What Scott Walker's Consultant Debacle Says About the Fight for Iowa

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's hiring of Liz Mair, a respected Republican political strategist and pundit, was problematic from the start. On Monday evening, just hours after CNN reported that she'd joined the team, conservatives and pesky Democrats were asking questions about Mair's punchy tweets. Yes, she'd consulted for Walker during the 2012 recall campaign that effectively defanged Wisconsin's left. She'd also occasionally criticized the importance of the Iowa caucuses, saying they pushed the GOP into unelectable positions.

Mair had consulted for Rick Perry during his star-crossed 2012 campaign, the nadir of which might have been an ad pandering to Iowa conservatives by bemoaning how gays could "serve openly in the military." The scars from that experience showed in January 2015 tweets, when she said that Iowa was "once again embarrassing itself" by gathering presidential candidates at a forum kicked off by jokes about undocumented immigrants, and that "morons across America" did not realize that Iowans "grow up rather government-dependent."