Wisconsin: Who won, who lost

In Wisconsin’s bitter battle over public labor unions, “everyone lost something,” said Natasha Vargas-Cooper in TheAtlantic​.com. Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators ended a three-week standoff with public workers last week by using a procedural trick to force through a bill that severely limits union pay and collective-bargaining rights. The result: Walker and at least eight of his Republican colleagues in the Senate face recall efforts in the coming months by union supporters. Walker won the “procedural round” by tweaking his bill so that he could pass it without the Democratic legislators who fled the state, said E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post, but in the process, he lost the public-relations war. Unions had already acceded to wide-ranging concessions, including higher pension and health-care contributions, making Walker look like an “inflexible ideologue.” Alienating union and blue-collar workers will hurt the GOP in the next national election.

Quite the opposite, said National Review Online in an editorial. It’s the unions and progressives who came off like thugs, by trying to stampede into the Capitol building, comparing Walker to Hitler, and shutting down “the essential business of government.” As governor, Walker has a duty to close a $3.6 billion budget shortfall over the next two years and curb flagrant abuse of taxpayer money. His bill was hardly “draconian”; it simply requires union members to contribute modest amounts to their own health insurance and pensions. “For all the cheap talk about civil rights,” the Left’s rage really stems from the fact that Walker’s bill also ended mandatory dues payments and gives workers an annual vote on whether they want to continue union representation. That will mean that union bosses can no longer count on their ability to funnel union dues to Democratic politicians.

That’s a big victory for conservatives, said Peter Beinart in TheDailyBeast.com, but it might cost them the 2012 presidential election. For the first two years of Obama’s presidency, Republicans pretty successfully portrayed him as a “radical, frightening figure.” But in the past six months, hard-right conservatives like Walker have dragged Republicans so far to the right that they’ve “reframed Obama as a man of the center,” making him look to independents “like a bulwark against conservative radicalism.” Emboldened Tea Partiers are now seeking “to take a meat cleaver” to state and federal budgets, and crush public unions. For the next two years, “the more conservatives win, the more Republicans lose.”

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