Big Labor's Big Boo-Boo

June 6, 2012
By C. Edmund Wright

Wow.  Where to start? 

The "it's gonna be a late night in Madison" notion was virtually over by the end of Happy Hour -- which no doubt did cause some very late nights instead in Washington and Chicago.  With little or no happiness at all.  

And naturally there were also the comparisons to the vibes of the night Scott Brown took down the Kennedy seat in 2009.  More on both of these dynamics shortly.

The real story is: what happened this spring in Wisconsin was not a recall election at all.  Pure and simple, it was a mulligan.  A childish do-over.  Moreover, it was a battle of government union members and their families against pretty much everyone else.  And when that really crystallized in the minds of the voters, the unions' cause was doomed.  The name Tom Barrett is irrelevant here.  The biggest losers last night -- and there were many -- were big labor generally and public service unions specifically.

Succinctly put, the petty, protected, pampered lefty government unions -- still indignant over Scott Walker's 2010 win -- simply threw a 75 million dollar tantrum as a third do over on that same election.  And the unions' reward from the citizens of Wisconsin for a year and a half of hell was a resounding "go to hell" of epic proportions.  And if anyone doubts that there is a God -- and that He has a sense of humor -- the Wisconsin State Motto is, yep, "Forward." 

You can't make this stuff up.

Making stuff up, however, is what the entire leftist media-Democratic Party complex is doing today, blaming everything and everyone from the Citizens United decision, voter fraud, a bogus robo-call, George Bush -- and probably even Brett Favre.  MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell even pretended the election did not happen, focusing on Mitt Romney's job creation record in Massachusetts instead.  It's all very funny.  And satisfying.

Now the losers:

Big Labor: Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell didn't want to admit it on Fox, but big labor was absolutely the huge loser last night and in fact, they have been losing ever since Walker took office.  It was the behavior of the unions in the Madison riots that really started the general public's focusing in on just how much these "public servants" are now making in salaries, pensions and health care, and how damned entitled they feel to all of this.  That is what started all of this mess.  The public was also tuned in to the unseemly nature of public sector unions per se and their relationship with politicians they get elected.  And perhaps most devastating of all is the fact that some government unions in Wisconsin have lost over half of their own membership during this protracted battle.  And oh by the way, public sector unions started in Wisconsin.  In 1959. 

Democratic Party: It goes without saying that if big labor loses, the Democratic Party loses.  Actually, we have Wisconsin to thank that this now goes without saying.  The past 21 months have been a highly visible object lesson for all to see.  Moreover, the Democrats have lost much of their built in fund raising via the union mechanism thanks to some of Walker's reforms.

MSM and their exit polling: As 9pm EDT rolled around last night, all media outlets were buzzing with word that the exit polls were 50-50 and Ed Schultz was settling in "for a long night."  He had no idea at the time.  These exit polls excited the same fantasies that these same media outlets had been feeding that "the race was tightening" in the final week.  Actually, it was not tightening at all.  One thing the exit polls showed was that almost everybody who voted had long made up their minds.  And why not?  You're either on the gummint gravy train or your're not.  What's to decide?  How this escaped the geniuses in the media is another story.  But they lost last night in a big way.

Obama: This one is a no brainer, and was pretty much obvious when he decided to avoid Wisconsin this week like yellow in the game Twister.  But it goes deeper than that. His failure to do more than send a last minute Twitter message in support of Barrett has to rankle the unions, who have in the past done so much to get Obama and other Democrats elected. Looking ahead to November, their coffers are depleted, and enthusiasm for giving money to Obama, manning phone banks, and canvassing drives has to diminish not just in Wisconsin but beyond.

GOP Establishment: Setting Reince Preibus aside for a second, the GOP Establishment took a bit of a whipping last night -- because Walker is exactly the kind of Republican the establishment constantly warns us is poison for the party. Preibus gets a lot of grief because he is RNC Chair and they normally deserve it . But Preibus was key to Walker's first win as well as Senator Johnston's defeat of Russ Feingold in 2010.  We can only hope that now Preibus will have more cred in the halls of the RNC offices inside the Beltway.

Gop Consultants / Conventional Wisdom See above, but the consultant class deserves their own space in the biggest loser category.  They have cost us many elections over the decades, and last night was a huge blow to their entire foundational template.  This may be Walker's biggest gift of all to conservatives.

Bipartisanship / No Labels Crowd: The stunning vitriol and passion in this election, along with the results of the recent Pew Research findings, have dealt the notion of "getting along" and bipartisanship a huge blow.  Actually, reality is the problem with bipartisanship.  This is a nation divided on the role of government and government unions and all of the attendant spending and control in our lives.  Many of us knew that already.  Those that didn't surely should now, after seeing the last 21 months unfold in Madison and after perusing the Pew results as well.

Julia: The entire nanny state government dependency mindset -- as demonstrated by the Obama 2012 cartoon character Julia -- took a big whipping last night as well.  The folks who pay for all of the government union members and for all of the Julias had a collective awakening and said enough is enough.  If there's another installment of Julia, and I suspect there will not be, she would be very unhappy watching MSNBC in last night's episode.

Now, as pleasing as this result is, this is not an indication that Mitt Romney can necessarily come rolling into Wisconsin and win.  While Walker, his Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch and several State Senators won last night, surveys indicate that even in this environment Romney would have lost.  Besides, rarely has Romney shown the cojones on any issue that Walker has shown consistently.

Which brings us to the contrast with the Brown win in 09.  The Walker win is even sweeter and more significant.  Scott Brown campaigned on tea party principles, and while avoiding the term celebrated those principles in his victory speech. But he has not always voted that way -- and will run against Princess Warren as a moderate.

Scott Walker meanwhile campaigned outwardly as a tea party type in 2010,  governed that way absolutely -- campaigned again as a tea party candidate this year -- and won an even bigger victory. Now, in his speech last night, Walker said that "he's committed to working together" and to is determined to "put this election behind us." Of course he was sounding the obligatory good winner attitude, as he should have.  We all know better.  The liberals, their unions, their President, their media -- all have to be defeated because there is no working with them. 

And last night, we did.  Soundly. 

American Thinker

Democrats Join GOP in Condemning Leaks on Military, Intelligence

by Joel B. Pollak 

 

 Legislators from both parties are condemning a string of leaks from the "highest levels" of the White House about the Osama bin Laden killing, President Barack Obama's oversight of a terrorist "kill list," and U.S. cooperation with Israel in creating the Stuxnet computer virus to target Iranian nuclear facilities, among others.

The leaks, which always seem to make their way to selected mainstream media headlines, and which paint Obama as a tough-minded commander-in-chief, are being described as a threat to national security. Senate Democrats, in particular, have been vocal. The Hill quotes Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee: "This is like an avalanche. It is very detrimental and, candidly, I found it very concerning,” Feinstein said. “There’s no question that this kind of thing hurts our country.”

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, added to the criticism, saying that the leakers--whoever they may be--were acting contrary to national security: "A number of those leaks, and others in the last months about drone activities and other activities, are frankly all against national-security interests,” he said, according to The Hill. “I think they’re dangerous, damaging, and whoever is doing that is not acting in the interest of the United States of America.”

It is commonly suspected that the leaks are coming from the commander-in-chief himself--or his surrogates. Sen. McCain told CBS This Morning: "This is the most highly classified information and it’s now been leaked by the administration at the highest levels at the White House and that’s not acceptable." However, Senate Democrats are not ready to go that far. Sen. Carl Levin, chair of the Armed Services Committee, pushed back against the idea: "“I just can’t believe that there’s a decision in any kind of a formal way to leak this kind of a thing,” he told The Hill.

Big Peace

Politico Lashes Out at 'Citizens United' With Half-Truths

by John Nolte

 Earlier today, Politico's Glenn Thrush beclowned himself with this piece of leftist hackery that couldn't be more contextually challenged. Thrush says money is the reason Walker won his recall challenge in Wisconsin last night and that the dastardly Citizens United  Supreme Court decision is to blame:

Walker, exploiting a loophole that allowed him to hoard cash months ago, out-raised Barrett, a pathetic fundraiser who turned out to the political equivalent of the Milwaukee Bucks, by a TEN-TO-ONE margin, $30 million to $4 million. This was the first purely Citizens United Election -- and in that regard it should send a chill through Chicago and everywhere else Democrats are counting their pennies or begging Jeffrey Katzenberg to please, please, please save us.

What Thrush chooses to exclude in his analysis is the fact that unions poured another $21 million into the race on behalf of Democrats. So with those numbers added, it looks as though the money game was pretty even between the two parties. Walker might have had a slight edge, but as my colleague Ben Shapiro points out, Walker didn't have the built-in advantage of a ground game the unions enjoys (with taxpayer dollars fed to them through union dues from public workers).

Why would Thrush intentionally exclude such an important piece of journalistic context?

Well, for the same reason Politico's Donovan Slack excludes the most important journalistic context in his own piece of hackery that blames Citizens United for Obama shattering the record for most presidential time spent at fundraisers:

Including this week’s trip to California, he will have spent eight of 24 weekdays during the past month – that’s a third of them - on the road and collecting cash.
His event Thursday morning will mark his 153rd fundraiser since announcing his reelection bid last year. That’s nearly double the number that his predecessor George W. Bush had attended by this point in his reelection campaign, according to CBS’s Mark Knoller, who put 43’s early June number at 79. ...
Obama, like all federal candidates, is basically limited to taking in $35,800 per donor -- $5,000 for a campaign committee and $30,800 for the national party. But since Citizens United in 2010, outside groups - that are not subject to the limits -- have been allowed to spend unlimited amounts on political campaigns.

First off, Slack is simply making excuses for Obama's jet-setting with the 1% as the economy burns, and laughably attempts to portray poor Obama as some kind of victim, which is in and of itself pathetic. 

In order to pull this off, though, what Slack chooses not to tell his readers is that there are pro-Obama super PACs just like there are pro-Romney super PACs, so the playing field with Citizens United is a perfectly level one. Moreover, it was Barack Obama in 2008 who exploded the money game by breaking his word to accept federal campaign matching funds (something the media, including Politico, never made him pay for).

By the time the 2008 race was over, Obama and the DNC had raised $830 million compared to McCain's paltry $500 million.

And as a watcher of Politico, I can tell you that no one there was ever wringing their hands over all that money being poured into politics when it was headed for Obama's fat coffers.

Something else Slack covers up is that Obama has to spend more time fundraising because he's having trouble raising the same amount of money he did last time, which has absolutely nothing to do with Citizens United and everything to do with the fact that he's a lousy president.

The bottom line here is that Thrush, Slack, Politico, and the whole of the MSM hate Citizens Untied for a couple of reasons. First off, it won't allow Obama the grotesque money advantage he enjoyed in 2008, which hurts his reelection chances -- something unthinkable to this crowd. Secondly, Citizens United has created the rise of the super PACs, which means that corporations other than media corporations can now compete with the MSM to get a political message out.

The corrupt media hates that because the MSM believes it should be the only corporate-backed partisan machine legally allowed to use unlimited funds to get candidates elected. 

As you can see by the two stories published at Politico today and those catalogued on the sidebar, Politico is getting more desperate by the day. Today's lies of omission are well beyond bias and edging into the arena of outright dishonesty.

And it's only June.

Big Journalism

WI Recall a Tea Party Victory

by Dana Loesch 

 Networks are calling the historic Wisconsin recall for Governor Scott Walker and Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch while final vote counts continue to roll in. This victory marks the third time the far left and Big Labor has been defeated at the polls since Obama's inauguration. If ever there was a referendum on public sector unions and the President's idea of how government should work, it was with this election. If ever there was a measure of the muscle of the tea party movement, let it be judged by this election.  The tea party led the way, got out the vote, and raised massive amounts of money for the recall candidates. I visited Wisconsin twice to help rally voters and was amazed at the ground game of the Wisconsin tea party groups. I was amazed at the effort of folks like Nancy Milholland, a rock-n-roll tea partier with AFP, who helped coordinate with local grassroots. I met a tea partier named Tamra Varebrook who ran a legitimate race as a "Walker Democrat" in Racine County, the hotly contested race where embattled Van Wanggaard fought to help hold the state Senate's Republican majority. I was up there just this past Saturday when 4,000 patriots filled a field in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin, on the outskirts of Milwaukee. They were energized, engaged, and ready to make their voices heard at the polls.

Jimmy Hoffa Jr. said in Detroit: "President Obama, this is your army ... let's take these sons of bitches out."
So much for that.

While Occupiers and union protesters got the ink, the tea party dropped the placards and picked up clipboards, phones, and got out the vote. They petitioned, volunteered, they took out a number of RINOs, including Dick Lugar; they forced Orrin Hatch into a primary and got Ted Cruz into a runoff. We won the House for the GOP in 2010. We won MA for Scott Brown. And now we've sent a message to the White House via Wisconsin: your class warfare rhetoric is rejected, your public sector construct voted down --again.

The stage is set. Obama was denied a campaign talking point in Wisconsin. The first generation of reform governors has been protected by voters. Debbie Wasserman Schultz called Wisconsin a "dry run" for November. Indeed it is. Get ready.

#War.

Big Government

Unions Can't Stop the Coming Tide of Pension Reform

by Mike Flynn 

 Last night, while Scott Walker was expanding his 2010 margin of victory, voters in California signaled what may be the death knell for public sector unions and their platinum benefits packages. Voters in San Diego and San Jose overwhelmingly approved significant cuts to their city workers' pension benefits. Its the start of a wave the unions will be unable to stop.  From The Associated Press:

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Voters in two major California cities overwhelmingly approved cuts to retirement benefits for city workers in what supporters said was a mandate that may lead to similar ballot initiatives in other states and cities that are struggling with mounting pension obligations.

The measures were especially significant, because they covered current workers, not just new hires. San Diego approved its measure with 66% of the vote. In the more liberal San Jose, the measure won 70%.

It isn't hard to understand the voters frustration with the unions. In recent years, the pension costs in both cities have skyrocketed; San Diego now spends 20% of its general budget on pension costs. In San Jose, the figure is almost 30%. This has forced both cities to dramatically cut back city services and lay off workers. In San Diego, fire stations had to share engines and trucks. The generous benefit packages union had won from politicians are simply unsustainable. Even voters in California have had enough.

Make no mistake; mayors and governors across the country were watching closely last night's results. Cities and states nationwide are struggling with the soaring costs of union benefits. They are increasingly difficult to defend when private sector workers have to adapt to reduced benefits and increased job insecurity.

And, reforming public sector pensions works. Wisconsin has already saved $1 Billion without cuts to services, lay-offs or tax hikes. Cities and states around the country could save tens of billions of dollars with similar reforms.

The unions know this, which is why they poured so much money into these fights. Every responsible elected official knowns pension obligations have to be tackled if they are to get their fiscal houses in order. Unions needed to show that the political risks in doing so would be too great. Their failure was catastrophic.

Not only were the politicians championing these reforms not punished, they thrived. Walker got more votes than he received in 2010. Carl DeMaio, chief proponent of the reforms in San Diego, is the leading frontrunner to win the Mayor's office. In San Jose, its measure was championed by Mayor Chuck Reed, a Democrat.

A wave for reforming public unions is building nationwide. There is nothing the unions can do to stop it.

Big Government

Left-Wing Recall Effort Fails in Wisconsin

by Breitbart News

 

Multiple news outlets now project that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker will defeat challenger Tom Barrett in today's recall election. Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch is also expected to beat challenger Mahlon Mitchell.

Developing...

Breitbart

Huge push by labor, tea party, in final hours before recall vote

June 4, 2012
Rick Moran

With less than 24 hours before the polls open in the Wisconsin recall election, both sides are making a final push to energize their supporters and get out the vote.

The Hill:

Major unions and Tea Party groups have plowed substantial funds into the recall election. Politicians on the national scene have journeyed to the state to campaign with their chosen candidates.

But the stakes are particularly high for labor groups, which have invested heavily in the fight to unseat Walker and have expressed concerns that their traditional Democratic allies haven't been as committed.

More than $63 million has been spent by Walker and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, his Democratic challenger, as well as outside groups. That figure tops the more than $34 million spent on the 2010 gubernatorial race, making it Wisconsin's most expensive state contest in history.

Republicans and Democrats agree that the Tuesday showdown could be a preview for November's presidential race. A Walker win in battleground Wisconsin could boost Republican hopes to take the state, which has gone blue in the last several campaigns for the White House. A Walker defeat could also energize Democratic supporters ahead of the presidential contest.

Asked on Fox News Sunday whether a Walker victory meant Wisconsin swings to Romney in the fall, Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee's campaign, said he couldn't say, but that more states in the region are moving towards the GOP.

"There is something going on in Wisconsin and all across the Great Lakes where it is moving away from liberal Democratic policies and for more reform-oriented Republican policies," Gillespie said.

Pundits always like to draw broad, national lessons from local elections and in this case, they are overreaching. Even if Walker wins comfortably, it is still an uphill climb for Mitt Romney to win the state in November. And Gillespie is talking through his hat about other Great Lake states moving toward the GOP. 

Which ones would those be, Ed? Illinois? Obama is a slam dunk winner in his home state. Michigan? The latest poll has Obama up 14. Ditto Minnesota. Only Indiana could be considered solid Romney territory, while Ohio is a toss up. Pennsylvania always teases Republicans but ends up in the Democratic camp on election day.

The industrial heartland is gettable for Romney but he must select his targets carefully. Iowa is very much in play, as is Missouri. Ohio is, of course, a must win and Wisconsin may deserve a lot of attention no matter how the recall race turns out. Michigan is one of Romney's "home" states, but like Massachusetts, he trails badly.

The course of the national election takes many twists and turns and it is too easy to point to a particular event along the way as affecting the race decisively. The voters in Wisconsin are not going to be thinking about Romney or Obama when they walk into the polling booth tomorrow. They are going to be thinking about jobs and the Wisconsin economy.

And on that, the recall election will turn.

American Thinker