I See In The News

I see in the news that the Wisconsin Democratic Party has gathered enough signatures to call for a recall election of Governor Walker.  In the article I read, the author, in an effort that can only be responsibly understood as an attempt to bolster the Democratic Party effort, made much of the fact that a whole lot more signatures were gathered than were needed.  Noted.  They'd better do that.  If they need (for instance) 537,359 and they get just that, then disallowing even one of those - and you know somebody signed "Mickey Mouse" - makes the petition invalid.  According to the article, Gov Davis (Cal) got 18% disallowed when he was challenged.  Ergo, a bunch more is merely good political management, not an indicator of any sort of public cohesion.

I expect they will be successful.  Walker took on the unions and won.  That won't be popular.  It will be particularly unpopular during these lean times, when a generation that has been trained that government is Daddy and God both will look to someone to fix it for them.  The sad part is that most of the time, union workers merely trade control centers.  They make the argument that the company will not take good care of them, so they go find a sugar daddy that will.  Enter the union.  In their paradigm, either the union owns them or the company owns them.  What's sad is that they don't wish for an option to not be owned.

A Wisconsin resident remarked to me during the union vs state government fight that Walker was just put up there by the Republican Party to be a union buster.  Setting aside, for now, the point that a party very likely did in fact put him in office, as opposed to the people insisting on being independent enough to have done it themselves, it's as reasonable a bet that he is just that as that he is not that.  Who knows?  It's simply a sad drift away from common sense (see the below blog) that allows the discussion of whether or not a government can manage employees or whether they have to ask the union's permission to twist into whether or not he was sent up there to be a union buster.  It's a dodge, and it was well employed by the Democratic Party.  The term "union buster" is an undeniable perjorative to most Americans, and the Party is not above doing whatever is necessary to gain power.

What will be most interesting to watch will be the response of the professional pundits: Limbaugh, Maddow, et al.  That is, it will be interesting to see if any of them have any sort of new line of bull to throw at the situation, or whether they will simply recycle some version of "the (pick one) Party is inherently stupid and my Party is inherently right."

Al