Organized labor, liberals in general, and President
Barack Obama in particular got their heads handed to them by the good people of
Wisconsin ,
with a little help from the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.
The state, once home to Fighting Bob LaFollette — the
father of the progressive movement — has now given us his photographic
negative: union-busting Scott Walker, father of the regressive movement.
The election, an attempt by a liberal coalition to recall Walker two years after
he'd been elected governor, wasn't really that close. Conservative commentators
have been sent into a mass gloat.
"Obama's goose is cooked," crowed Sarah Palin,
to the accompaniment of chortles from the conservative commentariat.
I don't know about that. If I were her —a thought that
fills me with a revulsion I cannot fully express — I wouldn't cook my geese
until they were hatched. Or something like that.
Let's look at the possible interpretations of the election.
Interpretation No. 1: Obama's goose is cooked.
Hardly. A curious phenomenon of the Wisconsin vote was
that exit polls showed that 18 percent of the people who voted to retain Walker also said they'd
vote for Obama in November. Go figure.
Obama, shrewdly as it turns out, really
didn't engage himself in the Wisconsin
election. Other than a single tweet offering his support for Walker 's Democratic opponent, he sat it out.
Die-hard liberals (with the emphasis on die) criticized him for it, but he and
his advisers apparently figured the recall was a losing proposition and didn't
want to be identified with it. Not heroic perhaps, but probably wise.
But maybe not. Sometimes it's better to have fought and
lost than never to have fought at all.
Interpretation No. 2: The election demonstrated
the power of outside money to turn a local election.
You might think so, since Walker outspent his opponent by at least a
7-1 margin, thanks to the Supreme Court's removal of the lid on campaign
spending by corporations and unions. (You know how everybody's favorite
oxymoron has always been "military intelligence," or perhaps
"jumbo shrimp?" I've got a new one: "The Supreme Court.")
And yet those pesky exit polls showed that 90 percent of
the voters had made up their minds before May, when the big money really
started to make itself felt. So again, who knows?
Interpretation No. 3: The election is a sign that
most people think unions, particularly public service unions, have gotten out
of hand and need to be brought to heel.
You may be on to something here. Surely the results can
be interpreted as nothing less than a massive repudiation of unions and their
members. The recall was triggered after Walker
and the Republican legislature voted to strip public workers of their
collective bargaining rights, once an unthinkable development in a relatively
liberal northern state like Wisconsin .
The voters — 53 percent of them at any rate — said "right on, Guv."
The unions have to take a share of the blame for this —
they got greedy. They negotiated salaries that often were higher than private
companies pay for similar work, they got very generous health insurance plans,
and they arranged for fat pensions that could be accessed at a young age.
The American people will accept greed from the Vast
Right-Wing Conspiracy and its Wall Street cohorts — they don't see that as
their money, even though it is, indirectly. But they won't take it from their
next-door neighbors. They get jealous.
Mark Twain co-authored The
Gilded Age, a book about the excesses at the end of the 19th
century — when the rich had it all going their way. They lived like kings
while the average stiff scratched out a living.
It was a time of weak unions, low wages, and little (if
any) government regulation.
Does that sound like the Republican Party platform or
what?
OtherWords columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor , Michigan