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Charles Krauthammer knows the real reason the unions fought so hard against Walker’s reforms.
… The real threat behind all this, however, was that the new law ended automatic government collection of union dues. That was the unexpressed and politically inexpressible issue. That was the reason the unions finally decided to gamble on a high-risk recall.
Without the thumb of the state tilting the scale by coerced collection, union membership became truly voluntary. Result? Newly freed members rushed for the exits. In less than one year, AFSCME, the second-largest public-sector union in Wisconsin, has lost more than 50 percent of its membership.
It was predictable. In Indiana, where Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) instituted by executive order a similar reform seven years ago, government-worker unions have since lost 91 percent of their dues-paying membership. In Wisconsin, Democratic and union bosses (a redundancy) understood what was at stake if Walker prevailed: not benefits, not “rights,” but the very existence of the unions.
So they fought and they lost. Repeatedly. Tuesday was their third and last shot at reversing Walker’s reforms. In April 2011, they ran a candidate for chief justice of the state Supreme Court who was widely expected to strike down the law. She lost.
In July and August 2011, they ran recall elections of state senators, needing three to reclaim Democratic — i.e., union — control. They failed. (The likely flipping of one Senate seat to the Democrats on June 5 is insignificant. The Senate is not in session and won’t be until after yet another round of elections in November.)
And then, Tuesday, their Waterloo. Walker defeated their gubernatorial candidate by a wider margin than he had — pre-reform — two years ago.
The unions’ defeat marks a historical inflection point. They set out to make an example of Walker. He succeeded in making an example of them as a classic case of reactionary liberalism. …
And Peggy Noonan has a stunningly good column on the meaning of Wisconsin.
What happened in Wisconsin signals a shift in political mood and assumption. Public employee unions were beaten back and defeated in a state with a long progressive tradition. The unions and their allies put everything they had into “one of their most aggressive grass-roots campaigns ever,” as the Washington Post’s Peter Whoriskey and Dan Balz reported in a day-after piece. Fifty thousand volunteers made phone calls and knocked on 1.4 million doors to get out the vote against Gov. Scott Walker. Mr. Walker’s supporters, less deeply organized on the ground, had a considerable advantage in money. …
… Mr. Walker was not crushed. He was buoyed, winning by a solid seven points in a high-turnout race. …
… President Obama’s problem now isn’t what Wisconsin did, it’s how he looks each day—careening around, always in flight, a superfluous figure. No one even looks to him for leadership now. He doesn’t go to Wisconsin, where the fight is. He goes to Sarah Jessica Parker’s place, where the money is.
There is, now, a house-of-cards feel about this administration. …
… And where is the president in all this? On his way to Anna Wintour’s house. He’s busy. He’s running for president.
But why? He could be president now if he wanted to be. …
Michael Barone drills into the Wisconsin numbers.
Here are some observations from the election results in the Wisconsin recall race. For the results I’ve used the convenient interactive maps provided by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Huffington Post. When you look at the map, you notice that Democrat Tom Barrett won only in a relatively few counties, 12 of 72. He was reduced to the Democratic base: Madison and a few surrounding counties, the central city of Milwaukee but definitely not the suburbs, a few old factory towns like LaCrosse and Stevens Point, three counties up on Lake Superior near Duluth, Minnesota, and the Menominee Indian Reservation. Everything else went for Scott Walker.
Turnout in this election was really high: 2,507,269, compared to 2,160,832 in November 2010 and closer to the 2,984,417 in November 2008. Much has been made of the exit poll finding that union members were one-third of the total, up from 2010, but we see evidence of this in county returns as well. Turnout was up 16% statewide, but it was up 20% in Kenosha County and in Douglas County (Superior) which have had lots of blue collar voters. Walker’s percentage as compared to 2010 declined 6.2% in Douglas County, more than in any other county in the state, and Kenosha County was one of the few counties Walker carried in 2010 but lost in 2012. Turnout was up 16% in Milwaukee County, suggesting that black turnout was fairly robust, and up 15% in Dane County (Madison), the epicenter of anti-Walker forces and up 22% and 25% in adjacent Columbia and Dodge Counties, which were two of the 16 counties where Walker’s percentage fell from 2010 to 2012. One has visions of Madison Occupy-types heading out to canvass in rural areas nearby. Conclusion: the union and leftish Democrats did a good job of turning out their voters. It was like the 2004 presidential race in Ohio, where the Kerry forces did a great job turning out voters in central cities, but were still beaten because there was also heavy turnout in small and medium-sized counties of strongly motivated Republican voters. Such was the case in Wisconsin.
Walker’s percentage rose most in small counties in the northwestern quadrant of the state and near Green Bay. These were mostly Barack Obama territory in 2008; the rise in Walker percentage suggests that confrontational tactics hurt Democrats there (as I speculated in a blogpost last night) and they might hurt Obama there as well.
In Friday’s presser, the president said the private sector was “doing fine.” James Pethokoukis begs to differ.
… But is it really? Is the private sector “doing fine?”
1. Private-sector jobs have increased by an average of just 105,000 over the past three months and by just 89,000 a month during the entire Obama Recovery.
In 1983 and 1984, during the supply-side Reagan Boom, private sector jobs increased by an average of 292,000 a month. Adjusted for population, that number is more like 375,000 private-sector jobs a month
2. If the labor force participation rate for May had just stayed where it was in April, the unemployment rate would have risen to 8.4%. As it is, the U.S. economy is suffering is longest sustained bout of 8% unemployment or higher since the Great Depression. …
Pethokoukis again posts on the remark later in the day.
… The remark reveals the government-centered nature of Obama’s thinking. He just doesn’t give private enterprise very much thought, particularly when it comes to all the ways government can muck up the free enterprise system. To Obama, the private sector is always “doing fine,” so it really doesn’t matter if the public sector overloads it with too many taxes and too much regulation. The private sector? Oh, you means guys like Bain Capital who like to fire people.
No wonder there’s been so little sense of urgency by the Obama White House to cut the sky-high corporate tax rate or so little consideration given to the impact on small business of letting the Bush tax cuts expire. The private sector is “doing fine,” after all. Unintended consequences? What are those?
Approve the Keystone pipeline? Why? The environment comes first, especially at a time when the private sector is “doing fine.”
The private sector isn’t just millionaire CEOs of America’s largest companies. It’s also workers (who bear most of the burden of high corporate taxes) and investors and entrepreneurs. …
David Harsanyi tells us why we love Miss USA.
The cartoonists have fun with Wisconsin.