Over at National Review, conservative blogger Jim Geraghty joins the crowd of pundits who are unimpressed with Scott Walker’s recent answers to fairly easy questions:
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker received a lot of completely undeserved grief from the national news media in the past weeks. But he may have made a genuine unforced error in one of his remarks today. Asked about ISIS, Walker responded, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe.”
That is a terrible response. First, taking on a bunch of protesters is not comparably difficult to taking on a Caliphate with sympathizers and terrorists around the globe, and saying so suggests Walker doesn’t quite understand the complexity of the challenge from ISIS and its allied groups.
Let’s put aside the question of whether Walker deserves any grief for his weasely comments about evolution and President Obama’s love of country. Fair or not, those actually seem like the kinds of questions presidential candidates get asked all the time. If Walker wants to be taken seriously, he should have better responses than he did.
But hey—maybe those really were gotcha questions and Walker should get a pass for answering them badly. ISIS, by contrast, certainly isn’t. It’s one of the preeminent policy challenges we face, and if you’re aiming for the Oval Office you’d better have something substantive to say about it. As Geraghty suggests, generic tough-guy posturing does nothing except show that you’re out of your depth.
At a broader level, the problem is that although Walker’s anti-union victories are a legitimate part of his appeal and a legitimate part of his campaign story, he’s become something of a one-note Johnny about it. His supposed bravery in standing up to union leaders and peaceful middle-class protestors has become his answer to everything. This is going to get old pretty quickly for everyone but a small band of die-hard fans.
Needless to say, it’s early days, and Walker’s stumbles over the past couple of weeks are unlikely to hurt him much. In fact, it’s better to get this stuff out of the way now. It will give Walker an improved sense of what to expect when the campaign really heats up and his answers matter a lot more than they do now.
That said, every candidate for president—Democrat and Republican—should be expected to have a pretty good answer to the ISIS question. No empty posturing. No generic bashing of Obama’s policies. No cute evasions. That stuff is all fine as red meat for the campaign trail or as part of a stemwinder at CPAC, but it’s not a substitute for explaining what you’d actually do if you were president. Ground troops? More drones? Getting our allies to contribute more? Whatever it is, let’s hear it.
