Scott Walker is traveling the state, granting New Year interviews in advance of his State of the State speech and laying the ground work for another run for governor. This, in itself, is not surprising or unusual. However, what does stand out is that Walker is only granting interviews only to TV reporters and is passing on any interviews with the reporters from newspapers.
The reason for this is pretty clear. With TV reporters, they don't have the time to fact check anything he says and he is able to get away with his lies, hypocrisy and false spin.
For example, on January 8th, Walker did an interview with Alex Hagan of WGBA:
In this interview, Walker blamed the failure of his presidential bid on the national media and Donald Trump:
Walker hasn't been very outspoken about his campaign since he suspended it, but now he says he's moving past that point and looking towards a possible third term as governor.
Governor Scott Walker says nothing has changed since suspending his campaign in September.
“There just wasn't a pathway to reach the nomination.”
Walker blames his drop out to the obsession over Donald Trump and not paying attention to the real issues.
“Nationally not the local media here in Wisconsin, but nationally the media was consumed with Donald Trump."
The gentle reader should note that there were no follow up questions, such as about his multiple gaffes, his spending money like a drunken Republican lobbyist or that Wisconsin is failing under his leadership.
Nor were there any follow up questions in the interview he gave just the day before with Charles Benson of WTMJ when Walker made the most outrageous excuse yet:
Benson: Do you think Trump's surge doomed your campaign?
Walker: Oh there's so many different factors when you look at a campaign, the bottom line is we didn't see a pathway to the nomination.
Walker: One of the retrospective things is I would advise anyone who is a Governor to know to run for president at the same time they are governor because - I short-changed my campaign. There are things I needed to do to be a better candidate for President that was able to do because of attention and focus on being the governor
Benson: Some might say you short-changed being governor?
Walker: They may say that but they give no example of it.
Benson: The poll numbers might suggest they didn't like you were spending that much time doing it.
Walker: Yeah but I say - our opponent, they said it, but they couldn't give an example of anything.
Did you get that? Walker says his presidential bid failed because he spent too much time being the governor.
But just how much time did he spend governing instead of campaigning? Not a helluva lot:
Gov. Scott Walker spent an average of less than one hour per day doing state business during his short-lived presidential campaign, according to records released to FOX6 News.
Over his 71-day campaign, Walker's official monthly calendars include 57 hours of state business, or an average of 48 minutes per day. Many days, the governor's only Wisconsin-related agenda item was a brief morning teleconference with his staff.
Walker's office released the records to news outlets late Friday afternoon, when few people would be paying attention to them.
In contrast, Walker blocked off 809 hours over the same time period for other purposes, an average of 11 hours and 24 minutes per day. The calendars note it as "hold time" -- often from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. during the presidential campaign.
Walker's office didn't provide details on the governor's schedule during those times, although the times matched up with the governor's campaign schedule.
The report goes on to say that Walker's time governing went from 48 minutes a day to about five hours a day when after dropped out of the race. Not that you could prove it by anyone in Wisconsin.
But I don't know what is more astounding and scary - that Walker is starting to hint at running for a third term or that there are people foolish enough to support him.
