Posted by
Bill Crawford on Monday, March 07, 2011 11:13:29 PM
So anyway, as always, I'm hooked into just about everything. That is to say, I am on gobs of e-mail and update lists. In the eternal political campaign world, I get feeds from both ends of the spectrum.
And this Wisconsin conflagration is bringing out the twitter-happies. My gosh, my inbox went from half capacity to over 80% full in less than two weeks. This stuff is coming from all over the country. Most of it is from the left, and it is laced with similarities, almost like they are being fed talking points and spitting them out. That is probably happening on a certain level, but there is also a great deal of original work.
The similarities have to do with one form of deflection or another. The union workers aren't making out as well as you think. The unions have made many sacrifices in this economy. The unions are not the enemy. Statistical studies. Income averaging models. And polling? I've been overwhelmed with polling.
The Republicans have overreached. The unions are filled with your neighbors. Government workers are people, too. (Wow. You think? That hadn't occured to me before.) The war is over, and the Tea Party has already lost.
Well, here's the thing, folks. The Tea Party people were not elected in numbers that made them unstoppable. This is not a done deal. But they will maintain their vigil on this issue, and if the Republicans back down, there will be hell to pay for them in 2012- and they all know this. That is a choice Governor's Walker and Kasich will have to make, along with Boehner.
That choice being, who will finally start dealing with the debt? At the fed level, that means restructuring the entitlements. At the state level, it means dealing with the public employee base. There is no getting around that. If the powers that be accept Wisconsin style one-time concessions and the structure is left in place to continue the spiral when nobody is paying attention, it is back to square one.
There is nothing but public grief for the GOP with this- and they know that, too. Obama is more than happy to let them make the calls and then have ten million union types paint them as the ones who ran your grandmother over and killed public education. I've been hearing that crap for years, and for positions a lot tamer than what is on the table now. So, what of it?
It is time to buck up and take it. Anybody who came to Washington to start a career is not a conservative. Take the hits and leave in six years. The Tea Parties will find a replacement. You can't make peace with these people and deal with the mounting debt.
In two years, it will either be the public unions or the taxpayers. The unions will be retiring more modestly than they thought, or we will be well on our way to a new Swedish tax state. It's one or the other. Make your choice, and take a side.