I write this, as usual, deep under the influence of music. Today it's specifically having just seen a favorite songwriter of mine live for the first time. That would be Erin McKeown, and as she sang her song "Manifestra," the same line that always catches my ear caught my ear. "I forgot about the water and chased the whale," it goes, "the myth that prize is all there ought to be."

If I were the kind of person to keep note cards adorned with motivational sayings taped around my mirror, an imperative variation of that line would be among them: DON'T FORGET ABOUT THE WATER TO CHASE THE WHALE. The metaphor, lifted from "Moby Dick" (the song even name-checks Ahab), is timeless but really necessary for us all to remember: The important stuff is abundant and all around you and in need of your focus but also supremely easy to forget if all you worry about is catching the uncatchable.

So, of course, this column is about Scott Walker, my whale. Even I can see the hilarity of it, so let me be the first to point and laugh at myself in my note card-less mirror just to get that out of the way.

About Walker, though. He dropped out of the race for president so unexpectedly last week I wasn't prepared with my own take on why his first national campaign was such a disaster. And while my short take might well have been, "Because he is a monster," my longer take is, I think, in this metaphor. He is a whale-chaser at the expense of the water.

Depending on how you define the whale, of course, then everybody is chasing it. Hillary and Jeb! and Bernie and Trump and the rest all want to be president, sure. The question, though, is whether they mind the water along the way.

Scott Walker clearly didn't. It's hard to know where to start, but we could start with the obvious: From the beginning of his career, his goal was only the prize. People who knew him in college, for example, recall him believing that "God has told me I’m chosen to cut taxes and stop killing babies."

But along the way, he didn't do the fundamental parts of whatever his job was at the time – legislator, county executive, governor. He didn't govern.

Consider what we know about his time as Milwaukee County Executive. Walker didn't land in legal hot water because his policies were partisan or even misguided. Rather, he wound up a target of a John Doe probe into illegal practices because he used the time he should have been governing to (allegedly) make connections and build a coalition of PAC support, grease wheels for donors, reward loyalty over competence and build his own campaign machine on the taxpayers' time and dime.

The devastation left in his wake still haunts Milwaukee County today. The current board and new county executive have struggled to maintain quality parks, transit, mental health facilities, labor relations and sound budgets in the years since Walker's ascent to the governor's mansion.

His time as governor is no better. The single greatest criticism of Walker, from left and right alike, over the last nine months is that he hasn't been here, that he's been working on the Big Show instead of doing his actual job. The utter shambles of the last budget session – replete with radical, unnecessary policy changes and ham-fisted denials from Walker's own mouth about things he personally directed – was a big, fat clue that the last thing on Walker's mind was actually governing.

And that's to say nothing of his first term, which opened with a transparent plot to weaken the opposition he'd face in a re-election campaign just months before he'd need to start running for president. Its highlights, such as they are, were a misanthropist's grab-bag of policies designed to make actual quality governance (like running a school district, for example, or promoting job growth in a recovering economy) much harder.

When Walker did give lip-service to the water – that is, the people who saw fit to elect him to govern us – it was in wildly unrealistic promises he never planned to keep. Things like 250,000 new jobs, working cooperatively with state employees, balancing the budget and keeping policy out of the state budget process. The promises he kept were the ones that would endear him to Republican primary voters: cutting taxes for the sake of cutting taxes, cranking up abortion restrictions, making it harder for Democratic constituencies to vote.

And even in running for president, Walker forgot – or didn't care – that they you have to work for that one, too. By refusing to answer questions and playing at out-Trumping Trump, he ended up getting dragged under, barely perceptible in the final polls. His last major policy speech, about liberating the American worker from the "union bosses" and tyranny of federal labor protections, seemed like nothing than so much as the last desperate flails of a drowning man who regrets sleeping through swimming lessons.

In a sense, I can't really blame Walker (in many other, much larger senses, of course I blame him. But bear with me here for a second.) Last week saw a second political casualty in Speaker of the House John Boehner, whose case is illustrative of where Walker failed – and why.

What sank Boehner was not so much his own pursuit of a whale, but rather the demands of his crew, in particular the Tea Party faction in the House GOP, to abandon all pursuits except the whale. No less an authority than deposed ex-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor set finger to keyboard to explain this.

Boehner worked hard to govern, Cantor said, which sometimes required compromise with the other side and demanded an honest assessment of what could be accomplished in the moment. In other words, Boehner minded the water. Most of us know that life is actually hard work and small steps forward, and as much as I disagree with the direction Boehner wanted to go, he seemed to get that. He wanted government to work, just not in a way that I personally would approve of.

But the fringe of Boehner's party, Cantor wrote, wanted none of that. They wanted the whale: government shutdowns, extremist policy, impeaching President Obama over imaginary scandals. What they got instead was the (strangely orange) pelt of one of their own.

Walker knows that the Republican primary isn't about picking the person most likely to make small steps forward in the face of Democratic opposition. It's about picking their Ahab. It wasn't always this way; Walker's hero, Reagan, couldn't get nominated by the GOP today based on his record of actually governing. The fact that the top three Republican candidates right now are people who have never held elected office makes it clear that at this point they actually prefer someone who has never governed successfully at all (this last point is perhaps the most frightening sentence I have ever written.)

Whether he was a victim of the Tea Party faction that took down Boehner or in his own way an embodiment of it, Walker's failure to look to the water, his belief that the only thing that mattered was the whale, the prize, has not only sunk him but the rest of us here in Milwaukee and Wisconsin as well. He didn't get the prize and we, in the end, didn't get the good governance we deserved.