THE DEMS FOUGHT DIRTY AND THEY’RE STILL DOOMED

If after 17 months of turmoil during which you spent upwards of $50 million, and have only the taste of wormwood and gall, you should be more careful about the fights you pick.

The news media downplayed the blow labor unions and Democrats suffered Tuesday (6/05).  "Walker survives recall in Wisconsin," read the headlines in most newspapers, the Chryons on the cable news channels.

Yeah.  And Reagan edged Mondale, Nixon nipped McGovern, LBJ slipped by Goldwater.  In a state Democrats have carried in every presidential election since 1984, Republican Gov. Scott Walker won by a margin as big as Barack Obama’s over John McCain (53-46).  He  received 18 percent more votes than  when he was elected in 2010.

The high profile battle has made the soft-spoken preacher’s son a hero to conservatives; shined a spotlight on how much higher on the hog government workers live than do the taxpayers who pay their salaries; made Gov. Walker’s reforms a blueprint other states are now certain to follow, and jeopardized President Obama’s hold on a state he won by 14 percentage points.

Gov. Walker heavily outspent Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in the weeks after he defeated labor favorite Kathleen Falk in the May 3rd primary — a fact emphasized by journalists, who didn’t mention labor and liberal groups spent much more than conservatives in last year’s recall election; their attempt to oust a conservative state supreme court justice, and in the petition drive to force the election Tuesday.

Delusion can be comforting, but it’s still delusion.  Scott Walker won big because none of the bad things unions said would happen did, and good things are.  He closed the $3.6 billion budget deficit he inherited without raising taxes.  His reforms will save state and local taxpayers up to $1.03 billion a year, according to the Beacon Hill Institute, a think tank in Boston.

The reforms required government workers to contribute more to their health and pension benefits; restricted collective bargaining to wages only, and made union membership voluntary.  Public employee unions fought the reforms as if there were no tomorrow, because for them, there isn’t. 

Since the reforms went into effect, the Wisconsin branch of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has lost 54 percent of its members; the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers 35 percent.

They fought dirty.  Government workers neglected their jobs to protest.  Protesters trashed the state capitol.  Death threats were made against the governor and GOP legislators.  Unions threatened to boycott businesses which didn’t side with them publicly.  Democrat state senators fled the state to try to block a vote.  On election eve, a liberal group claimed, falsely, that Gov. Walker had sired a child out of wedlock.

The Government Accountability Board (six former judges, five of them liberals) made little effort to check recall petitions for duplication or fraud; rejected help from outside watchdog groups; cut short the time for the candidates to review them, and reneged on a promise to post the petitions online.  About a third of the several hundred thousand signatures it examined were invalid, said a conservative watchdog group.

A Dane County (Madison) judge who’d signed a recall petition issued a sloppy injunction (he misquoted the state constitution) against Wisconsin’s new photo ID law.  He’s all but certain to be overturned on appeal.  But because it couldn’t be adjudicated before the election, he had, in effect, issued a license to cheat.

Of which some may have taken advantage.  A caller to a Washington D.C. radio station Tuesday said he was on his way from Michigan in a union-organized four bus caravan to vote in Wisconsin.  In tiny Norway, just north of the Illinois line, a "heavy turnout" customarily is about 300,  resident John  Barrett told a Milwaukee radio station.   By midmorning Tuesday, 1,794 had voted.

Passage of the Walker reforms was to public employee unions what Stalingrad was to the Nazis, I wrote last year. "Union bosses will win some fights," I wrote then.  "But they’ll be rear guard actions like those fought by the Nazis during their retreats to the Rhine and the Elbe. We’re flat broke. This dooms them."

Tuesday was Kursk, D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, rolled into one.  In California, voters in San Jose and San Diego voted overwhelmingly to cut benefits for municipal employees.  There is no more money.  Unions must learn to live within our means.

Here’s another sign of how far the worm has turned:  When the turmoil in Wisconsin began, President Obama renewed his pledge to unions to "walk the picket line with you."  As he shuttled between fundraisers in Minnesota and Illinois last week, the president flew over Wisconsin several times — but never found the time to stop.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.