This is officially Scott Walker day, since today he’s officially announcing his candidacy. So what can we say about him that’s new and interesting? Nothing, really, and Brian Beutler thinks that’s still his most serious problem:
Walker’s biggest liability may be this: He is incredibly dull. Not just plodding-speaker dull, though he’s often that, too, but an actually boring person. Mitt Romney is nobody’s caricature of a party animal, but he could legitimately boast of being an industrial titan, a fixer, and a man of the world. Hillary Clinton isn’t particularly charismatic, but her life story is filled with dramatic tension, and nobody who masterminded #Benghazi can be credibly dismissed as boring.
Walker, by contrast, is painfully boring. His boringness is evidenced by this sequence of 37 tweets, which go back more than four years.
Walker abbrevi8es like a tween. His life turns on snow, dairy, hot ham, Kohls, haircuts, Packers, Badgers, and watching American Idol while eating chili. His critics err when they mock him for lacking a college diploma, but they could be forgiven for observing that his intellectual incuriousness is symptomatic of lacking ambition outside politics.
Oh, snap! He abbrevi8es like a tween! But give the guy a break. His two kids are 20 and 21, and Walker probably learned to tweet from them back when they were tweens. Now he’s stuck in a time warp.
As for those 37 tweets, I guess we’ll find out soon enough if America finds Kohl’s and hot ham boring and unpresidential, or heartwarmingly ordinary and in touch with the common man. Or if, more likely, they don’t read his tweets at all.
Anyway, yes, Scott Walker is boring. Maybe he’ll get better with practice. Or maybe boring goes over surprisingly well with voters. Oddly enough, most world leaders aren’t really very charismatic. I’ve never quite figured out why that is. And in any case, if Walker wins he’ll be going up against Hillary Clinton, who’s never going to win any awards for charisma either.
And there’s more! In the first debate later this month, the big guns he’ll be going up against are Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, who are only slightly more interesting than Walker. And all of them will have Donald Trump on the stage, who’s going to make boring look really, really good by comparison. Should be a fun show.
