Potential Rivals Plan to Kill Scott Walker's Candidacy

It is always great entertainment watching Republicans back stab and trash each other.   With the preliminaries for the 2016 presidential elections underway and Scott Walker - a man I find thoroughly repulsive - high in the polls, the other would be GOP candidates are out to savage Walker and destroy his potential campaign.  It's an endeavor in which I hope they are successful.  Walker, to me symbolizes much of what is wrong with today's GOP, and his early demise, if it happens, may be a very positive development. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the efforts to destroy Walker.  Here are highlights:

The Daily Beast spoke with strategists working with each of Walker’s top rivals to the Republican nomination, granting those who requested it anonymity in order to speak freely about how they are sizing up the field’s first leader.

The 2016 presidential campaign is still in its earliest stages—no serious candidates have even officially announced—and so most strategists said that they had only begun the process of pouring over Walker’s record.

Which is fine since Walker has begun to provide real-time oppo fodder on his own.   No sooner did Walker emerge as the early poll-leader than he ran into a series of stumbles, most notably refusing to answer whether or not he believed in evolution or whether he considered Barack Obama a Christian. He then declined to criticize Rudy Giuliani after the former mayor said that President Obama doesn’t love America, while Walker sat a few feet away.

 “The question for him is, ‘Is he ready for prime time,’ ” said a top strategist to one Walker rival. “He has always been a little cocky, and you are starting to see that being governor of Wisconsin doesn’t necessarily prepare you for storm of a national campaign.”

Republican operatives say they are just beginning to pour over his record from a decade in the State Assembly, eight years as county executive of the relatively liberal Milwaukee county executive and four runs for governor, including an aborted attempt in 2005 and a failed recall attempt in 2012.

Already Walker has been dogged by alleged improprieties regarding campaign finance laws during the recall campaign and a lack of transparency as county executive.

“This is a guy who has literally been in elective office his entire adult life,” said a strategist for one rival campaign. “He has made his living off the government sector, the taxpayer. He has never really, to my knowledge, had any kind of serious existence outside of the public sector.”

That has left enemies in his wake, the Republicans say, and helped turn Walker into a candidate willing to throw sharp elbows at his fellow presidential contenders at a time when the other candidates are still trying to hold the party together.

Now they are getting ready to respond in kind. Several rivals said that the first place to attack Walker was on his conservative bonafides. In such a deep field, evangelical and Tea Party voters looking for fidelity will have plenty of alternatives to choose from if Walker is found to be too soft on immigration, abortion, or gay marriage.

I think you can easily make a line where this guy looks like the kind of person who will say anything to get elected.”

Walker has already come under criticism for recently shifting his position on abortion and immigration. Next up is likely to be his record as governor of Wisconsin. Walker’s constant mentioning of his battles with the unions is already drawing eye-rolls among his rivals, particularly when he suggested that the battle prepared him to take on the Islamic State.

Walker’s early polling leads mean that every stumble will be magnified, while the other campaigns say that their candidates will still be able to make mistakes that go unnoticed.

“Expectations are high, and he is under a microscope,” said Mike Dennehy, an aide to Rick Perry’s campaign in New Hampshire. “I’ve been on both sides in these races, at the top and at the bottom, and starting out at the top can be extremely difficult.”