I am not certain where the term “oops” came from, but apparently the term inspired the title of a book, O.O.P.S.: Observing Our Politicians Stumble.

Politico, which has been deconstructing the crashed-and-burned presidential campaign of Gov. Scott Walker, lists seven Walker gaffes:

1. Mazel tov
In December, a letter surfaced where Walker had made an unforced error responding to a Jewish constituent by writing “thank you again and Molotov.” Walker meant Mazel tov.

2. The Europe curse
In February, Walker made things tougher for himself when, during a trip to Europe, he refused to answer questions on foreign policy.

“I just think for me, commenting on foreign policy, or in this case economic policy, in a country where you’re a visitor is not the politest,” Walker said while visiting the prestigious Chatham House think tank in London.

He also refused to say whether he believed in evolution. “I’m here to talk about trade, not to pontificate on other issues. I love the evolution of trade in Wisconsin and I’d like to see an even bigger evolution as well,” Walker told BBC journalist Justin Webb.

3. Won’t say if Obama loves America

After Rudy Giuliani, at a private event held for Walker, said he didn’t think President Obama loves America, Walker was asked if he agreed with the former New York mayor — and the governor wouldn’t say one way or the other.

“I’m not going to comment on what the President thinks or not,” Walker said during an interview on CNBC. “He can speak for himself.”

4. Unions are just like ISIS

One of Walker’s biggest challenges was to establish himself as credible on foreign policy. Despite studying intensely with a rotating cast of GOP wonks, he stretched a bit too far during the Conservative Political Action Conference in late February, when he said that fighting union protesters in his home state showed he could defeat the Islamic State.

“If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world,” Walker said.

5. Firing the air traffic controllers defeated the Soviets

It didn’t take long for Walker to make another foreign policy gaffe. Days later at a Club for Growth cattle call in Palm Beach, Florida, he said the “most significant foreign policy decision of my lifetime” was President Ronald Reagan decision to break an air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 by firing roughly 11,000 of them.

“It sent a message not only across America, it sent a message around the world,” the Wisconsin governor said.

6. The Wall

In late August, during an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Walker said he had “legitimate concerns” about beefing up border security not just along the border with Mexico but also the Canadian border, saying he’d been asked about that in New Hampshire. Todd asked if Walker would consider building a wall along America’s 4,000-mile northern border — and Walker didn’t laugh it off, as another candidate might have.

“They have raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our hall meetings about a week and a half ago. So that’s a legitimate issue for us to look at,” Walker said. He was quickly mocked, and his communications staff had to clean up after him the next day.

7. When ‘yeah’ doesn’t mean ‘yes’

Walker was hounded by questions about birthright citizenship after he was asked in mid-August whether he agreed with Donald Trump that the children of illegal immigrants who were born on American soil should be deported. “Yeah, to me it’s about enforcing the laws in this country,” Walker said — reverting to his verbal tic of saying “yeah” without necessarily meaning agreement. “And I’ve been very clear: I think you enforce the laws, and I think it’s important to send a message that we’re going to enforce the laws, no matter how people come here we’re going to enforce the laws.”

Obviously, no candidate can get through a campaign without saying a few things he or she later wishes he or she had not said. (And in the case of Bernie Sanders, previous statements come up to bite you decades later, such as his interesting views on men and women.) For that matter, in the decades I’ve been calling high school and college games and making various media appearances, there hasn’t been one instance where I didn’t feel afterward I could have something better, at minimum.

Walker’s first supposed gaffe is insignificant. The second was partly insignificant (the part about evolution) and partly dancing when you’re supposed to be there for another reason. The fifth was clearly incorrect (hint: Iceland), and the sixth and seventh were non-answers that were the wrong answer. The others should have been answered better than they were.

So, Mr. Former PR Guy, how would you have answered the questions? Glad you asked! To channel my inner Lyn Nofziger and try to imagine what Walker meant to say instead of what he said (or for that matter what I believe):

2. While his statement about “the evolution of trade in Wisconsin” was a reasonably clever verbal turn, he could have talked about how he believes in better relations with our historic allies such as Great Britain, both economically and militarily, and that the Obama administration has made things worse with our allies and not better with our enemies. (You know, Iran.)

3. Walker could have said that no one who wants to “fundamentally change America” to make America weaker loves America. Voters want the candidates to make things better, not different.

4. The comparison of ISIS to the union thugs could have been answered by asking which other presidential candidate dealt with political opponents who damaged historic state property and threatened the lives of the candidate and his or her family. Or, for that matter, which other presidential candidate survived a recall attempt (that was thoroughly illegitimate).

5. It wasn’t the air traffic controllers, it was Reagan’s walking away from the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty talks with the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, which in turn was the manifestation of Reagan’s four-word policy statement on how to deal with the Soviets: “We win, they lose.”

6. Are Canadians illegally flooding into the U.S.? Obviously not, but “They have raised some very legitimate concerns, including some law enforcement folks that brought that up to me at one of our hall meetings about a week and a half ago.” That issue needs to be viewed as a security question, not an immigration question. (Another dimension to add is the reason people illegally enter the U.S. — because they think it’s better here than where they are — so the answer to illegal immigration is not walls, but improving the economies of Mexico and elsewhere.)

7. See the last sentence of number 6.

Given the degree with which Walker has always been composed and prepared when speaking to Wisconsin media during his political career, either he didn’t sufficiently prepare, or his media handlers didn’t sufficiently prepare him, or the media game requires considerably better performance at the national level.

Right Wisconsin’s Savvy Pundit has his own list of not gaffes, but reasons Walker’s campaign ended before a single vote was cast:

1. Too Much Too Soon – The Walker campaign went supernova a lot earlier than anyone expected. On one hand that made Governor Walker a font runner, attracted cash, attracted attention and was a very good thing. On the other hand, however, if forced the Walker campaign to build out a large, national campaign sized staff and a national campaign travel footprint early rather than slowly building out from Iowa. Big staffs cost big money. Having to go national early strained Walker’s resources in the long run and made his campaign less sustainable when donors began to get cold feet in the past weeks. Walker’s surprisingly fast ascendency also thrust him into commenting on topics before he was ready. Walker had almost no low stakes ramp up period to test out messages and to get his legs under him in terms of dealing with national and international issues under intense national media scrutiny. He never got to work out the clinkers off Broadway before hitting the main stage. That led to several self-inflicted rhetorical wounds that made people question if he was really ready for prime time.

2. He Got Trumped – The Donald Trump phenomenon is the central story in this year’s GOP campaign so far. He has sucked the oxygen out of the room for everyone in the GOP field. Perhaps Walker’s biggest campaign mistake was panicking after Trump stole the show in the first GOP debate. In response to criticism that he was too passive during the debate, Walker started commenting on everything and responding to issues that were not in his wheelhouse. He looked and sounded like he was flailing around and the decline in his poll numbers can be traced most directly to this period directly following the debate. He started playing Trump’s game instead of his own with disastrous effect. Trump could make outrageous statements about border walls and the like and not pay a political price because deep down everyone expects him to be an entertaining buffoon. When Walker made similar slips, he nosedived because his campaign was based on his governing competence and anything that cast doubt on that competence cast doubt on his legitimacy as a candidate.

3. Loss of Focus – Governor Walker’s strongest trait throughout his political career has been his message discipline. He knows who he is, he knows the issues he wants to focus on, and he sticks to them with an uncanny tenacity. In the Legislature it was criminal justice, at the County it was taxes, at the state it was Act 10. At each stop critics mocked him as a “one trick pony” but they missed the fact that the ponies he picked ran like Secretariat. The most confounding thing about the Walker presidential campaign was how he seemed to lose his trademark message discipline. He allowed himself to be drawn into every issue of the day rather than deftly redirecting back to his own issues with an, “I know some candidates are focusing on that, but my campaign is about …..” Instead of being extremely deep and well-messaged on a narrow band of issues, he made himself appear a mile wide and an inch deep, responding to every issue that popped up. By trying so hard to prove he belonged on the national stage he lost his unique focus that brought him to the national stage. When he tried to get back to “his issues” by announcing plans to attack federal unions, he looked as silly and desperate as aging rockers repackaging acoustic versions of their greatest hits in order to make a few bucks.

4. Be Who You Are – Throughout the campaign Walker never seemed to find a comfortable balance between who he is and who he wanted to be. That discomfort was perceived by the voters and over time made him seem less than authentic. He seemed to crave the image of a national big shot – traveling to foreign countries, courting the elite, and being a big league politician. That image, however, contrasted with the “kid from Janesville” and “outsider” image he also tried to push in a crowded field featuring some high profile outsiders. Scott Walker is a “career politician,” but Scott Walker is not an establishment politician. Scott Walker has made a career of challenging the establishment and taking on the status quo. He never seemed to realize just how unique he was. Even as a career politician Scott Walker was dramatically different from the other candidates in the GOP field. The Kohl’s sweater story was great and all, but why not ask all the other candidates on the stage, “How many of you are still paying a mortgage?” “How many of you have credit card debt?” “How many of you are taking out loans to put your kids through college?” “How many of you left college early because life intervened and you needed to get a job?” In the entire GOP field, that image was one unique to Scott Walker and, ironically, common to most American voters. The Walker campaign had a unique opportunity to convince ordinary Americans he cared about the challenges they faced because – unlike every other candidate in the field – he actually faced them too. It was a politically exploitable difference with the rest of the field that would have made Walker come across as a more authentic and empathetic candidate. Unfortunately, it was a difference his campaign never embraced.

5. Dance With the Girl Who Brung You – I hate criticizing campaign managers. It’s a very tough job. The campaign manager always gets the blame for a loss while the candidate gets all the credit for a win. That being said, Rick Wiley was miscast as the Walker for President campaign manager. Wiley is a very good strategist and manager, but he does not speak “Walkereese.” While it is true that Scott Walker is his own primary (some would say sole) political advisor, it is also true that over the years there are a handful of individuals who know his language and his style to the point where they can nudge and steer him in a way that Wiley never could. Those people should have been in charge of the campaign. Perhaps Scott Walker the candidate’s biggest mistake was to put a day-to-day national campaign team together that was not instinctively in sync with what makes Scott Walker Scott Walker, how to keep Scott Walker Scott Walker, and how to introduce a national audience to an authentic Scott Walker.

The 70 Days of Walker were an incredible ride that ended too soon. Scott Walker is a skilled, passionate and thoroughly decent man who would have made an outstanding president…but, like all but one citizen of this country, he won’t get there this election.

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.