The cult of Reagan is alive and well. Here’s Scott Walker with a delightful(but untrue) anecdote about the departed president:
He described being invited by Nancy Reagan to give a speech at the Reagan Library near Los Angeles in November 2012, five months after he won a recall election that stemmed from his successful effort to curtail the union rights of public employees in his state. Walker said he met with Nancy Reagan before the speech and told her that he had won the recall on the eighth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s death.
Walker went on to describe how, during a tour of the library before the speech, the library curator “unbeknownst to me” had taken the Reagan family Bible out of its display and readied it for him to look at.
“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’,” Walker said in a YouTube video of part of the speech posted by a reporter for the liberal magazine The Progressive.
Audience members can be heard gasping, then applauding as Walker tells the story.
Walker, 47, frequently notes that his wedding anniversary and Reagan’s birthday fall on the same date.
Blah blah Reagan blah Reagan Reagan. It’s nothing short of creepy, the way they fetishize the old boob and his stuff. What is it, the fucking shroud of Turin to these rubes? Scott Walker and his handlers are very clever, playing on the atavistic tendencies of your average dumb Republican voter. So far, he has avoided controversy by steering clear of the crazy talk that a Ben Carson trucks in. No one consequential blinked an eye when he flipped on ethanol subsidies, because Walker is aware that he needs the rural sucker to build his base. And now, here he is, genuflecting to the demigods of the movement. These sad-sacks will in all likelihood not notice that Walker is lying to them; they will hold that Reagan story close to their hearts, because the “liberal media” are the real liars.
But I’m not going to worry about Scott Walker. It goes one of two ways; he implodes by saying something loony or stupid, or he gets the nomination and receives a shellacking in 2016. Walker’s ultimate weakness is that he is boring. He can claim the right to Reagan’s legacy all he wants, but that won’t bridge what I’m certain will be an enthusiasm gap when it all shakes out.