There had always been talk that Walker, as a Midwestern governor, wasn’t well versed, or even very versed at all, in foreign policy. That turned out to be true, and obvious to all when he cited his command of the Wisconsin National Guard as national security experience and argued that Ronald Reagan’s 1981 firing of the air traffic controllers was “the most significant foreign policy decision of my lifetime.”
Some supporters saw Walker’s lack of foreign policy chops as a fixable problem. Indeed, he tried to fix it, gathering a group of experts to school him in international affairs. But for Walker, an even bigger problem was domestic policy. He just wasn’t very up on some of the key policy and political issues that a president has to confront.
About a month after his Iowa breakthrough, Walker traveled to Palm Beach, Florida to address a donor-heavy crowd at a gathering sponsored by the conservative Club for Growth. He was asked his thoughts about the Export-Import Bank — not a huge issue, but an important one to many fiscal conservatives — and he didn’t seem to have any. Walker was also asked about the standoff then going on in Congress over funding the Department of Homeland Security. His answer was long, meandering, and entirely unclear. He was asked about President Obama’s executive action on immigration. Same story.
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