The Wisconsin recall election should never have happened in the first place. It's an abuse of the process to attempt to recall a duly elected official over a policy dispute. The recall is for office-holders who've betrayed the public trust, not to punish people for implementing policies which a segment of the electorate doesn't like.
The opposition to Walker has been ugly, consisting as it does mostly of unions and liberals. Death threats and insults have been received by virtually every supporter of the governor, and still are.
Nevertheless, the Governor refused to bend or be intimidated, and he has prevailed. The power of the public employee unions to coerce taxpayers into paying an ever-increasing share of their income to subsidize ever-increasing salaries, health care, and pensions for government workers and public school teachers has been diminished with the failure of this recall.
Walker's win is a win for Wisconsin, to be sure, but it's also a win for much of the rest of the nation. His success will encourage other governors and legislators in other states to likewise rein in their public employee unions and return their states to a sensible, responsible fiscal footing. Those which don't, like California, will gradually slide into insolvency.
I also believe that it very well may put Wisconsin in play in November. The state went for Mr. Obama by fourteen points in '08 and exit polls yesterday showed that a substantial number of voters who pulled the lever for Walker still plan to vote for the president this fall, a result that strikes me as inexplicable, but those same exit polls also showed Walker and his opponent at 50/50 when in fact Walker is winning by almost 8 points as I write this.
Even if Wisconsin stays blue in November, though, the results there suggest that other states in which Mr. Obama eked out a much narrower victory in 2008 than he did in Wisconsin might well be undergoing a red shift. Mr. Obama no longer has the cachet he had in '08 and he's confronting a much more formidable candidate in Mitt Romney than he faced in John McCain.
Moreover, the electoral news since 2008 has been almost uniformly bad for the Democrats. Several GOP governors and Senator Scott Brown won in off-year elections, some in traditionally Democratic states, then came the landslide defeats the Democrats suffered in 2010, and now the bitter pill in Wisconsin. Add that momentum to the state of our economy and the growing perception that Mr. Obama has proven singularly unsuited for the job he's in, and one must assume that the atmosphere in the Obama reelection campaign is pretty gloomy this morning.
Mr. Obama's only solace, perhaps, is in the fact that there are still a lot of people riding in the wagon who will vote for the candidate most likely to crack the whip on those who are pulling it.
