Walker Would Lose if Wisconsin Election Held Today, Says New Poll
Not exactly a Walker campaign rally... (photo: mrbula)
People I talked to in Wisconsin say that Scott Walker isn’t an ideologue as much as he is a politician. He was seen as a moderate in the Legislature, working with left-leaning types on some issues. He saw a moment to “change Wisconsin” by breaking the public employee unions that help fund the Democratic side, and armed with the legislative numbers, he took it. He wasn’t prepared for a backlash, and most important, he should have taken the concession he was able to extract from the unions on pension and health care contributions and ended it there. He would have been able to declare victory, and could always have gone back to collective bargaining at another point, if the local unions didn’t adhere to the same compromise. But running past the compromise has put Walker into a box. It was a major mistake.
What could be the case is that Walker is something of an ideologue when it comes to unions. He used layoffs as a strategy as Milwaukee county executive to extract concessions from unions years earlier. His entire history is filled with union fights. Maybe he thought the ground was fertile to end public union participation permanently.