You have read the phrase that success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan.

The alternate phrase “circular firing squad” also applies to the postmortems of the late Scott Walker presidential campaign, many of which have centered on Walker’s campaign manager, Rick Wiley.

Wiley fires back in Politico:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker pulled the plug on a bloated campaign that was headed into debt and was being undermined by furious donors, a warring staff and — at the root of it all — a candidate who was badly out of his league.

Prior to the governor’s abrupt exit from the Republican race, his campaign had a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency plan at the ready: Campaign manager Rick Wiley, in a half-hour phone interview with POLITICO on Tuesday night, said he had an “all-in Iowa” plan that would have moved the headquarters from Madison, Wisconsin, to Des Moines and cut the staff from about 85 to 20 as of Thursday. But Walker, floundering in debates and on the stump, was facing such a sudden drought in donations that even those drastic moves wouldn’t have guaranteed solvency.

“We built the machine that we needed to get a governor in just phenomenal shape to take a stage in a presidential debate,” Wiley said. “I think sometimes it’s lost on people the largeness of the job. I think people just look at it and say, ‘Wow! Yeah, you know, it’s like he’s a governor and he was in a recall’ and blah, blah, blah — he’s ready.

“It’s just not like that. It is really, really difficult. … I’m just saying, you know, like it’s a f—ing bitch, man. It really is.” …

By Wiley’s telling, the end came fast. “June and July, up through that first debate, were good, fundraising-wise — really good,” he said. “Hitting your numbers. And we thought maybe we could even project [that] outward, like tick our numbers up a little bit. And then the [Aug. 6] Cleveland debate happened. … The press corps wrote that he didn’t help himself but didn’t hurt himself. But the didn’t-help-himself narrative took over. And fundraising started to go down.”

The problems snowballed, all self-inflicted. “The week after the debate, our events fell a little bit flat,” Wiley said. “And so then we roll into the Iowa State Fair, and the ‘birthright citizenship’ [gaffe] came up. And that was another one where the donors were like, ‘What’s going on over there?’”

After five weeks, it was clear: Madison, we have a problem. “It culminated with a trip through Texas, the three days leading up to Labor Day weekend, where … we’re supposed to raise half a mil and we brought in $184K,” Wiley said. “That, coupled with we were in the mail with [a] mailing to our donors, and that was the first time that [an internal] file had lost money. … So, at that point, we can say, ‘OK, we have a huge revenue problem.’”

Wiley said that three days before last week’s debate, he “sat down with the governor and the first lady and we talked about the cash on hand and we talked about the staff and what was going on [with the shakeup rumors] out there. … I laid [out] the scenario that, ‘Look, the revenue is taking a hit. … I think we need to come up with a plan where we scale back and go from there.’ So the decision was that I was going to come up with that plan.”

On Sunday night, just hours before Walker would end the campaign, Wiley sketched the grim figures in a phone call with the governor, who was being driven back from Iowa. Wiley said cash on hand was about $1 million, accounts payable were around $800,000, and fundraising “was like grinding to a halt.” (He said in the interview that after the next two-week payroll, “we would be close to a balance-sheet zero.”) Then he outlined his proposal for “all-in Iowa” cuts.

“I presented it to him and then I said, ‘You know, it’s going to be tough right now with the environment that we’re in for us to raise enough to sustain this plan,’” Wiley recalled. He said Walker didn’t really respond. “He just processed the information like he always does: ‘Thanks for the information.’ Appreciated the candor.”

While Walker had a fundraising problem, he also had a spending problem.

When Walker and Wiley began building the campaign team in January, they made a bold, and ultimately foolhardy decision: Go big. Walker was the front-runner in Iowa polls through the spring and early summer, and he tried to capitalize on that momentum by hiring former Republican National Committee aides and Washington operatives, plus a Beltway PR firm to target conservative media, a full-time photographer and well-known consultants for outreach to evangelicals.

At the time, Walker could afford it. But as he began to fumble issues, and Donald Trump took over the race, the cash flow began to slow. Then, on the night of Walker’s mediocre performance in the first debate, [campaign chair Michael] Grebe warned senior staff that the campaign would need to prepare for a severe fundraising ebb — and the possibility of staff cuts.

It was a startling admission, and some top Walker aides wanted to keep it from the candidate. Walker had been immersing himself in preparation for the second debate, and they didn’t want to throw him off his game.

Around Labor Day, Grebe approached Walker about instituting some staff changes, and he was open to the idea.

In the meantime, at the super PAC supporting Walker, Unintimidated PAC, top officials were preparing something revolutionary. Keith Gilkes, a former Walker chief of staff who was a leader of the super PAC, was legally barred from coordinating with the campaign. But in August, he began asking donors pointed questions about the campaign’s finances. He concluded that the situation was dire.

The super PAC, which had about $20 million available, looked into hiring field staffers in South Carolina and other early states — preparing to take over many communications and political functions from the campaign, rather than staying in the traditional role of running TV ads.

Aside from the finance issues, Walker also had a staff problem. Campaign sources said Tonette Walker, the Wisconsin first lady, had never warmed to Wiley. During a visit to campaign HQ shortly after the first debate, she wanted to know why her husband hadn’t used all his allotted time in answers (a mistake he repeated in the second debate). She made it clear she saw the lapse as a staff failure, which aides took as a shot at Wiley.

Walker advisers said they were considering bringing back longtime aides, Gilkes or R.J. Johnson, to replace or layer Wiley. Tonette Walker, along with Grebe, then began reaching out to a small group of longtime Walker supporters and inviting them to a meeting at the governor’s mansion on Monday morning — the session that resulted in the campaign’s end.