http://www.nationalreview.com/node/423725/print Scott Walker: What Went Wrong?
And how he can he make it right.
By Rich Lowry & Eliana Johnson — September 8, 2015
In January, when Scott Walker gave a speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit that shot him to the top of the polls, he was pushing at an open door. There was so much goodwill for him among conservatives that a merely creditable performance would probably have created a surge of support — and it did. On the strength of one good-but-not-great speech, he instantly became the hottest thing in Republican politics.
Fans of Donald Trump like to say of their man, “He fights,” and if there was one thing conservatives knew about Scott Walker, it was that he had fought and won.
Walker’s victorious battle with Wisconsin’s public-sector unions, which at one point had Democratic legislators fleeing to a motel in neighboring Illinois to prevent a vote on his reform bill, and which famously precipitated mass protests and a failed recall, was the most high-profile conservative political and policy success of the Obama era.
Walker entered the presidential campaign with that notch in his belt, and without the obvious liabilities of other highly touted candidates. Marco Rubio had badly hurt himself on immigration; Jeb Bush hadn’t run for office in more than a decade and had work to do to win over skeptical conservatives; Ted Cruz faced doubts about his electability.
Such was Walker’s strength that on the eve of the first Republican debate, even after he had hurt himself with a series of miscues in preceding months, a Gallup survey found that just 7 percent of GOP voters had an unfavorable view of him.
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