The Queen: The Epic Ambition of Hillary and the Coming of a Second "Clinton Era" (18 page)

Walker might survive this, and his lack of a B.A. which the
Washington Post
trotted out in early February might even get traction in whispers during the GOP primaries, though Walker would be smart to plant question after question about it, and answer it every day and to his advantage in joining his own story to that of every American who either didn’t finish or didn’t start college. He can bring up Lincoln even as he talks again and at length about the costs of college and how he knows better than everyone how the system works against kids from middle-America’s middle class. Powerful stuff that.

I asked Walker the question about credentials in the course of a January 6, 2015, interview that gives you a glimpse of his skills set. I began by asking whether his wife, Tonette, was on board for a 2016 race after having run in 2010, 2012 and 2014—the first and last races being brass-knuckled state house races, and the middle contest being the nastiest recall election in the country’s modern history—by a lot:

HH: What, is she okay with it?

SW:
Absolutely. I mean, she is a trouper. Tonette was a widow before we were married. She lost her husband and her only sibling within a year. She is a tough and remarkable woman in her own right. And she and now our 19- and 20-year-old sons, who themselves, not just me, over the last four years, were targets of protests and attacks, and all sorts of other things. They weathered this. It made us, sometimes a family goes through traumatic things like that, and they grow apart. We grew closer together. And I think they’ve realized after not just two years ago in the recall, but even this last November’s election, I was the number one target in America, you know, for AFSCME, for the AFL-CIO, for the teachers union nationally, the NEA. I was their number one target. Washington-based special-interest groups spent just about everything they could. They brought the president in. They brought in Clinton. They brought in Elizabeth Warren. And we prevailed, because we took the power away from those big government special interests, and we
put it in the hands of the taxpayers. And in the end, the taxpayers wanted someone who was going to stand up for them.

HH: Now, I, because of the nature of my business, I talk to everyone about this, and you are almost everybody’s second choice to be the Republican nominee, and many people’s first choice. But I hear the same two questions again and again, so I want to pose them to you first in 2015.

SW:
Sure.

HH: First of all, you’re too nice to beat Hillary. Can you beat Hillary?

SW:
Anybody who watched me over the last four years knows that you know, I ran against the mayor of Milwaukee twice, who was former member of Congress, had all the backing in the world behind him, and I ran against a very strong businesswoman this last time who have had, like I said, all the Washington base behind her. And we had no problem. Yeah, I’m nice. I’m Midwestern nice. There’s no doubt about it. But I don’t think anyone’s ever wondered if I was able to stand up and fight the big issues. And we’ve done that, I think, both on the campaign trail, and equally, if not more importantly, in the capital.

HH: The second thing I always hear, in a field full of lawyers and even one doctor, Rand Paul and a couple of businessmen, you’re the only guy without a college degree.

SW:
Yeah.

HH: What do you say to that?

SW:
I say I’m like the majority of people in America. I’m someone who went to college, had the opportunity in my senior year to go and take a job full-time, which was not the only reason I went to college, but one of the biggest reasons was to get a job. And the American Red Cross offered me a job my senior year and I took it, thinking someday, maybe, I’d go back. But a few years later, I met my wonderful wife, Tonette, a year after that, we had Matthew, the year after that, we had Alex. And now, like a lot of folks in America, you know, your family and your job take the time away from you from finishing it up. But I don’t think anybody, and I’ve got a master’s degree in taking on the big government special interests, and I think that is worth more than anything else that anybody can point to.

This sort of facility with tough, pointed questions and his brilliant backstory is why you will need to launch the Palin missile early. Opponents with controversy and especially controversial people about whom few opinions will ever change is the wrecking ball of politics, second only to personal scandals, and there won’t be any of those with Walker. Every bit of oppo that can be done, has been done to Walker. It is a dry hole. He is the only preacher’s kid in America who never raised any Hell. Accept it, and try the Palin dart.

Quickly, and through Bill. Pretend-admiration has no better practitioner. You would blow it. Don’t try.

If it doesn’t work, you are in serious trouble, especially if Walker as the GOP nominee in Cleveland and summons Marco Rubio to join him on the stage, even as Rubio would stun you by picking Mitt Romney as his Veep. Either combo is a killer for you. So don’t spend the next year raising money and waiting to spend it until August. The GOP has done the rarest of things, by accident. It has presented you with a political MIRV, and like these missiles with multiple warheads, the GOP’s legion of good candidates makes it very hard for you to attack them all simultaneously. But you must. Just spend most of your time and money on Bush, Cruz, Rubio and Walker.

The biggest rap on Walker is that he isn’t read for the national security issues, that his “Eagle Scout” demeanor and his backstory about taking on the public sector unions gets jumbled into the mix of complicated foreign policy narratives and makes him sound naive. That’s what your MSM buddies tried to do with his PATCO quotes at CPAC and what the lefty trackers tried to do when, in response to a question I posed on whether he had thought about being Commander-in-Chief, they posted a video arguing he had tried to compare the achievement of becoming an Eagle Scout with preparation for being atop the U.S. military. Neither attack impressed anyone outside of Team Hillary because they were both absurd over-reaches and Walker didn’t over-react. He never does. That is what scares you most—his unflappability when your machine is designed primarily to destroy opponents by
occasioning their meltdowns.

So you will go after him on the names and places around the globe you have been, suggesting that perhaps the lack of a degree is a signifier of larger gaps. Beware. He is a learning machine. On the same day of the “Eagle Scout” comment, Walker sat down with me for a wide ranging chat about all things foreign and domestic. Again, no telegraphed questions, no notes in front of him, just us, two mics and an audience of millions:

HH: Sitting across from me, the Governor of Wisconsin, who’s not in the very cold far north. Scott Walker and I had a little Q&A in front of the Chamber of Commerce [earlier today]. Governor Walker, thanks for coming over to KKNT and continuing the conversation.

SW:
Thanks for having me on, and thanks for a great interview over there at the Chamber. It was outstanding.

HH: Well, it was pretty easy after about a thousand people gave you a standing ovation. You’re kind of getting used to that, I think. And we’ll come back to some of that. But I sat down here, and there’s breaking news everywhere.

SW:
Yeah.

HH: Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s been charged with desertion, the Saudis are massing troops on the Yemen border. This is what you’re going to have if you decide to run for president–headlines breaking. So how do you prepare for walking into an interview when Bowe Bergdahl all of a sudden is charged with desertion?

SW:
Well, every day, I’ve started with Mike Gallagher, I was going to say a “former” Marine, but you’re never a “former” Marine.

HH: Captain, two tours, Anbar Province, right?

SW:
Right, a great, great guy. He’s now our national security advisor, and used to work for Senator Corker on the Foreign Affairs Committee, really super guy. Every day, he gives us great information, great briefings, and I obviously reach out to a lot of others. But there’s things happening all over the place. And as we talked about at lunch, and we’ll talk about even more here, you’ve got to be ready on multiple fronts. When I think about this
desertion charge, the thing that gets me the most frustrated is this administration gave up five Taliban, five Taliban for this guy, and I can’t, I mean, logic tells you all this information that they’re bringing against the sergeant now isn’t something that just happened since then. This is stuff they knew about when they put American soldiers’ lives at risk to try and rescue him. And they gave up five Taliban leaders in return for a guy who now is going to be charged.

HH: It goes to the question of judgment, Governor Walker. And earlier today, Eliana Johnson said of your campaign in
National Review
, “the best of times, the worst of times.” And yesterday on this program, Dave Weigel said Walker’s going to be haunted by the speech where he compared public employee unions to ISIS, and I said “He actually didn’t do that.” But nevertheless, the small becomes large, and the large becomes small. What do you think of the President’s judgment, not your judgment, but the President’s judgment as it’s evolving and unfolding?

SW:
Well, the unfortunate reality is this is what happens when you put someone in office who’s never led before. He’s not listening. When you’re a governor, you’re a mayor, you’re a county executive wherever you’re at, and when you have a cabinet and you have to act on behalf of not just the people who elected you, but the whole group, the whole constituency as we talked about a little bit at lunch. You’ve got to lead, and you’ve got to listen to people who hopefully are smart or smarter than you are on any given topic. You ultimately have to make the decision. This president, unfortunately, having been a senator, a state senate, and community organizer, never led anything. And so he’s never been in a position to make those sorts of judgments. And so we’ve seen time and time again, they’re just faulty decisions, which would be one thing if it was something off on the side. But this is affecting not only American policy and American lives, but people around the world.

HH: You mentioned today, you called it “the safety issue,” not the “national security issue,” that sort of brings, explain to people why you use that terminology.

SW:
I do, because I think it’s come to the forefront not so much because “national security,” that, to me, as I said [at lunch], is on page 6A of the newspaper where only a handful of us read into that. But when people see the videos, when they see the Jordanian burned alive in a cage, when they see the Egyptian Christians who were beheaded, when they see some of these other
folks from around the world, including James Foley, who went to Marquette University where my son’s a junior, and suddenly, that becomes very real to everyday Americans.

HH: One of the beheaded Islamic State videos.

SW:
Absolutely, whose parents are actually from New Hampshire, not far from where I was at a weekend ago, and you just realize, you can see it on your phone, you can see it on your iPad. You don’t need the filter of the network news or the daily newspaper to tell you how bad this is. It suddenly becomes an issue of safety, because that’s not something, national security, foreign policy is something over there. Safety is something you feel inside your chest, you feel in your heart. And I think increasingly, Americans feel a sense of concern that particularly if they have family members or loved ones that ever want to travel again, they see France, they see Canada, they see other places around the world, not just the Middle East, and it’s a safety issue. And they, and then I would just add to this, as they look at this more closely, they see a president whose drawn a line in the sand and crossed it, who called ISIS just a year ago the “jayvee squad,” who called Yemen last fall a success story, who calls Iran now a place where we can do business. Think about how screwed up that is. I remember the movie in the ’80s,
Trading Places
…

HH: Right.

SW:
… you know, with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy, it’s like Iran and Israel are trading places in the sequel. In the eyes of this president, our ally is supposed to be Israel. Our adversary has been historically Iran. And yet this administration completely does it the other way around. We need to call radical Islamic terrorism for what it is, and a commander-in-chief who’s willing to act.

HH: Now I asked maybe one of your potential competitors yesterday, Senator Marco Rubio, who I know is a friend of yours.

SW:
Good guy, yeah.

HH: I asked him yesterday would you disown any agreement that this president signs with Iran that leaves Iran uranium enrichment. What’s Scott Walker think about the deal, because that’s the outline, it appears?

SW:
Absolutely.

HH: Would you reject that deal if you took the Oval Office?

SW:
Absolutely, on Day One. I mean, to me, it is, the concept of a nuclear Iran is not only problematic for Iran, and certainly for Israel, but it opens the doors. I mean, the Saudis are next. You’re going to have plenty of others in the region. People forget that even amongst the Islamic world, there is no love lost between the Saudis and the Iranians. And so they’re going to want to have a nuclear weapon if the Iranians have a nuclear weapon. This is something that just escalates right before our eyes. And the fact that this administration began these discussions essentially conceding that they’re going to allow enrichment to go forward with the Iranians just shows you that they don’t have the same level of concern that I think I and Senator Rubio and many others out there have, that a nuclear Iran is a problem for the entire world, not just for Israel.