Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, who has previously declined to have stances on birthright citizenship, evolution, whether being gay is a choice, and whether he would meet with Black Lives Matter organizers, discussed the philosophical underpinnings of his political apathy when announcing that he has no opinion on the migrant crisis in Europe.
ABC News asked Walker how he would respond to the massive influx of refugees from Syria if he were president today. He explained that the query was flawed. As he is obviously not president, Walker argued, there is no way that he would be able to answer that question. “I’m not president today and I can’t be president today,” he said. “Everybody wants to talk about hypotheticals; there is no such thing as a hypothetical” — a sentence that probably would have moved Socrates to set Walker’s pants on fire himself.
Walker has avoided answering questions with similar evasions before — although “I’m not president, so I can’t answer that” is the closest he has come to finding the secret cheat code that will allow him to advance to the convention without having to provide much insight into how he might deal with the types of difficult decisions a president has to make.
When asked if he would have done the same thing as Obama during the auto crisis in May, he replied, “That’s a hypothetical question in the past. We’re going to talk about the future” — logic that sounds similar to Colonel Sandurz’s statement in Spaceballs that “we passed then” and “everything that happens now is happening now.”
Walker does not only decline to answer questions that require flights of fancy that send him to dreams within dreams where he is and has always been president; the presidential candidate also refuses to answer questions that do not follow Scott Walker’s Book of Political Manners. In February, when asked about ISIS after a speech on trade in London, he said, “I don’t think it’s polite to respond on policy in the United States when you’re in a foreign country. That’s certainly something I’ll answer in the future.”
During his interview with ABC News on Monday, Walker was much happier to talk about the Islamic State — in fact, he declared it the antidote to the impasse he and the reporter had reached after his answer broke through the space-time continuum, sending them to a place where Walker might be president and hypotheticals could once again be answered.
“I’m talking about what I would do as president, that’ll be a year and a half from now.” He hypothesized that he will “take on ISIS as president.”
