As many, many people immediately leapt to point out, dealing with a crowd of angry but mostly peaceful union demonstrators and liberal activists in Madison is rather different from dealing with murderous, messianic terrorists in Mesopotamia. (It’s also very offensive to unions and Wisconsinites who disagreed with Walker about labor, but let’s set that aside for the purposes of discussion.) Walker’s presumptive 2016 rival Rick Perry saw an attractive weapon for bashing him. Walker later told the Wisconsin State Journal he didn’t regret the comment, and added: “I’m just pointing out the closest thing I have to handling this difficult situation is the 100,000 protesters I had to deal with.”
Everyone, Walker included, seems to agree the comparison wasn’t well founded, but to state the obvious, it’s hard to imagine this quotation being a major source of grief for him in the campaign. Operatives and reporters are in full gaffe-spotting mode already, but many of the alleged boneheaded quotes seem destined to fade. I’m so old I remember when prominent journalists were saying Walker’s failure to disavow Rudy Giuliani’s claim that President Obama didn’t love America should disqualify him from contention. (It was last Friday.) And yet here he still is!
Shortly after that dinner with Giuliani, Walker was asked about whether he believed Obama was a Christian and said he didn’t know. He tried to spin that as a response to a gotcha question, a trick that might have worked more effectively if his spokeswoman hadn’t hastened to assure The Washington Post that he knew Obama was a Christian. These gaffes are ephemeral, and insofar as they ought to inspire concern among his supporters, it’s mostly about clumsy handling of fairly straightforward questions.
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