The amazing Scott Walker.

• Author: Lueders, Bill
• Position: Essay

I let Scott Walker get away with A it. Not just this one time but as a rule. He is a master of obfuscation and 1, as a member of the press, was unwilling to be too impolite.

My question to Wisconsin's Republican governor, asked at a press conference on February 24, 2011, was about the transparently phony call he had unwittingly taken from a prankster pretending to be billionaire benefactor David Koch, during the height of protests over Walker's plan to kneecap the state's public employee unions.

The call by blogger Ian Murphy, an occasional contributor to The Progressive, became huge news, mainly because of Walker's admission that "we thought about" planting troublemakers among protesters, as the caller had suggested.

Walker had also agreed with the caller's characterization of then-Obama adviser David Axelrod as "a son of a bitch" ("No kidding, huh?" Walker had replied) and took no issue when urged to "crush these bastards," meaning protesters. I quoted these words to the governor, asking if he was wrong to have gone along.

He ignored my question and instead gave a canned response to one I hadn't asked, about planting troublemakers: "We acknowledged that some had brought that up but we didn't think that was a good idea." (Actually, he told the caller "the only problem" with this suggestion was that the resulting "ruckus" might raise the pressure on him to compromise.)

I criticized Walker for not answering my question, in a piece I wrote for Isthmus, the weekly newspaper where I worked at the time. But in the crowded conference room, with the chants of thousands of protesters audible through the closed doors, I let him spew his spin.

Perhaps I should have insisted on an answer until I was dragged from the room, shouting, like Al Pacino in And Justice for All. But I doubt even that would have knocked Walker off-message.

By the end of 2011, when I interviewed Walker (then as a reporter with the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism), he had a new take on the Koch call. "It was stupid," he told me. "Just the fact that I was duped ... that I would go off and talk about stuff like that, yeah, it was stupid."

How smart was it for Scott Walker to portray himself as stupid? So smart that he applied the same spin to his account of the episode in his 2013 book, Unintimidated: A Governor's Story anda Nation's Challenge. Here he claimed to have announced at his first press conference after news of the fake call surfaced "that it was stupid." This is a complete fabrication; he never said any such thing, as the video of the event attests.

Walker, in his book, portrayed the episode as a gift from God, meant to teach him a lesson. He says he left the press conference in a funk, opened a devotional book, and came across a message about "the power of humility." Relates Walker, "I looked up and said, T hear you, Lord.' "

Let's review: Walker takes an experience in which he appears foolish, gullible, and vile, and refashions it into a political asset, a badge of honor to shore up his presidential ambitions. He is not so much a spin doctor as an alchemist, turning excrement to gold. It is a quality that greatly enhances his prospects for winning the GOP nomination, and possibly the Presidency.

Some things that are commonly said about Scott Walker need to be said here. He comes across as a likeable guy. When you talk to him, he listens intently. He smiles and laughs at the right moments. He doesn't lose his cool. His friends shower him with praise.

"He's a man of faith, but he doesn't wear it on his sleeve," Brian Fraley, a conservative consultant who's known Walker for many years, told me in 2011. "He's nonjudgmental and doesn't hold anger or grudges. He was raised right."

Walker, forty-seven, is the son of a Baptist minister father and bookkeeper mother. He touts his frugality, symbolized by his brown-bag lunches of ham-and-cheese sandwiches. His stamina is as boundless as his ambition. He rises early and works late. An analysis of his work calendar in 2011 showed he averaged about sixty hours a week.

But mostly, Scott Walker is an amazing politician, able to deftly sidestep questions and dissemble with apparent conviction. Even some of his foes recognize he has what it takes to become President--but, arguably, nothing you'd want in a person holding that office.

Walker sees his life in grandiose terms. Consider his account of visiting Ronald Reagan's presidential library near Los Angeles in 2012 and being presented with the family Bible. He later told an aww-ing audience, "And they brought over a pair of white gloves to me and they said, 'No one has touched this since President Reagan. It is his mother's Bible that he took the oath of office on. Mrs. Reagan would like you to hold it and take a picture with it.' "

As The Progressive reported in March, the museum's curator stated in an e-mail that Walker had asked to...