OPINION:
Scott Walker had a very good week. He was the star of the beauty contest at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and the price and proof of his good fortune was the flak he took from the activists and operatives of the left and the magpies of the media. The Wisconsin governor, so the story went, is oblivious of “gender assaults” on campus.
This sounds like a complaint from the English department, that evildoers have been abusing nouns. The magpies actually mean “sexual assaults.” The word “sex,” unlike actual sex, is a no-no in the lexicon of the primly vulgar.
The governor’s imagined crime was that his latest budget for the state of Wisconsin eliminates a requirement that state colleges and universities report the statistics of sexual assaults to the state. Mr. Walker’s budget does indeed make that change, because officials within the University of Wisconsin system asked him to do it. The statistics are already collected and forwarded to the U.S. Department of Education, and posted on the university system’s website. The officials of the university system say that by eliminating an additional and redundant reporting requirement they could save time and money.
The point of the story was to suggest that the governor is soft on crime, on the wrong side in the war on women and is a woman-hater unfit to be the president of the United States. This was a transparent smear, and not a very effective one, lifted from opposition research passed on to the magpies, meant to spoil Mr. Walker’s very good week.
Indeed, Mr. Walker’s appearance at the CPAC pageant was drawing rave reviews. His was the hand that everyone wanted to shake, and his speech had to be moved to a larger venue when news of his approaching appearance rippled through the lounges and coffee shops of the hotel. He finished atop the CPAC presidential straw poll with Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, new, fresh blood for a presidential campaign otherwise shaping up as a last hurrah for old, tired blood.
The smear originated in the Internet blog world, where such fakery thrives, and was picked up by the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast, then by word of mouth into the ears of the eager mainstream press. The smear evaporated when it was exposed to the light, and one of the original purveyors of the smear even retracted it.
The episode should be a caution to everyone, on both the right and the left, as the pop and crackle of small-arms fire becomes the bigger bore cannonading of a presidential campaign. The dirt-diggers in “oppo-research” are always on the scout for rocks to turn over, searching for a promising “factoid” — a word coined by the novelist Norman Mailer to describe something juicy that looks like a fact, smells like a fact, tastes like a fact but is actually not a fact.
Ronald Reagan, dealing with the arms negotiators of the old Soviet Union, famously cited the wisdom of an old Russian proverb to “trust, but verify.” That goes double in politics.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.