Wipeout in Wisconsin

The Whupping in Wisconsin: Seven Key Conclusions

.....The seventh thing we can conclude from Wisconsin is that MSNBC is consistently the most entertaining news network in America when things go badly for the left. They may think Fox is in the tank for the GOP, but Fox anchors don’t cry when the GOP loses. I was actually concerned that Ed Schultz might have a medical episode on live television last night. It was … surreal. Now I know what MSNBC means by lean forward. I leaned forward as I was viewing, watching for signs of possible coronaries live on TV.

Here’s one thing I don’t think we can easily conclude, but I would take away from Wisconsin. Anger does not win elections......

......This fight is not without precedent. Progressive patron saint Franklin Delano Roosevelt—who more than any other president set our country on a course away from the founding principles of limited government—knew that public sector unions would be the death of the social welfare state he worked so hard to create. Hence, he consistently opposed allowing government employees to unionize. Today, Greece sets the example of what happens when public sector unions gain the upper hand......

In Wisconsin, the Left Picked a Fight -- and Lost....

“If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Great Scotts! Just as Scott Brown’s 2010 victory in Massachusetts foretold the Republican rout later that year, so Scott Walker’s win is but a foretaste of the November election’s likely result. Polls come and go. But when a Republican governor, in a Democratic state that Obama carried by 14 points in 2008, wins by six points, it shows how overwhelming our victory later this year will be. Add to these facts the high turnout in Wisconsin (over 60 percent, compared with less than 50% in 2010) and the handwriting is clearly on the wall for Obama.

But the real meaning of the Walker victory goes far beyond its obvious role as a predictor of the fall elections. It marks the same kind of catalyst for a downward decline in state and local public employee unions that the air traffic controllers’ strike in the 80s signaled for federal and private sector unions in general. It is the beginning of the end of their reign of power – or terror – over our states and localities.

While only 7% of the private sector labor force is unionized, 41% of state and local government employees are. A majority of union members are now public employees. After foreign competition has decimated private sector unions, the labor movement has found new power in using it leverage over complicit legislators to prey on helpless taxpayers.

But, in Wisconsin, Walker flung down the gauntlet to public employee unions and they accepted the challenge only to go down to a total defeat. Their power will never be the same. Already, the National Education Association (NEA) has experienced a 150,000 decline in its 3.2 million memberships this year and expects another 200,000 falloff in the next few months – more than a ten percent drop. As states follow Wisconsin’s example and stop automatically deducting union dues from their employee’s paychecks, the funds available to unions will continue to drop – and with it will go much of their political power.

But even the fall of the power of public employee unions fails to capture the full extent of the impact of the Walker victory.

Its most important impact is on America’s schools. By elbowing teacher unions aside and permitting local school boards to abolish teacher tenure and insist on merit pay and school choice, the Walker reforms open the door to a vast and rapid improvement in educational quality throughout the nation. No other education reforms have worked. Now we have no choice but to insist on competition at every level of our educational establishment to improve the product. Teachers must compete for jobs and higher pay even as their schools compete for students. It is the only way we have left that can raise student performance.

The sun is shining and Walker won!

Governor Scott Walker's victory last night – his seven-point win against Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was by a greater margin than in 2010 – will have profound national ramifications. It was a historic defeat for organized labor, and most especially public sector unions. They chose Wisconsin as the ground on which they would make their stand and make an example out of Walker. Instead, they were decimated. In addition, Walker instantly becomes a dominant political player in the GOP, as well as a model to other reform-minded governors. The loss will also drive a wedge between President Obama and organized labor, which cannot be pleased at the indifference Obama showed toward this race. (Tom Barrett was one of Obama's earliest supporters in 2007.) The president wasn't there when organized labor needed him. They are likely to return the favor in November.

When combined with the dismal jobs report on Friday, the news Monday that new orders for U.S. factory goods fell in April for the third time in four months, and the downward revision of economic growth in the first quarter (to 1.9 percent) – all of which signal that our weak economy is growing still weaker – Democrats must feel as though the walls are beginning to crash down around them.....

The left's "outspent" argument is ridiculous. Unions take money by force from members, hire hundreds of political operatives and give them salaries to work on campaigns, then call them "volunteers" so their work isn't reported as a campaign contribution.

Luckily for them, government employees' non-punishing work schedules leave them plenty of time to be in a constant state of grievance, demanding recalls after any election they lose, and mobilizing voters.

This election had nothing to do with people being paid a fair wage for the work they do. The question is: Do you want a society where the people whose salaries you pay make more than those who pay them?

The Democrats will do anything the government unions ask, because (1) It's not their money they're spending, it's the taxpayers'; and (2) Government unions reciprocate by making sure the Democrats keep getting re-elected. ....

The year-long saga of the Wisconsin recall is, at long last, over, and Scott Walker is still standing. The low-key Republican governor has withstood a sustained (and expensive) onslaught from the forces of Big Labor and its allies on the Left that featured everything from the coordinated cross-border retreat of intransigent Democratic lawmakers, to the occupation of the state house by a band of radicals, bongo drummers, and high-school truants, to ill-fated attempts to nullify Republican legislative majorities and pick off uncooperative judges. Walker’s enemies did everything but release the kraken.

And yet, he won. Throughout, Walker has stayed even-keeled, evincing—if not exactly cockiness, then something like the fatalism and serenity of an innocent man in the middle of a trial for his life. An equanimity, and a faith that his reforms would be embraced by Wisconsin voters, that turns out to have been fully warranted.

Walker won because his reform program is popular, and because it is working. The governor’s personal approval numbers in Wisconsin hover around 50 percent — not bad for a man whom most Wisconsinites have seen Photoshopped into a Hitler mustache and Nazi regalia at least once in the last year. But more telling is the popularity of Walker’s reforms. According to one recent Reason-Rupe poll, 72 percent of Wisconsinites favor the requirement that public-sector workers increase their pension contributions to 6 percent of their salaries. And 71 percent favor making government employees pay 12 percent instead of 6 percent of their health-care premiums.
Such commonsense measures, which put public-sector employees on a more even footing with the taxpayers who pay their salaries, have already led to over $1 billion in savings across the state, saving public-sector workers from layoffs in the bargain. The reforms’ success has also neutralized them as campaign issues for Walker’s opponents, who were forced to turn away from the very raison d’être of the recall and emphasize instead a grab-bag of non-issues (Walker’s record on women’s rights?) and non-controversies (vague and discredited whispers about a pending Walker indictment and a secret college love child?) in the final weeks of the race.

Walker won because he represented the taxpayer, while his opponent represented the groups whose livelihoods depend on bilking the taxpayer. Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett served as less of an alternative than a vessel for Big Labor’s unmoored wrath. Barrett raised a mere $4 million on his own, while outside PACs did the heavy lifting — We Are Wisconsin raised more than $5.5 million in the last month alone, including seven-figure donations from AFSCME and the AFL-CIO, six-figure donations from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, and a mere $720 from its three (that’s three) individual donors. The Left will complain that Walker outspent Barrett handily, but this is no vice considering Walker also handily outraised Barrett in individual donations, about three-quarters of which were for less than $50. It was Walker’s strength, after all, that convinced national Democrats to stop spending on a race they didn’t think they could win.

And, most of all, Scott Walker saved his job by being the adult in the room. While Democrats in Washington seem to be relying on their belief that the United States government is “too big to fail” to justify a program of taxing and spending our way out of debt, the states don’t have such a luxury. And so, across the country, in states red, blue, and purple, they have turned to men like Scott Walker — and Chris Christie, and Mitch Daniels, and others — to close structural deficits, stabilize out-of-control spending, and break the death embrace between Big Labor and Big Government. In taking this toxic partnership head on, in a state with a rich progressive history no less, Walker became its biggest target. His enemies spent a year and a half preparing to take their best shot at him. And a combined total of $100 million or so later, they missed. They missed because voters are starting to understand that governing through crisis requires someone willing to make unpopular choices, stand up to entrenched interests, and hold the line against loud and determined opposition.

Quite simply, Wisconsin voters realized that if they no longer had Scott Walker, they would have to invent him.

....Walker won because he represented the taxpayer, while his opponent represented the groups whose livelihoods depend on bilking the taxpayer.....

"Walker Survives Wisconsin Recall Vote," read the tepid headline in Wednesday's New York Times. Governor Scott Walker, however, did much more than survive. He defeated his rival, Tom Barrett, convincingly. His lieutenant governor did the same in her recall election. Significantly, this election marks the beginning of the end for dominance of state, county and city budgets by public employee unions.

Lost in the Wisconsin coverage is the fact that Tuesday's election brought overwhelming votes elsewhere in favor of reducing overly-generous public employee pensions. In California, voters in two large cities decided enough was enough. San Jose voters passed Measure B by 71-to-29 percent. In San Diego, they endorsed Proposition B by 67-to-33 percent. In recent years both cities had been forced to cut back on libraries, recreation centers, fire and police services in the face of galloping pension liabilities. San Diego saw its annual contribution to pensions go from $43 million in 1999 to $231 this year, soaking up 20 percent of the city's budget. In San Jose it went from $73 million in 2001 to $245 million this year -- equal to 27 percent of the budget.
These events offer the necessary will to elected officials across the nation to pass reforms that will bring public employee pensions and health care contributions into line with private ones. ...

.......The voters of Wisconsin know that the Democrat Party is for the most part owned and operated by corrupt public-employee unions that want to suck every last dollar out of their pockets to fund bankrupt pensions and health care plans for themselves and their members.
The voters of Wisconsin have realized that these unions and the politicians who support them are literally stealing from them and endangering the economic future of their children.

The false "major wake-up call" the far-left pundits, union officials and politicians want to shout is that rather than the corrupt and budget-destroying policies of the unions being at fault, were it not for the money of "evil" conservatives and corporations, all would be well in liberal utopia.
Said an official from the American Federation of Teachers: "It's pretty clear that the voices of ordinary citizens are at permanent risk of being drowned out by uninhibited corporate spending." Laughingly wrong.

The voices of "ordinary citizens" just spoke. And guess what? These far-left pundits, politicians, wealthy liberal activists and union leaders know that. They know the jig is up and that the American people have finally caught on to their outright thievery........

the Wall Street Journal ^ | 6/7/2012 | Peggy Noonan
Posted on Thu Jun 07 2012 21:17:46 GMT-0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) by Beave Meister

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 Paul 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.

But organization and money aren't the headline. The shift in mood and assumption is. The vote was a blow to the power and prestige not only of the unions but of the blue-state budgetary model, which for two generations has been: Public-employee unions with their manpower, money and clout, get what they want. If you move against them, you will be crushed.

Mr. Walker was not crushed. He was buoyed, winning by a solid seven points in a high-turnout race.

Governors and local leaders will now have help in controlling budgets. Down the road there will be fewer contracts in which you work for, say, 23 years for a city, then retire with full salary and free health care for the rest of your life—paid for by taxpayers who cannot afford such plans for themselves, and who sometimes have no pension at all. The big meaning of Wisconsin is that a public injustice is in the process of being righted because a public mood is changing.

(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...

On Tuesday night, as the word spread that sweeping pension reform measures for public employees had won landslide victories in San Diego and San Jose, the highest-profile group opposing such reform in the Golden State put out a conciliatory statement. The Californians for Retirement Security said it respected the decisions of voters. But the union-funded group also lamented the failure of city leaders to pursue such cost-saving reforms through collective bargaining.

Not mentioned: the fact that when it comes to real pension reform, as opposed to tinkering on the margins, unions’ consistent response to elected officials has been, “Get lost.”

And on Wednesday and Thursday, it became clear that “respect” for voters’ decisions didn’t mean accepting those decisions. In San Jose, public employee unions sued to block the pension reform initiative. In San Diego, City Attorney Jan Goldsmith outlined his plans to try to defeat similar lawsuits filed earlier and to fight off the union-allied state Public Employment Relations Board, which tried to scuttle the city’s pension reform measure months before it was voted on. And in Sacramento, Democratic legislative leaders once again made clear that Gov. Jerry Brown’s pension reform proposal is just not a priority.

Welcome to California, 2012, where unions and their allies are at war with math, reality and taxpayers.......

Let's give Wisconsin voters some credit. While others try to find easy right-versus-left explanations for Gov. Scott Walker's decisive victory last week, Badger State voters appeared to be more worried about their state's purse.

Their fiscal anxiety reflects a national trend...