In a bid to impress Republican primary voters (a scheme that appears to have worked), Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker went full-on nativist earlier this year and came out against not just immigration reform but also legal immigration.
With a pitch that erred on the side of "they took your jobs," Walker made it clear he believes we're allowing far too many people into the country both legally and illegally.
Given that, it came as a bit of a surprise last week when Stephen Moore, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, quoted Walker for saying "I’m not going nativist, I’m pro-immigration."
Governor Walker's aides contacted the New York Times the following day to set the record straight and confirm that Walker is a nativist and, by Friday, Moore also walked back his story.
Mr. Walker’s advisers contacted Mr. Moore about his comments in The Times article that afternoon, one of them said the following day. Walker aides were also apparently receiving inquiries from the conservative Breitbart News website, which on Friday night posted an article in which Mr. Moore recanted his account of the conversation with Mr. Walker.
But it was not until Sunday afternoon that Mr. Moore emailed this reporter to say he had “miscommunicated something to you in our interview.”
The truth, I suspect, is that Walker revealed the position he will take in the general election; not the position he currently holds for the purposes of winning primaries.
Fellow nativists and puritans on the right must suspect the same as well.
In any event, it's amusing to me that Walker's campaign was forced to go on the record and confirm his current stance. This is even more valuable to Walker's opponents than his original comments because now we have a record of his campaign solidifying those comments with a correction.
I suppose we should thank the crack team at Breitbart dot com for digging the party's grave.