WALKER, WATERLOO, AND WELLINGTON

The day after Gov. Scott Walker signed into law a bill sharply limiting collective bargaining for public employee unions in Wisconsin, there was a massive protest.  Capitol police estimated the crowd at 50,000.  The Madison police department put it at 85,000.

"Gov. Walker’s overreaching has brought us to this moment to talk about jobs," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.  "This is the debate we wanted to have…In your lifetime, have you ever seen this much solidarity, this much excitement, this much activism?"

Wisconsin is shaping up to be the Republicans’ Waterloo, said E.D. Kain, a liberal who blogs at Forbes magazine, referring to the famous battle in which Napoleon was defeated by the Duke of Wellington (June 18, 1815, just south of present-day Brussels in Belgium).

Democrats have filed recall petitions against eight GOP state senators.  Millions of dollars are being poured into the effort.  Republicans have filed recall petitions against eight of the 14 Democratic state senators who fled the state to try to prevent a vote.

If Democrats can recall three GOP senators, they’ll take control of the state senate.  They have 60 days to gather in each district signatures equivalent to 25 percent of those who voted for governor last November.

 Most recall efforts fail to meet that threshold.

Scholars "could cite only three times in American history when more than one state legislator has been recalled at roughly the same time over the same issue: two in Idaho in 1971 over a pay raise; two in Michigan in 1983 over a tax vote, and two Republicans in California months apart in 1995 over their collaboration with Democrats," said the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Democrats think they can make recall history because the base is so fired up, and because polls indicate a substantial majority opposes restrictions on collective bargaining.

But Democrats and labor may be overly optimistic.  Their base is energized, but so is the Republican base.  There are twice as many conservatives as there are liberals, according to Gallup.

A Rasmussen poll March 8 indicated likely voters in Wisconsin opposed weakening collective bargaining rights, 39 percent to 57 percent.  But the same poll showed support for Gov. Walker on specific provisions.  For instance, only 19 percent think school districts should be required to buy health insurance from a union-owned company.

This suggests the more voters learn about the issues in controversy, the less they support the unions.  A Gallup poll Feb. 22 showed 61 percent opposed weakening collective bargaining for public employee unions.  But in a Gallup poll Mar. 9, Americans supported, 49 percent to 45 percent, "changing state laws to limit the bargaining power of state employee unions."

Protesters predicted apocalyptic consequences if the budget repair bill were passed.  Recall elections won’t be held before June.  If the sky hasn’t fallen by then, steam could be drained from the recall effort.

Even if Democrats gain a majority in the state senate, it wouldn’t avail them much.  Republicans would still control the Assembly.  And Scott Walker will still be governor. But Democrats must do what they can to punish GOP lawmakers for their vote, lest what happened in Wisconsin spread to other states.

Public employee unions are doomed, thinks a college professor in New Jersey who supports them.

 "The surest way to ensure the survival of any program is to spread the benefits of it as widely as possible — give everyone a reason to fight for its continuance — but hide the costs by either concentrating them on a small but unsympathetic group (maybe trial lawyers), or by tacking them onto a cost that is already tolerated  (like sales taxes)" Thurman Hart wrote on the Web site of the Newark Star Ledger.

"The fastest way to kill a program of any kind is to concentrate the benefits but to make everyone pay for them.

"There is no reason for ninety percent to rally for benefits that accrue to only ten percent of the work force when they themselves are cut out of those benefits," Mr. Hart said.

"The primary purpose of public unions today, as ugly as it sounds, is to work against the financial interest of taxpayers," said Mark McKinnon, a self-described "centrist" who’s worked for both parties.

Taxpayers are catching on.  In Miami Tuesday (3/15), 88 percent voted to recall Mayor Carlos Alvarez because he raised taxes to fund a pay increase for public employees.

So if Wisconsin does turn out to be the Republicans’ Waterloo, it may be because the unions are fighting for Napoleon and Gov. Walker is Wellington.

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.