I Made Rick Perry’s 2012 Campaign Look Competent: The Scott Walker Story

Scott Walker announced an EXCITING NEW PLAN to once again vault him ahead of George Pataki in the polls:

It’s been a thrilling—and harrowing—roller coaster ride for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

First, the Republican presidential candidate suddenly rose and broke from the pack with a well-received speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit in January, where he repeatedly brought the crowd to its feet with thunderous applause. Almost immediately afterward, support for Walker surged. Iowa polls conducted during late spring and early summer showed him with almost enough support to potentially win the state’s Feb. 1 first-in-the-nation caucuses amid an unusually crowded field.

But then came Donald Trump, whose June 16 entry into the race blindsided his GOP rivals, perhaps none more so than Walker. Suddenly Walker was hurling down the ride, faster and faster, seemingly to the bottom. In a span of two months, the Wisconsin governor has gone from leading the Iowa race with 18 percent support in a Qunnipiac University survey released July 1, to just 3 percent support in the polling organization’s Sept. 11 tally.

Whether there’s another climb up the tracks isn’t likely to be known for weeks or months, as Walker deploys a new strategy that places virtually all his chips on Iowa.

The signs of his precipitous fall were all too vivid Sunday afternoon inside Serena’s Coffee Café in Amana, Iowa, where about 40 stoic supporters showed up for his first retail campaign event in the state since Wednesday’s debate.

And don’t kid yourself, he’s committed to seeing it through:

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has concluded he no longer has a path to the Republican presidential nomination and plans to drop out of the 2016 campaign, according to three Republicans familiar with his decision, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Mr. Walker called a news conference in Madison at 6 p.m. Eastern time.

“The short answer is money,” said a supporter of Mr. Walker’s who was briefed on the decision. “He’s made a decision not to limp into Iowa.”

The supporter said Mr. Walker’s fund-raising had dried up after his decline in the polls and that campaign officials did not feel they could risk going into debt with the race so uncertain. The governor, who was scheduled to be in New York and Washington this week, partly to raise money, had built up an expansive staff, bringing on aides and consultants detailed to everything from Christian conservative outreach to Super Tuesday states. But his fund-raising did not keep pace with the money needed to sustain such an infrastructure.

Mr. Walker’s intended withdrawal is a humiliating climb down for a Republican governor once seen as all but politically invincible. He started the year at the top of the polls but has seen his position gradually deteriorate, amid the rise of Donald J. Trump’s populist campaign and repeated missteps by Mr. Walker himself.

When the Bad Campaigns Hall of Fame goes up, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin goes in on the first ballot with Perry and Phil Gramm.
…Alec MacGillis was prescient.