Scott Walker addresses the press
In this op-ed, Scott Walker channels Newt Gingrich minus all the nastiness—although Newt wouldn’t really be Newt without the nastiness.
Why do I say Walker is being like Gingrich? I remember, back in the 2012 Republican primaries, one of the things that drew Newt-supportors to Newt was that he was the only one of the Republican field who threw the press’s “gotcha” questions back in their faces, questioning the motives and tactics of the questioners rather than being trapped by them. A lot of people wished the others would adopt the tactic, too, because it can counter one of the ways in which members of the MSM treat Republicans very very differently than they treat Democrats.
Well, Scott Walker has adopted it, and Walker has the decided advantage (at least to my way of thinking) of seeming personally non-threatening and mild-mannered. Unlike Newt, he’s got that Midwestern affability thing going. But watch out—as with that “amiable dunce” Reagan, Walker is both sharp and unafraid of standing up for himself and defying the attempts of the media to define or trap him.
I found the following video of Reagan because I was looking for a clip of his “I am paying for this microphone” quote. But when I watched it I was struck by what Reagan says at the very end about Carter (it starts around 0:50). The statement is very well put, and could be a template for what Walker might say about Obama right now. Yes, Obama’s leadership is much worse than “mediocre,” the word Reagan uses in the clip for Carter’s. But it’s still a very hard-hitting statement overall, and “mediocre” is actually a description that even most moderates could agree with. Take a look:
Unfortunately, Walker may just have provided the sound-bite that will ruin his chances. At CPAC today, when asked about ISIS, part of his response was: “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe.”
The statement [by Reagan about the “mediocre” Carter] is very well put, and could be a template for what Walker might say about Obama right now.
Reagan had some kind of almost magical ability that still perplexes me. The MSM is like a large wall standing between sensible politicians (like Reagan, Walker, Cruz, etc) and a large mass of the public, distorting or blocking the message such politicians want to get across.
It was as if Reagan somehow climbed up on a big ladder, looked over The Wall and spoke directly to the crowd on the other side. By convincing much of that crowd, he was able to put together majority coalitions for reasonable changes.
Today, Republicans seem completely baffled and defeated by the MSM Wall–despite the fact that they have many more communications channels available to them than Reagan did. Obama and the Dems keep winning every showdown because the MSM portrays conservatives as unreasonable extremists no matter how ridiculous and destructive the Dem’s positions are.
Much of the blame for this rests with Republican ineptitude. They utterly fail to do anything to get past The Wall. Starting 2-3 months before a government “shutdown” (or some other showdown) they should pound the drums day after day to get their message across, but they do nothing.
I don’t believe this sh*tstorm of lefty-statist policies is what the majority of Americans want. But King Barack and the Dems keep succeeding with this rubbish because a significant fraction of the public swallows the MSM picture, not the truth.
Don’t jinx Scott by calling him the next RWR.
Yep. While Newt had serious flaws as a candidate, that was what I liked best about him. The media are the enemy, and conservative politicians need to come out swinging and constantly call them out on their outrageous bias and partisanship.
At the moment, Walker is my top choice for 2016. He has real accomplishments in taking on the government unions in Wisconsin, and this desperately needs to be done at the federal level as well.
Gary:
I have some theories about why it’s harder for current Republicans to get past the Wall.
The first is that Reagan had a unique personality. Perhaps part of that was his acting ability—he knew had to deliver a line. And he was grounded in a belief system that was well thought out, and almost everything he said flowed from that.
The second thing is that even though the press was out to get Reagan, they hadn’t developed and coordinated their attacks quite the way they have developed them today.
The third thing is that the left has been working its Gramscian magic on the populace and its institutions (education and entertainment, to name two) far longer and far more successfully, and the population has been prepped in this way.
The fourth is that the welfare state is more advanced and more people are dependent on it and loathe to give it up.
There are probably more, but that’s what quickly comes to mind.
Also, Neo, Americans were very familiar with Reagan, especially because of his time on the TV show General Electric Theater, which he hosted from 1954 to 1962. It was broadcast on CBS in prime time on Sunday nights. That went a long way toward firmly establishing his persona and making folks like him.
Newt could drive past the question to the premise of the question. Once, candidates were asked whether the bin Laden op might have offended the Pakistani government and what we should do about it, or even possibly not have gone in the first place. Other candidates wandered around the question and Newt said, “We should be furious.”
RE: Reagan. Yes, Reagan was known as the “Teflon President” in that nothing bad would stick to him.
I think Ann has a good point; nothing others tried to stick on Reagan would stay because he had a “known” image before politics, before the MSM tried to knock him down, they just couldn’t overcome his “good” image from before.
Reagan also had real charm; not the slick Willie charm, or the shivers down my leg bromance charm some get from seeing a shirtless Obama; but, real honest-to-goodness charm. The kind of guy you’d like to have a drink with charm. That is very hard to beat.
It is also true that he understood television and media better than most politicians (Liberals, Democrats, Republicans, and Conservatives combined). After all, he worked in Hollywood, one of the hearts of liberal la-la-land, for many years before entering politics, so he, no doubt, had a lot of experience in dealing with them and besting them at their own game.
Reagan also had his beliefs and stuck to them. His beliefs weren’t something he held to get elected – no, sir, he seemed to genuinely believed what he believed. And Americans like that.
And, I think Neo, you are so right – the MSM today is better armed, better organized, and more willing to take down anyone who dares to challenge their world view.
Let’s hope Walker (or any other Republican) can deal with them and beat them at their own game.
Reagan’s words about mediocre leadership drifting from one crisis to another eroding the stature and will of the country fit the present situation very well. History repeats.
When RR told the moderators in no uncertain terms that he was paying for that microphone, you saw the flash of the stainless steel spine that was concealed by his genial image. I’ve mentioned before that I knew a man who worked for Reagan in California and his first term as President. He told me that Reagan was very, very tough. That he was extremely tough toward the Communists because he had seen them up close and personal in the Screen Actors Guild. That he knew being weak or accommodative was no way to deal with thugs bent on taking down democracy. He did not shy from making hard decisions because he knew that freedom is a fragile thing.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the man/woman who occupies the Oval Office must make decisions that most humans do not want to deal with. They are decisions of life and death, war and peace, depression and prosperity. They are decisions that the present occupant dithers over and then makes some half-baked decision that makes things worse. Thus, we drift from crisis to crisis.
Fine set of comments; thanks, all.
Scott Walker is emerging ahead of the pack. The neat thing is that I think he can work with all the lesser candidates, Jeb excepted.
Jeb is a flippin’ joke to us, but he’s the moneyed RINO’s pet and right now is the biggest electoral challenge conservatives face for 2016. We need to make him small. He’s wrong on domestic issues, and has zilch to say on foreign policy (as has Walker). But my sense is that Walker is not afraid of a fight, will re-militarize our military, and Bush fails me there. We need Walker to pull way ahead. send money! I am.
No one can win if we don’t all rally around him and PUSH. That means, if our enemies (yes, enemies, as the Leftists sure as hell are) start yawping and baying that a good American candidate has made some less than felicitous comment, we should stand with the guy and not panic and throw him overboard.
Neo:
Unfortunately, you make some very good arguments why it’s more difficult to get past the MSM Wall now than during Reagan’s presidency, for example:
…[the press] hadn’t developed and coordinated their attacks quite the way they have developed them today.
This occurred to me as I typed my comment, how rabidly partisan and brazenly mendacious the MSM has become, and how much better they’ve gotten at the swarm-blitz assault, strafing an isolated target at once from all directions–followed, if necessary, by a long-term siege of daily sniping and defamation.
As you say, the Gramscian-tainted leftist institutions have “prepped” the population to be more inclined to accept collectivism and less devoted to individual freedom. I can only hope that this degradation, combined with increasing dependence on government, has not already pushed us beyond the point where it might still be possible to downsize government and increase liberty.
Despite all the above, there now exist ways to go around the MSN Wall that weren’t available in the 80s: talk radio, the internet, Fox news and other conservative outlets. The Republican party has tools to work with. It seems clear to me that we’re in a titanic struggle to determine the fate of the country and that serious groundwork must be done well in advance of any showdown with the left (eg a government “shutdown”), to make the case to the people and counter MSM propaganda.
I think it’s obvious that massive information campaigns are the only hope the Republicans have of countering the MSM Wall and thereby slowing or reversing the advance of leftist statism. Yet they’ve done little or none of this that I know of.
Is it just stupidity or is there some other explanation for this failure to seriously engage the left and combat the alarmingly destructive statist push by Obama and the Democrats?
Reagan had the advantage of an inner circle who had been with him since before he ran for governor. They were also older when Reagan ran in 1980, and Washington didn’t impress them much and they weren’t trying to impress anybody. I doubt any of them were concerned about their next job or their reputations as political consultants. It was always all about Reagan and his message. Today’s conservative candidates don’t have this luxury and are generally poorly served by their consultants.
Reagan also had a clear direct message — one he had been refining since the 1950s. And he not only knew how to deliver a line, he believed what he delivered.
While the press has always listed left it has gotten much worse over the years to the point they are now virtually indistinguishable from Democrat party flacks.
There also used to be some countervailing influences. While reporters have always mostly been on the left many publishers were not. Outside the Northeast NYT/WaPo axis newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and LA Times used to have conservative, Republican editorial pages. The original publishers were self-made men who came of age when there was more competition with several newspapers in each city and they had an appreciation for the free enterprise system.
Now the same newspapers are all local monopolies and they are run by 3d and 4th generation descendants who live off inherited wealth, never had to work a real job in their lives so they are guilt-ridden liberals.
The 100,000 quote is completely unexceptional, it just means he can stand up to the native Bolsheviks in America, so he can stand up to the foreign monsters as well.
It is in fact based on what Reagan did. He fired the PATCO air traffic controllers, thereby frightening Gorbachev.
A correction:
Firing PATCO frightened the politburo, Gorby wasn’t in power yet.
FOAF – it can’t be all about the newspapers. we have cable news, radio, talk shows and internet.
UCLAs Tim Groseclose demonstrates that the empirical evidence shows that were there no media bias, Democrats would have 9% less help. And that the nation would “vote” more like Texas or Tennessee.
Think of that – even if only half accurate, not Dem since Reagan would have been elected president.
At minimum, we need a Republican candidate willing, and able, to talk past the media, directly to the people.
Walker has done just that. He doesn’t have Reagan’s lengthy experience; few people do. (There’s a reason he was one of our oldest Presidents. It takes a lifetime to accumulate the kind of experience he had.) But in his USA Today editorial this week, he made it bluntly clear — he cares about the priorities of the American people, and he DOESN’T care about the priorities of the media.
Charisma would be nice. Reagan had both leadership AND charisma. but if we have to choose, let’s take leadership. We have charisma without leadership right now, and it ain’t pretty.
Unfortunately, Walker may just have provided the sound-bite that will ruin his chances.
So that’s how the European propaganda machine chooses to react to US politics with. It remains to be seen whether the Left’s gambit will work on that issue.
Not just the view of the “European proganda machine”, Jim Geraghty at NRO thought it an “awful answer”:
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.
Second, it is insulting to the protesters, a group I take no pleasure in defending. The protesters in Wisconsin, so furiously angry over Walker’s reforms and disruptive to the procedures of passing laws, earned plenty of legitimate criticism. But they’re not ISIS. They’re not beheading innocent people. They’re Americans, and as much as we may find their ideas, worldview, and perspective spectacularly wrongheaded, they don’t deserve to be compared to murderous terrorists.
Jim Geraghty
Is he who you need to listen for to get an update on American politics?
A far cry from having your own judgment in things, isn’t it.