"The narrative is we have a chance to elect the first woman as president of the United States, something I think we should have done a long time ago."

"I just don’t think it should be Hillary Clinton. There’s a lot of other women I can think of in the Republican Party who would be a much better alternative to that and some day will be. But if it’s a narrative like that, I think we run into trouble. If we shift the narrative, and I think, Hillary Clinton, you even saw with this story, with her book tour, the statements about her and Bill being broke when they came out of the White House. …You see the size of the fees she’s asking universities and colleges to pay, when you look at some of the other things, when she talks about not having driven a car in all those years, I get why that’s true, but it’s why I like to get on my Harley Davidson… every once in a while to drive myself and not have someone else do it for me. I just think those are all things that penetrate this out of touch persona. And to me to win I think the argument has got to be change it from a narrative of two personalities to Hillary Clinton represents Washington."

Said Scott Walker, on the important question of how the GOP candidate plans — or is willing to say he plans — to defeat the presumptive Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.

This quote comes from the same event where Walker refused to comment on the secret contents of Barack Obama's heart after Rudy Giuliani proclaimed that Obama doesn't "love America." The event — I'm just seeing this now — was supposedly intended to be off the record, but — per Politico — "that request wasn’t made to POLITICO and other reporters attending the dinner until after he’d already begun speaking."

Obviously, the candidates have to assume that anything said at a sizable event like this — a big dinner at the 21 Club — will leak out. In fact, the very thing that is most useful to your opponents is likely to come out and get even more attention because you seem to be speaking confidentially to a subgroup in terms suitable only for them. To illustrate my point in the previous sentence, I need only show you the tiniest shorthand: bitter clingers and 47%.

I'm pretty sure Scott Walker knows all that. He was annealed by that prank phone that — as he sees it — was a "stay humble" message from God. You know, some people believe that God is watching and listening to everything you do and say. For them, nothing is ever off the record. I don't know if Scott Walker believes that. Who knows what somebody else really believes? People are also talking about Walker's "I don't know" answer the question whether Obama is a Christian, and his answer is some evidence that he believes religion is what's on the inside of the human mind. I don't know if he really believes that. But I suspect that he's gone to church enough to have heard that Jesus was not impressed by outward appearances of religious belief.

I see I've gone off track. I'm not as doggedly on message as Scott Walker... perhaps because I have no message... and, also unlike Scott Walker, I don't think of myself as a receiver of messages, not from God — Psst, Althouse, please give some subtle assistance to My humble servant, Scott Walker — and not from the human beings in my real-world-Madison-Wisconsin context — Althouse, we will ruin your goddamn career, your comfort, your pocketbook, your sense of safety and wellbeing, and your life....

The subject is, among other things, how Scott Walker will oppose Hillary Clinton, how he will "penetrate this out of touch persona," as he put it, using a verb that's just asking for an attack from feminists who lurk in the alleyways of the internet, waiting for a Republican to utter a phallocratic word.