Why did Scooter scoot so soon?

Why did Scooter scoot so soon?
by David Benjamin

“I’m going to punt.”
— Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker

PARIS — One night during my service as a weekly newspaper editor in Massachusetts, I was taken intimately aside, in the Town Hall parking lot, by one of the members of the Board of Selectmen. Let’s call him Ward Cleaver.

Ward was a model of clean-cut uprightness and conservative “family values.” He dressed meticulously, bathed regularly, drove a late-model American-made beige sedan, attended Sunday services, voted cautiously and rarely took an uncalculated step in any direction. True to form, he rarely spoke to me, the rumpled nut who ran the local rag. So his overture to me, ‘round midnight in a deserted parking lot, came as a surprise.

Ward told me a heart-rending story about his wayward son, the Beav, who’d gotten in trouble with the local police. Again. The cops had treated the first incident as a slight matter of youthful indiscretion. Because Ward was a Selectman, the Beav’s mistake disappeared from the system. Ward looked into my eyes, conveying the humble gratitude he felt for that indulgence from the Police Chief.

However, the Beav’s second strike occurred on a new Chief’s watch. The kid was being charged, arraigned and sent to court. Here was a small misstep by an impetuous, but otherwise admirable and sterling young Beav that could keep him out of college and wreck his future, not to mention the permanent stain on the Cleavers’ previously immaculate escutcheon. Ward almost wept as he spilled his tale of woe, and I thought, “Yeah. OK. So?”

I had no idea why I’d become Ward’s confessor. He asked for nothing from me. He didn’t want me to write it up. He was just, y’know, venting.

To me. In whom, in the past six years, he’d never confided anything more than “H’lo, How ya doin’?”

It all became clear at the next Selectmen’s meeting. Ward led a faction that engineered the immediate removal of the Police Chief, based on a series of drunken episodes and blunders by members of our smalltown constabulary. As Ward related the new Chief’s malfeasance, I learned — and passed along to my readers — a police record fraught with human frailty and a heavy dose of incompetence. But none of this stuff was criminal, and most of it wasn’t even the new Chief’s fault.

The crook here was Ward, who had spoon-fed me the Beav’s sob story — off the record — in hopes of mitigating the spectacle of four Selectmen railroading a popular Police Chief for personal reasons. But, to Ward’s dismay, I kept my word. The Beav’s juvenile offense (and his betrayal by his father) remained sealed.

Eventually, Ward was one of three Selectmen recalled from the Board by the unsympathetic voters. Ward was sanctioned by a state ethics commission that banned him from ever running for public office in Massachusetts.

I thought of Ward when I heard that my governor, Scott Walker, was dropping out of the presidential race. I thought of these two guys together because they’re birds of a feather. They’re small-time politicians, abjectly and irredeemably.

The defining ethos of the political small-timer is a tunnel-vision faith in the proposition that It’s Not What You Know, It’s Who You Know.

Ward cozied up to me that night in the Town Hall lot because I was suddenly someone to Know. I commanded the town’s most trusted news medium. If I told Ward’s story his way, I could soften the shock of Ward’s vengeful power play against the punk cops who’d busted the Beav.

When I had failed to comply, Ward approached me again, after a tumultuous Selectman’s meeting. He introduced me to someone else he Knew, a local thug who unsubtly threatened me with physical harm. But this was an empty gesture. Ward had sunk so low that he was looking downward for people to Know. A cardinal rule among small-time politicians is that the people you really want to Know are up there. They’re powerful and, best of all, they’re rich.

The rich have ideas, the sort of ideas that — if uttered by a homeless guy in a doorway — prompt us to quicken our step and shake our heads. But a harebrained idea backed by a billion dollars has a magnetism hard to resist, especially among small-time pols. Because they make a practice of cultivating no ideas of their own, small-timers have ample brainspace available to adopt and legitimize the notions of the crackpot rich.

A watershed moment in Scott Walker’s career was when he realized, late in his senior year, that there was nothing to learn at Marquette University, a mecca of ideas. For an ambitious politician — which is what he knew he was — ideas, plans, blueprints and solutions are a total waste of time.

He had to get busy getting to Know the right people. And the right people — when they found him — had an idea for Scooter. It was simple, and hardly new. For eons, rich white businessmen have hated — and sought to destroy by every means possible — one American institution above all others: the labor movement.

When Scooter became their boy, unions became his only idea. Wisconsin is one of the cradles of the union movement. If Scooter could kill unions in Wisconsin — and he has pretty much done so — the sky might well be his limit.

As a presidential contender, the vanquisher of the Wisconsin labor movement seemed to be riding the perfect storm, thanks to the Supreme Court. Its Citizens United decision had revived cronyism to a level not seen in America since the mid-20th century. Thanks to Citizens United, you don’t have to study a lot of issues or speak with any particular flair. You can be as dull as Scott Walker and just keep rising to higher and higher office, buoyed by a handful of plutocrats who can afford to flood television with ads that declare your opponent a wife-beating kitten-torturer with an under-age colored mistress in North Milwaukee.

Scooter entered the race with the favor of the billionaire Koch brothers, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and several of the wealthiest families in Wisconsin. Scooter’s tiny team of tycoons had carte blanche — from Chief Justice Roberts — to buy as many elections as they could notch on their 24-carat pistol grips.

The trouble for Scooter, though, was that the new rules applied to everyone. He was running against a whole bunch of smalltown Selectmen who all had their own sugar daddies and SuperPACs. Worst of all, there’s this billionaire who owes no fealty to any donor or even to the Party. Moreover, like Walker, he’s a bigoted demagogue with no moral center. He’s just as ignorant and bereft of ideas as Scooter. But he’s a consummate showman, a shameless dissembler, a peacock of immense proportions and he’s spending all his own money.

So what if Walker says he doesn’t believe in evolution? Donald Trump will say, “That’s nothin’. I slept with Darwin’s granddaughter and she evolved all over me.”

And that northern border fence? Trump will threaten Canada with nuclear war and claim Ontario as the 51st state.

Who could top that? Not this bunch.

Except for Trump, the venomous spoiler, this primary season is a lot of bad dancing by a small-time corps de ballet, each one stumbling to the tune of the mean white recluses who underwrite an invisible primary that has shrunk Iowa and New Hampshire down to quaint exercises in empty nostalgia.

But even in this motley crew, there’s such a thing as too small, too obvious, too tongue-tied, conniving and selfish. Scott Walker has set the bar — so low that most of his former opponents will have to grease their suits to slither under it.