My mother taught me a number of lessons in life, guiding my behavior and my beliefs.

Don’t smoke. I broke that one.

Don’t play golf in a thunderstorm. I broke that one.

Don’t speak ill of the dead. I’m about to break that one.

Scott Walker's presidential run is dead. A lot of people think it was a homicide committed by Donald Trump, Ben Carson, voters who abandoned him and fundraisers who tightened their purse strings.

I believe, though, that this wasn’t as much a homicide as it was a suicide.

Walker’s exit from the presidential campaign was like the guy who kept getting drunk and driving home. Eventually he’s going to crash.

Walker crashed into a wall that appeared all of a sudden as he rounded the turn to home. But the groundwork for the crash was laid long before he hit the wall.

For all that Walker tried to portray himself as an average guy who was just like you and me, he is a guy whose ego has no bounds.

He didn’t like being something nearly as much as he liked running for that something. He was happiest when he was devising a political strategy for him to win an election. He ran everything with an iron fist. He truly believed that he was the smartest guy in the room.

And that, more than anything else, is what led to this humiliating defeat. He tried to spin it by saying God called on him to withdraw in order to lead others to do the same so voters could focus on a few candidates Nobody believes that. If he still had money and position in polls, it wouldn’t have made any difference what God said. He’d still be running.

Many of Walker’s acolytes are pointing out that this is just like 2006 when he was running for the Republican nomination for governor against a popular congressman named Mark Green. The Walkerites are pointing out that he voluntarily and graciously withdrew in order to keep from a massive bloodletting in the party.

The fact is that Walker withdrew from his race because of a bribe. Party leaders promised they would support him when he ran for governor again if he just backed off in 2006. Former Republican Gov. Lee Dreyfus told me that story.

Walker spent 12 years in the Assembly and I had lots of contact with him when I helped run the newsroom at Channel 12. He was incredibly aggressive when it came to getting his face on TV. Every time there was an issue in the news Walker would call the assignment desk and volunteer to comment on the issue and would meet a camera crew anywhere we wanted. It was part of his self-designed strategy to build a name for himself.

Walker’s strategy decisions for the presidential race were fueled by his own unbridled ambition and funding from people like the infamous Koch brothers. But his strategies, for the first time in his elective life (which is really his entire adult life) failed miserably.

He built a huge organization (including of all things a full-time photographer) and then obviously didn’t listen to anyone who tried to tell him something about issues like foreign affairs. Time after time Walker came off as a shallow candidate who didn’t know much about many issues. He was a talking point candidate, a strategy that had worked well in Wisconsin where the media coverage was relatively mild.

Once he got on a big stage with intense and sophisticated media coverage, Walker was unable to withstand the scrutiny. He called himself a fighter but acted like a wimp. His claim to fame, which he repeated ad nauseum, was that he broke public employee unions once and could do it again. The problem, of course, was that almost no voters cared much about public employee union busting.

If Walker learned anything from his try at national politics, it has to be that what works in Wisconsin doesn’t work at all on the national stage.

Go back to the televised debates between Walker and Mary Burke in 2014. Walker said he was going to focus on "the voters, not my opponent." And, indeed, during the debates he didn’t even look at Burke. It was Scottobotic at his absolute finest. It was his strategy and it worked in Wisconsin.

Once he took his act outside the boundaries of the state his micro-managing wore thin out. His advisors, smart and experienced people all, certainly tried to teach him things.

But he treated his team not like a team, but like members of his family. And he truly believed that Father Knows Best.

Not this time and maybe never again.