Walker-Talker

David Farenthold’s piece in today’s Washington Post (Click here.) wonders what happened that Scott Walker – “the [Marquette] campus’s suit-wearing, Reagan-loving politico – who enjoyed the place so much that he had run for student body president” – what happened that that guy “had left without graduating. To most of the Class of 1990 – and later, to Wisconsin’s political establishment – Walker’s decision to quit college has been a lingering mystery.”
       Farenthold investigates; but if he sets out to solve the mystery, he doesn’t succeed. Nor should he.  Walker’s political legacy at Marquette is a matter of record. As a freshman he was elected to the student senate. He also ran for a higher student government office that same year and lost to a write-in candidate. Undeterred, as a sophomore he ran for student government president and lost again.
       His academic record is also a matter of record.After four years at Marquette, he was still a year’s worth of credits short of graduating.
       But no one really knows why he left, perhaps Walker least of all.

I’ve always thought Scott Walker was a pinhead and now I know how much he thrashed about

Walker talking.

academically – at Marquette, which lists among 

its most famous alumni, another noted pinhead, Joe McCarthy[1] - I’m convinced of it. So, as Farenthold’s article points out, he was interested in other things; so was I – far more important 

than campus politics, not to mention sweeter smelling (for the most part); but I graduated,

from a school with a somewhat better academic reputation than Marquette, and I’m hardly the sharpest knife in the drawer.[2] College is just 

not that hard if you can read and write when you get there – and know your times tables.
       But acucapution aside, does Walker, “a spokeswoman for [whose] political committee declined to comment” for Farenthold, owe any 

of us an explanation? I don’t see it. I’m not revealing what or who smelled sweeter than academic success to me. Nor would I be, if I 

were a candidate.  It’s not so much the embarrassment – not to me but to who (especially considering the what). What is the relevance?
       What we do in our late teens and early twenties is of no weight, if we weren’t a child prodigy or tried as an adult.[3]  It doesn’t explain us, even if we – by some odd stretch of imagination or reason and the truth – can explain it. I’m not even sure, looking at my own crooked career path, I’m interested in what a political candidate in his fifties did in his thirties (or hers).[4]
       On the other hand, given Walker’s experience – what we know of it – at Marquette, we may begin to understand his wanting to defund the University of Wisconsin – that is, to piss off its smart-ass alumni; because it is the smart-asses that will be particularly offended.
       And in the dish best served cold, the odor of others’ offense is the sweetest smell of success.

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[1] But also, in an entirely other head category, Chris Farley, who was leaving just as Walker was arriving.
[2] Farenthold, incidentally, is another matter – a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, a school with a somewhat better academic reputation than mine.
[3] Or a figure skater or a gymnast, in which case we’ll likely do nothing of weight again.
[4] And I mean this to be read either way: “I don’t care what a political candidate in her fifties did in her thirties.”  Or, “I’m not interested in what a political candidate in his fifties did in her thirties.”