The experiment in seeing if Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker could be elected president, which began with energetic music and a decorated hall packed with supporters waving signs is over after only about 70 days. Walker held its eulogy in the sort of dismal hotel meeting room you see at conventions for dental certification in a new kind of gum gauze.  The latest polls showed Walker, who many had once thought would be one of the last two candidates vying for the nomination next winter, at 0% – a statistical nullity that some networks chose to render merely an asterisk. And Walker’s final message to his supporters (estimates suggest there were as many as 10) was a self-serving and muddled one, showing every indication that he never comprehended the Republican Party primary’s new show-biz reality.  But that final moment, in which he could have said anything he wanted, was as bereft of ideas as the campaign necessitating it. Walker began by citing Ronald Reagan’s optimism, ignoring that Reagan campaigned on optimism after the deserved negativity of the nation after Nixon’s resignation and the Church Committee. (Ignore, too, that Reagan campaigned on a rejection of Jimmy Carter’s call for the embrace of the values of work, anti-materialism and sacrifice, offering Americans instead a buy-now/pay-never consumptive celebration that a generation of Boomers embraced the moment they had to pay the bills for a safety net their parents built and for which everyone else has been paying for 35 years and counting. That’s Scott Walker’s lodestar.)  Then Walker announced that he was quitting for the good of the party and to spite Donald Trump, who pantsed him in front of America.  Walker encouraged other candidates to do the same, “so that voters can focus on a limited number of candidates who can offer a positive, conservative alternative to the current frontrunner”.  That’s it. That’s the big idea behind Walker’s sacrifice: beat Donald Trump.  Related: Scott Walker shocks Republicans with dropout call to gang up on Donald Trump  Afterwards, on MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes, former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele kindly speculated that Walker might also have been throwing a bone to his fellow Wisconsinite and current Chairman Reince Priebus, who wants to winnow the primary field. It’s perhaps more likely that Walker might have resigned to avoid the humiliation that his polling would kick him down to the kiddie-table in the next debate or see him barred from participation entirely.  Either way, the remaining candidates are free to divvy up his 0% of voters and, more importantly, his Rolodex of Koch Industries-approved donors, whose money he just wasted.  Walker, however, may never have been the man for the nomination – let alone the presidency – anyway. His potential candidacy’s momentum began with a speech at the Iowa Freedom Caucus this January that many columnists and pundits described as “fiery” because Walker – a man who, to steal a phrase from Albert Burneko, is essentially wet bread – indicated emotions stronger than gee-whiz optimism for America or performative empathy for the struggling folks whose lives he labored to make more difficult.  Then at CPAC last February, Walker rode the high of potential frontrunner status and bragged that he’d shown that, as president, he could take on Isis because he’d taken on 100,000 pro-union protesters in Wisconsin and won. It was the sort of absurd analogy that conservative candidates make all the time, then commit to long enough that critics stop debunking it and voters acclaim either by rote or by faith. But when the criticism came down like a hammer, the Walker campaign walked it back, losing the message and the effect. It was a mistake the campaign had and would continue to make. (Donald Trump does not make such mistakes.)  Walker’s original appeal was as someone who sits to the right of Jeb Bush, who many conservatives consider a “moderate” technocrat squish who has an unseemly tolerance for national education standards and non-white immigrants. Not only would Walker be seen as electable – after winning an election, a recall and a reelection campaign in purple-state Wisconsin – but he would also represent a “real” conservative alternative to Bush. It was good logic, as long as Bush was the favorite.  But Bush wasn’t. It’s been a downhill ride for Walker ever since.  Instead of Walker gnawing at Bush’s ankles, Donald Trump showed up and, wherever the polls and Trump’s ambitions ultimately take him, he is the dark heart of the Republican Party. Trump’s quasi-fictional, aggressive and unalloyed nativism and misogyny immediately shoved the rest of the Republican candidates to the left, co-opting the “real” conservative mantle while offering a peerless non-career-politician pedigree. Trump didn’t just eat Walker’s lunch, he took the Saran wrap from Walker’s sandwich and suffocated him with it.  Related: Scott Walker's withdrawal from White House race shows money isn't everything  Walker got boxed out of his own electoral niche and was left trying to make absurd claims, like the fact that he was somehow not a career politician despite drawing a public-office paycheck for the last 22 years. His campaign was a hilarious shambles. He at one point suggested a border fence with Canada. He was for birthright citizenship after he was against it, which was presumably after he had no opinion on it. He was against ethanol subsidies until he had to passionately make out with corn stalks in front of dubious-looking Iowa farm voters. He knew basically nothing about foreign policy, but pathologically incorrect blood-cheerleader Bill Kristol thought he was making strides. (Less than a month ago, Kristol even thought Walker was making a comeback.) And then Walker faded so fully into the background in two Republican debates that he appeared to have fewer dimensions than textured wallpaper.  Even without Trump, a Republican primary might not have been the contest for him. What Walker does well is politicking: he likes shaking hands and talking one-on-one, moving from party and assembly to more of the same, promising and omitting on a case-by-case basis. He’s good at the small stuff in a state evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, the rural/exurban and the urban. When he’s the only Republican and only needs to win over a few independents, his schtick works: winking to his base while lying to everyone else about how he won’t do what his base wants.  That schtick doesn’t work in a national Republican primary. Walker couldn’t smarm his way toward the center to peel off votes while winking back over his shoulder at a dedicated base. At every step of the primary process, he had to endanger his general election chances in a party already demographically at risk among minority and women voters by pandering harder and louder to conservatives. That requires policy, which he didn’t have. After 70 days of an official campaign and nine months of an unofficial one, God help you if you know what Scott Walker cared about besides crushing unions, hating taxes, liking fetuses and wanting to eat part of Ronald Reagan to become him.  It’s tempting to think that the end of his national campaign is the end of Scott Walker, but the scum also rises. Why should a intellectually bankrupt candidate stop trending upward now? After a beating like this, most people would consider retiring to a private life, but Scott Walker has spent less time in the private sector than most of us have spent in a single bad relationship, and he’s probably as determined as we would be to avoid that unfortunate coupling again. There’s no danger that he’ll have to find an actual job. If we’re lucky, we’ll see him marry his “moist-faced, balding dad-in-a-dress-shirt” appeal with his love of Harley-riding into the first partnered ad campaign for SuperCuts, Sears and Viagra.  More likely, he’ll continue his oleaginous slide into a six-figure sinecure at a place like the Heritage Foundation, where regular-Joe conservatives punting $35 donations to “stop Obamacare” can fund his farting out four blog posts per month. Post One: Reagan is good. Post Two: Unions are bad. Post Three: Fetuses are good. Post Four: Taxes are bad.  Given enough years and enough funding, Scott Walker might have a fifth idea – just in time for 2020.
The Wisconsin governor’s smarm couldn’t overcome his intellectual bankruptcy this time. But with a well-paid sinecure to pad his fall, he could be back in 2020