Scott Walker: An Idiot, Ready to Serve
on Day 900
By Ted Rall
July 14, 2015 "Information
Clearing House"
-
Imagine you're running for
president. Of the United States of America. The campaign
has begun. Then something unsettling happens: you
realize that you're not qualified for the job.
That you're in way over your head becomes
evident when voters and reporters on the campaign trail
ask you questions you can't answer. What's your position
on net neutrality? You don't even know what that means,
much less have an opinion about it. What would you, as
president, do about the Middle East? You don't have a
clue.
If you're like me, you'd probably call
the whole thing off. If you give two shits about your
country, you don't want anyone less than the best and
the brightest in charge of those awesome powers over war
and peace, the world economy and those nuclear launch
codes. If and when you come to the conclusion that you
are neither the best nor the brightest, or even very
good or much brighter than a 60-watt bulb, the right
thing to do is to step aside and leave the leading to
someone else — someone better, someone
brighter.
Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor
best known for his war against labor unions in
particular and workers in general, found himself in this
exact situation. Rather than drop out of the race for
the 2016 Republican presidential nomination and focus on
governing his state, however, Walker decided to bone up
on the issues like a college kid cramming the night
before an exam.
"While Mr. Walker is ahead in some
opinion polls, including for Iowa's first-in-the-nation
caucuses, a series of early gaffes alarmed party leaders
and donors and led Mr. Walker to begin several months of
policy tutorials," The New York Times reported. "Mr.
Walker is now emerging from his crash course with the
aim of reassuring activists and contributors…that he
will no longer sow doubts about himself with comments
like comparing pro-union protestors to Islamic State
terrorists, refusing to answer a question about
evolution or saying he does not know if President Obama
is a Christian or if he loves America."
In fairness to Gov. Walker, the
union-ISIS smear, professed agnosticism about Darwinism
and the Obama stuff are right-wing pandering to the
GOP's know-nothing base of idiotic white-trash voters,
rather than an indication of personal
ignorance.
Nevertheless, ignorance there is — in
abundance.
"Two Republicans recalled being at a
closed-door event last winter when, they said, Mr.
Walker did not articulate a strong answer to a question
about Internet neutrality, instead promising to look at
the issue," reports The Times.
We can't expect anyone to know
everything. There's nothing wrong with admitting you
don't know something, then going to research it. But a
presidential candidate should know a lot.
A would-be president should possess a
broad reservoir of knowledge, and a deep understanding
of, national and world politics, history, culture,
economics and science, and he should possess that
intellectual heft many years before having the gumption
to argue to hundreds of millions of Americans that they
should entrust him with the world's most powerful
position of political leadership.
Net neutrality is the argument that
the telecommunications companies that own the "pipes"
that carry Internet traffic and other digital data
should treat everyone who uses those pipes the same, so
that a small bootstraps start-up gets the same data
speed as a multi-billion dollar conglomerate willing and
able to pay for the best, fastest service. Far from
obscure or esoteric, net neutrality has received
extensive coverage in the tech media, business press and
political opinion pages for the last decade. Really,
we're talking about very basic stuff.
I was able to write the issue summary
in the first sentence of the previous paragraph without
having to Google it. And I'm just a cartoonist. Why
wasn't Walker able to do the same? He's the governor of
a state, but he doesn't read the news? What makes a guy
who doesn't read the news, lots of news, every day,
think he's qualified for the Oval Office?
The Times also cites Walker's
"repeated comments that the most important foreign
policy decision of his lifetime was President Reagan's
firing of air traffic controllers in 1981, because it
got the attention of the Soviet Union [as] a sign to
some Republicans that Mr. Walker, who dropped out of
Marquette University and has not traveled widely abroad,
has a limited worldview."
This is not a liberal-conservative
thing. No historian, journalist or informed American who
remembers 1981 believes that Reagan's destruction of
PATCO had any effect whatsoever on the Cold War, or that
Soviet leaders took note of it at all. If Reagan
hastened the collapse of the USSR (which is debatable),
he did so by sucking the Russians into their "Vietnam,"
the expensive, demoralizing Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan, and by accelerating spending on an arms
race with which the Soviets couldn't keep up. Walker is
wrong.
Moreover, it should be obvious to
anyone that U.S. foreign policy actions like Nixon's
normalization of relations with China, the two Gulf Wars
and Clinton's endorsement of the World Trade
Organization have infinitely broader implications than
Reagan's union-busting.
Thus Walker's boning up on US Politics
101.
From The Times: "Mr. Walker has joined
in hours-long meetings in Washington; Madison, Wis; and
elsewhere for tutorials on the Islamic State, Iran,
Russia and military and geopolitical confrontations, as
well as human rights abuses, border security and
immigration policy, and other issues."
Hours-long! Isn't that
splendid?
Unfortunately, Walker's ignorance,
followed by last-second pre-campaign cramming is not an
exception. It's the norm, and not just for buffoons like
Sarah Palin, George W. Bush and Scott Walker.
"Respectable" boldface politicos like Barack Obama, Jeb
Bush, and Hillary Clinton have had to pick up Cliff's
Notes versions of issues about which they were
unqualified to discuss, much less impose
prescriptions.
Whatever your ideological leanings, I
trust you agree with me that a Man Who Would Be
President should have been living and breathing the
minutiae of domestic and foreign policy problems and
issues throughout his life. Sure, he should take regular
briefings from experts. But he ought to know the basics
long before taking in his first campaign contribution.
© Ted Rall -
www.tedrall.com