Posted by
Bill Crawford on Wednesday, August 10, 2011 10:54:29 PM
The first batch of recall elections there have passed, and the best efforts of the national union movement (along with a few tons of their money) have not dislodged the new Republican Senate majority in Madison.
This was plan D, I think. That is, after the Democrats went AWOL and took up in a motel in a more friendly Illinois, left the union charges to clog up the vacant Statehouse, leave enough litter for a Macy's parade and to take to the television cameras to announce that thier "rights" were all being trampled on.
And that is point one here: every homeowner in this country has taken advantage of the home mortgage interest deduction to keep them going when we and our mortgages were still young. This could be taken away at any moment by an act of the same Congress that granted it. I am not one to look at things that have been around long enough to grow whiskers and translate that into it being a new "right". The same is to be said for collective bargaining: it is granted by a legislature. The vote giveth and the vote taketh away. As Obama was fond of saying circa 2009, "Remember, we won the election".
The next observation is that Wisconsin is not a swing state by any means. They have been a GOP write off for two decades now. Hell, Madison is right up there with us with San Francisco, Portland and Providence as hostile territory. The unions have screwed the pooch big time to get themselves in the position they are there. Keep in mind that the Republicans did not take the majority there by presenting some abstract agenda. They pointed at the unions and said, "We can fix this".
The final point is a bit more obtuse. This is a micro object lesson for 2012. You had a lot of money coming in from the unions to push these recall elections their way, and they got little traction. The lesson is that, in an election season where both ends of the spectrum are dialed in and have all their chips on the table, and the pool of swing voters is unusually low, each convertible vote becomes prohibitively expensive.
Flash back to 2008: the swing voter pool, tired of Bush and the Iraq war, and then the financial meltdown, was a much larger batch of targets for Obama and his $3/4 billion bum rush (no matter how he raised the last half). This was made more pronounced by he GOP fractures over immigration and McCain's conservative credentials.
Next year, Obama will struggle to raise the same amount, but will find that the swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina and Florida are not the bastions of low hanging fruit he found three years ago. He is behind in all of these states and cannot win next year without all of them. There is a reason why his convention will be in Charlotte.
When the votes become prohibitively expensive like that, and you are already fighting an uphill battle, your easiest path to victory is to prove that your opponent is a drug dealer or a child molester. I've already predicted that the charges of racism on the campaign trail will set new records in this one, but when that word becomes ubiquitous, it also gets tuned out more (which is probably a good thing). No, I'm talking about Clinton-level opp research, and dragging out everything.
It is as predictable as the sunrise, folks. It is one of the last plays in the Alinsky methodology, and Obama is an acolyte. Get a copy of "Rules For Radicals" and thumb through it. Connect the dots to Wisconsin when you do.
This administration, like the union movement that left their discarded banners and McDonald's wrappers on the streets of Madison, are as interesting as they are occasionally repulsive, but they are not unpredictable.
And they are going to lose. Next year is the conservative's to take everything, if they don't shoot themselves in the foot. The Wisconsin recalls are merely a shot across that bow.