Wisconsin left — and became a national cause as well, since no more powerful message could be sent about the dangers of crossing this key Democratic constituency anywhere in the country than booting Walker from office.
In the end, he won the recall by 6.5 points, and on Nov. 4 won re-election by 5.5 points.
So Walker has won three elections in four years in an Obama state, and the last two came in after he advocated conservative reforms in the teeth of unprecedented opposition that would’ve made most other politicians sue for truce.
And as for results? During the 2014 election, Walker claimed his reforms had saved Wisconsin taxpayers $3 billion — and PolitiFact Wisconsin, an organization not exactly friendly to him, rated the claim “mostly true.”
He has come through the fire, forged and strengthened.
And vetted: By one estimate, Walker has faced $130 million in opposition spending against him in the recall and the re-election effort. If there are any skeletons in his closet, that must be one deep closet.
Yes, Walker might seem an unlikely favorite. He doesn’t register strongly in the admittedly sketchy early polling of GOP voters.
He has kept a relatively low national profile, appearing infrequently on TV. And for those who have heard him speak, the experience is not exactly transporting: He’s colorless and unexciting to watch.
In fact, though the cruisers all thought the world of Walker, almost none of them had ever actually seen him in action. But he is riveting if you’re watching the box scores, which is what political junkies do in the runup to major elections.
Let me explain. In the days before people could see almost any pro sports event somewhere on TV, they mostly followed players through the papers.
So you could be deeply excited by, say, the slugger Harmon Killebrew of the Washington Senators and Minnesota Twins even if you’d only get to see him a few times a year when his team would play against yours.
As it happens, Killebrew wasn’t a charismatic person — he was quiet and literally sober, the definition of colorless. Despite one of the greatest careers in the history of the sport, it took him three tries to be voted into the Hall of Fame.
Still, your view of his talents was entirely justified by his accomplishments — which came through in the daily box scores.
Stat watching isn’t an infallible means of judgment.
You could easily overrate a player for secondary reasons — I was a huge fan of the pitcher Jim Kaat, not really for his pitching (which was terrific if not great) but because he may have been the best hitter among pitchers since Babe Ruth.
What the next 18 months will demonstrate is whether Walker is best admired from afar, or whether he’s going to take the national GOP by storm.