Scott Walker never stood a chance: Why this awkward, Koch-backed midwesterner was outrageously overrated

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a piece here about a phenomenon I called The Great Whitebread Hope, which is an ongoing Republican establishment fantasy of electing an upper-midwestern “reformer” in the LaFollete tradition who can bring together all the disparate factions of the party and offer up an image of respectable, mature, pragmatic leadership (and incidentally pick up some badly needed electoral votes from somewhere).