Can you play a dirge on a bongo drum? Can you hold a wake at an open-air protest of union activists, hippie leftovers and lefty college students?
The left’s year-and-a-half-long siege of Wisconsin has receded in failure like the Muslim invaders at the gates of Vienna in 1529. The Ottomans were never quite the same, and the public-sector unions won’t be either. With Gov. Scott Walker’s comfortable victory last night in his recall election, they have lost a momentous struggle in the progressive heartland.
From the first, the reaction to Walker’s union reforms on the left had about it the smell of impotent rage. Democratic lawmakers fled the state rather than vote on the measures; protesters flooded the state capitol in Madison, hoping to substitute the clamor of a demonstration for democratic deliberation.
When Gov. Walker had the audacity to forge ahead, they wanted revenge, and were confident that it would be theirs. Three times they sought to roll back the reforms — and three times they failed. They tried to beat a swing-vote state Supreme Court justice, and lost. They tried to recall the Republicans key to Walker’s majority in the state Senate, and came up short.
Finally, they gunned for Walker himself and apparently got no closer to defeating him than they had in 2010, when he first won election and no one had yet thought of depicting him on a protest sign as Hitler.
The case against Walker failed largely for two reasons. First, the public unions weren’t defending rights, but privileges. There is nothing written in stone that says public-sector workers must have collective-bargaining rights (they don’t at the federal level); that the state must collect dues for the unions (other organizations don’t get that benefit); that members of government unions must pay only 0.2 percent of their wages into their pensions and 6 percent of their health-care premiums (far below the averages in the private sector).
Second, the reforms worked. School districts took advantage of their new flexibility under the Walker reforms to achieve significant savings. In an irony that says much about last night’s outcome, Walker’s opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, himself used the reforms to save an estimated $10 million for his city.
No wonder that by the end, Barrett was hitting Walker on everything but the changes that precipitated the recall in the first place.
Yesterday’s vote may be remembered as the death rattle of public-sector unions in the state that first created them. The Wall Street Journal reports that union membership has already steeply declined. The Wisconsin chapter of AFSCME has shrunk from 62,818, when Walker undertook his reforms to 28,745. The American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin lost 6,000 members out of 17,000.
Union sisterhood and brotherhood aren’t quite as glorious once the dues are no longer mandatory.
Those declining numbers represent the sapping of power from the government-union complex that has done so much to bring states and localities around the country to the brink of bankruptcy. They tell the tale of real change, and of how reform is possible — even when special interests are deeply entrenched and ready to fight desperately for every advantage that they consider their entitlement.
Do bad things come in threes? The left must hope not. Occupy Wall Street has faded into irrelevance. The Wisconsin recall failed. And the pall of a third possible, even worse, calamity hangs in the air: the defeat of President Obama.
Obama kept his distance from the recall, lamely tweeting his support for Barrett but never showing up. Walker’s win may mean that the president is vulnerable in Wisconsin. At the very least, it shows the appeal of the reform conservatism that Mitt Romney will identity himself with.
Bang the bongo slowly: A tough year for the left may only get worse.