David Freddoso's take:
He’s the loser of the straw poll but the big winner of CPAC. Walker finished four points behind after attendees enthusiastically received his speech (even though it was only so-so), and buzzed about the brutal, unfair treatment he had lately received from liberal media outlets.
The "If they're going after him that aggressively this early, they must think he's our biggest threat" dynamic.
During CPAC, Walker was tendentiously hammered for making a point about his personal fortitude (it was construed as a comparison of his critics in Wisconsin to ISIS)....
Red meat to the CPAC faithful, certainly, although something the media will use to try to make him poison to independents later in the campaign.
....and falsely accused of going easy on rapists on college campuses.
The obligatory "War On Women" swipe. Which is kind of funny, given their taking such grave offense at being compared to ISIS.
A quiet formal effort to turn out Walker supporters apparently did exist at CPAC 2015, but you wouldn’thave known it. It was so stealthy that it is very hard to think it was solely responsible for the result. Not a single Walker 2016 sticker could be seen (even Cruz and Carson had stickers everywhere); not a single Walker t-shirt was on display; no throngs of identifiable Walker footsoldiers roamed the halls or showed up just in time to pack the hall for his speech (as they did for both Paul and Jeb).
Which, either unintentionally or very slyly, illustrates the genuine appeal and support Governor Walker enjoys. Or, put another way, he really is the GOP front-runner.
Simply put, there are many conservatives who do not want to nominate another Bush and are at least somewhat wary of Paul’s foreign policy views. For them, Walker seems like the most obvious choice.
Might I make another suggestion? They recognize not only that Scott Walker is a fighter and a "true conservative" and an inspiring hybrid of Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan, but they also recognize that he is the most electable Republican in the 2016 field. There is no way on God's green Earth that any freshman senator will ever be elected president again any time soon, so that eliminates Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. Other Republican governors are far more problematic, as Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is too wonky (and the media would use his "non-whiteness" to racistly flambe him) and Chris Christie of New Jersey has the "RINO" label to fight on his right and the "scary" label to fight on his left, in addition to the unfortunate timing of his re-election having come a year prior to Governor Walker's as well as it having come from tacking left rather than overcoming multiple leftwing smear attempts without compromising ideologically. And, let's be brutally honest about this: Is there any chance at all that the American electorate would even consider for a femtosecond electing a third Bush in a single generation?
When you figure in the changes that have been made to the GOP presidential nominating process to discourage earlier and earlier primary/caucus "front-loading" that has usually enabled the "establishment's" annointed candidate to clinch the nomination within days of the Super Bowl - a definite blow to Bush III that could be the more formalized equivalent of "I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!"....
....there may be no stopping Governor Walker's momentum. Which grows, let us never forget, from the widespread recognition of the unparalleled peril in which We, The People, find ourselves under the Obama Tyranny, and from the equally widespread realization that moderate "establishment" candidates are not more "electable" and have won the popular vote exactly once since 1988 - that being Bush43's re-election in 2004 - and that was only with 51% of the vote. If we're going to go down, we want to go down with our best, not yet another mushy compromiser festooned with such obvious, easily exploitable vulnerabilities.
And who knows? If we do go with our best, he might just win. And isn't that the name of the game?
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