Scott Walker's tasteless and thoughtless new TV commercial, in which he dons boxing gloves and promises to come out swinging and keep on punching at Tom Barrett until he knocks his block off (that's not the language but it's the image) has gotten him a heap of publicity -- the kind you don't want, unless you subscribe to the theory that all publicity is good.
The Associated Press, which first pointed out that Walker was threatening to beat up a guy who'd already been beaten up when playing Good Samaritan last summer, Tom Barrett, asked a political science professor for an opinion (who knew it was a science?):
The fighting metaphor is a common one in politics, but the Walker campaign should have thought twice before using it against Barrett, said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Charles Franklin.
"The Walker campaign doesn't have any strategic or tactical reason to want to remind voters of Barrett getting into a fight," Franklin said. "I think maybe their ad agency wasn't quite as sensitive to that possibility as they could have been."
Yeah, it must be that Milwaukee area ad agency that doesn't watch or read the news. (It's Nonbox, where the principal of principals is Bill Eisner, a longtime Republican media guy. They certainly got outside the box on this one.
But passing the buck to Eisner & Company would be exactly how Scott Walker operates every day. He takes responsiblity for nothing, and points fingers in every direction but his own when something goes wrong.
But before blaming some media guy who "wasn't quite as sensitive" as he should have been, there's one pertinent fact that might make it clear where the buck stops on this one:
Scott Walker is the guy who put on the gloves and performed in front of the camera.