Walker Loses Face and Faith

Poor old Scott Walker is having himself another bad week.

Walker was counting on making a lot of political hay over the next couple of months on the fact that the State had to close off one of the bridges in the zoo interchange. Even though the delays were only five or ten minutes, he were taking good advantage of this opportunity to get his sound bites issued.

Only it wasn't meant to be. The state has announced that the replacement bridge will be ready by Friday morning, only one week after they closed it down. To make matters even worse for Walker, the rest of the project appears to be ahead of schedule as well.

Walker, his campaign staff and the usual right wing echo chamber is very upset indeed about the good news, and are still trying to make a mountain out of this molehill. They claim it was a set up by Jim Doyle and Tom Barrett to make Walker look bad.

To me, it just shows that they have never watched Star Trek. For if they had, they would have remembered one of Scotty's more memorable quotes from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock:

"How much refit time before we can take her out again?"
"Eight week, sir - but you don't have eight weeks, so I'll do it for you in two."
"Mr. Scott, have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?"
"Certainly, sir - how else could I keep up my reputation as a miracle worker?"

- Kirk and Scotty

But Walker's problems didn't end at the bridge. There was a follow up story to Walker's crumbling courthouse in which it was reported that it could take up to five months to fix the cornice of the courthouse. Needless to say, the whole crumbling courthouse affair could have all been avoided if Walker just attended to the job he is getting paid to do, which is not going all over the state campaigning in a race that he has already lost.

Between having a golden opportunity taken away from him and having the courthouse issue falling on him like, well, a chunk of the courthouse, Walker must be feeling quite a bit of strain lately. And like many people under a lot of stress, Walker apparently finds himself in a crisis of faith.

His campaign has been tweeting all day about the new, vamped up look to his website. When I went to check it out, the first things I noticed was that it didn't really look all that different. But there was one major change:


Walker took down the picture of the hand holding a card that read "Believe in Wisconsin Again."

First Walker makes a fool out of himself over what turned out to me a minor and a very temporary traffic problem. Then his own house comes falling down around him due to his refusal to perform his duties as county executive. Now he no longer believes in Wisconsin, which was the whole theme of his campaign.

All of this combined will only help to accelerate his tailspin slide in the polls.