Tag: recall elections

What Obama Should Learn From Wisconsin

With Wisconsin’s epic state senate recall battle now over, the results carry a clear message that ought to resonate all the way to Washington – and especially the Obama White House. The essence of politics in America today, for Democrats at least, is to understand and communicate the political nature of the opposition. Having suffered a bad beating last November, the Wisconsin Democrats and their allies have succeeded in building a strong movement that fights back explicitly against the right-wing policies of Gov. Scott Walker’s Republican Party.

Last week they won two out of six recall campaigns mounted against GOP state senators which was widely interpreted as a defeat or at best a draw. But on Tuesday they won all three recall efforts against Democrats, giving them an overall series victory, and cutting deeply into perceived support for the Walker agenda. A third seat would have been turned over from the Republicans to Democrats, but for a thousand votes or so in a single senate district – or but for a profusion of ballot-counting irregularities that alleged benefited Republicans in a single big county.

To hear the Republicans and their supporters crowing, you wouldn’t know they had held onto control of the state senate by only a single vote. So it is clear that the governor remains vulnerable to recall himself – which must be why he now sounds more like the bipartisan, reasonable, constructive Republican, the very scarce kind that President Obama has pursued so long and so fruitlessly.

On the day after his party forfeited two state senate seats – matching the total number of elected officials recalled in Wisconsin’s entire history – Walker told reporters that he realized voters “want us to do more working together” and that he would henceforth focus on “jobs” (with no mention of his previous union-busting initiatives). Surely he is also concerned with his own plummeting poll numbers, which show a profound sense of buyer’s remorse among Wisconsin independent voters, as well as the continued determination of the state’s progressives and unions to remove him from power. And if the results of the recall elections of the past two weeks have encouraged him to reconsider the confrontational attitude he displayed during his first six months in office, so much the better.

But what do the Wisconsin results mean to President Obama, whose gauzy dream of a “post-partisan” era in Washington have been so bitterly dashed by the rise of the Tea Party? In a battleground state that could go either way next year – and that went sharply rightward last year – the progressive Democratic mobilization over the past six months has been nothing short of remarkable.

Consider that Wisconsin has only seen twenty or so recall elections over the past century, and that of those elections only two have previously resulted in the recall of an incumbent. Consider that incumbents generally have a powerful advantage in any election, especially an off-year recall. Consider further that only a few months ago, the Republicans used their majority to pass a highly restrictive voter ID bill that probably suppressed the vote of Democratic-leaning constituencies, including low-income families, elderly Medicare and Social Security beneficiaries, ethnic minorities, and students.

And finally consider the lukewarm attitude of the Obama White House toward the Wisconsin struggle, despite the president’s past vow to “walk the picket line” in defense of workers’ rights. Although the Obama political operation was reported to be lending help to the Democratic recall effort, there wasn’t much visible support from the president or his surrogates.

Perhaps it would have been inappropriate for the president to involve himself directly in a campaign against state officials. But whether he ought to have spoken out or not, there are still two profound lessons for him in this outcome.

The first lesson is that bipartisanship seems to be encouraged among Republicans these days only when they suspect that voters may be sick of their extremism. Just as Walker is now worried about his future, so is Ohio Governor John Kasich, who has suddenly realized that he prefers cooperation over confrontation over collective bargaining – evidently because he fears the results of a potential repeal referendum on the issue in November.

The second lesson is that there is only one way to instill such fear among Republicans, in Wisconsin or Washington: By demonstrating the will to push back, as hard as necessary, on behalf of the principles Democrats have always promised to uphold. That is what the Republicans do with great consistency on behalf of their own ideology, however extreme or unpopular. That is what inspired the Democrats who have fought them to a standstill in Wisconsin. And that is what could still save Obama’s presidency.

 

Wisconsin: Conservatives Win, Liberals Gain

WASHINGTON — There will be no magic potion, no instant formula for Democrats and progressives struggling to come back from their disastrous 2010 election losses.

They had hoped that Tuesday’s recall elections in Wisconsin would provide a narrative-changing breakthrough, proof-positive that the overreaching conservatives who now dominate the Republican Party had ignited a middle-of-the-road voter rebellion and inspired a legion of labor and liberal activists who would offer a definitive riposte to the tea party.

What happened instead was not without promise for Democrats, but it was also a sign of the resiliency of conservative activism — and the power of conservative money.

By holding on to four of its six contested state Senate seats, Gov. Scott Walker’s party maintained its majority and a right to claim victory. But that majority is a now precarious one-seat advantage. While Republicans hope they might pick up another seat next week by winning at least one of two recalls directed against Democratic incumbents, Walker seemed to signal he understood that his was not an unalloyed triumph.

The often pugnacious governor was remarkably mild in a statement he issued after the results were in. “I believe we can work together to grow jobs and improve our state,” he said. “In the days ahead I look forward to working with legislators of all parties to grow jobs for Wisconsin and move our state forward.” One Democrat called it the “most conciliatory statement he has ever made.” In the meantime, Democrats were touting the potential of their working with Republican state Sen. Dale Schultz, a moderate who has frequently resisted Walker’s arch-conservatism.

Still, this was small comfort compared to what might have been. If only about 1,100 votes had switched in the closest contest, Democrats would have won the extra Senate seat they needed and would now be celebrating their use of Walker’s frontal attack on the collective bargaining rights of public employees to produce a political realignment.

Republicans had shrewdly found ways of delaying the balloting. This allowed some of the white-hot anger of the winter’s labor battles to dissipate — even if the unions put everything they had into intense organizing.

You could tell even before the polls closed that Democrats feared they would fall short. “I just wish these elections had been held a week ago,” said a Wisconsin-based Democratic consultant as reports of high turnout made their way around the state. He argued that the anti-Walker message was muddled by a week of economic turmoil spawned by the debt-ceiling fight and a plummeting stock market. The dominant news was national and international, about President Obama and Congress, not about Wisconsin, Walker and his state Senate allies.

These contests will be studied as a laboratory test of wide-open campaign finance laws that allowed outside groups to pour millions of dollars into the state. Conservatives succeeded in using their large financial advantage to blunt the impact of labor and progressive organizing. All the spending had the effect of transforming the recalls from a progressive crusade into a typical and dispiriting electoral trench war and its weapons of choice, negative media ads and nasty mailings.

In truth, the euphoria created by the initial anti-Walker upsurge disguised the fact that the recalls were always destined to be difficult. “This was an extraordinarily hard set of races to win,” said Mark Mellman, a pollster who worked with the Wisconsin Democrats. “All these were incumbents who won in 2008 when Barack Obama was sweeping the state. Yet the Republicans lost one-third of their incumbents,” referring to the two senators recalled. “I’d be delighted if the Republicans lost one-third of their incumbents in 2012.”

Mellman, of course, was putting the best spin on the results for the Democrats. But it’s true that these were fights waged in Republican territory. As Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel pointed out in a helpful analysis, while all six districts were swing areas that had voted for both Walker and Obama, five of the six were more Republican than the state as a whole in 2008 and again in 2010. (And Democrats carried the other district handily.)

Republicans can say, and it’s true, that a very conservative governor carried out a very conservative agenda and escaped defeat. But he did not escape rebuke, and progressives can legitimately claim that having watched conservatives take fight after fight to their adversaries, a labor-liberal coalition reversed these roles in Wisconsin. Conservatives withstood this assault. Progressives made modest but measurable advances.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group

Walker, Wisconsin GOP Rush to Pass Bills While They Can

The Republican State Senators in Wisconsin who listened to Governor Scott Walker and stripped most public employees of their bargaining rights earlier this year are desperately trying to pass more right-wing legislation before next month’s recall elections. The successful petition for elections in 9 districts–mainly the result of a re-energized labor movement and sinking Republican approval ratings–means that they could lose their majority much, much sooner than expected.

According to The New York Times, they’ve dealt with the threat of political death by doling out goodies to the conservative base. They successfully deregulated the telecom industry and forced voters to bring ID to the polls. Up next: Slashing funds for Planned Parenthood, restricting immigrants in state universities, and making it easier to tote around a concealed gun. [NYT]