Sympathy for Scott Walker

Call me crazy, but I'm beginning to wonder if Walker isn't a candidate more sinned against than sinning. Only problem is, it's his supporters that are doing the heavy lifting against him.

First it was the ridiculous spectacle of the Scott for Gov blog.

Then it was the Jim Klauser open letter asking opponent Mark Neumann to return campaign contributions because of a perceived negative campaign against Walker. Mr. Klauser, I'm sorry that I wasn't around for your Thompson glory days, I was foolish enough to move to Wisconsin right before we embarked on Doyle train to nowhere, but the fact that you were for Neumann before you were against him makes you less than a credible source. Your letter strikes me as little more than a stunt and reflects poorly on you, and more to the point, on your now preferred candidate, Scott Walker. If you really want to see Walker elected, I suggest you stop making public statements in support of him.

Now it's the campaign against liberal blogger Capper. A campaign that has escaped the blogosphere and spilled over in to the real world.

Capper's got an anti-Walker fixation that comes perilously close to "he doth protest too much," and the best the Walker supporters can muster is sending the DA to confiscate the computer from his workplace at the county to make sure he wasn't blogging on county time?

I'm no forensic blog-ologist, but I sure hope the gang at CRG has some more evidence than a few time-stamped posts. You see, the magic of the google actually allows one to type those words at one point in time and schedule them for publication at a specified point in time in the future.

The fact of the matter is that if you have to resort to having the civil magistrate confiscate the computer of your rhetorical opponents, you have already lost. Can't the Walker camp come up with some smart folks to simply counter the pronouncements that Capper makes on his blog? Just read it for a while and it shouldn't be all that hard. Even I could, and I couldn't figure out that Capper and Chris Liebenthal were the same guy.

To make matters worse, some of Walker's supporters took to commenting on blog posts. Memo to arod: When it comes to snark + law you are not going to beat Tom Foley. I doubt that Sun Tzu ever had a blog, but if he did, he would have advised that by engaging your opponent via comments you have ceded the high ground and have brought defeat upon yourself.

If I had Walker's ear, and it's clear that I don't, I'd tell him that if he had any pull with these various folks that he should tell them to cool it. Otherwise, he should distance himself as quickly as possible and focus on an effort to campaign in a positive way.