Political Money & the Wisconsin Recall

Liberals who beat their chests and gnashed their teeth about the dispositive role money played in the Wisconsin recall were not wrong – they just were not right in the manner they thought they were right.

Money, as it happens, was not the reason Gov. Walker survived and the Democratic-public-employee union nexus failed. The evidence was all but conclusive at least a month beforehand that the recall effort was going to fail. Out-of-state liberal interests – struggling to raise as much money as they had the last quadrennial – were understandably loathe to commit resources to a lost cause. Neither was President Obama – mired in an intense state of political vulnerability in his reelection campaign – willing to expend his own personal capital to a cause with little chance of success to recommend itself. Gov. Walker and his allies had and spent more money because they had a decided advantage going in. Groups and individuals throw their money at winners, not losers.

The financial disparity between the two sides was thus not a cause but a symptom.

The role money did in fact play in the Wisconsin recall was in its genesis, not its fate. Liberals who have and continue to declare that big money in politics is an evil that bested them willfully ignore the fact that the reason they pursued the recall in the first place was to preserve their own big money source: unions and, specifically, public-sector employee unions. These have been a cash cow for the Democratic Party for decades and Gov. Walker's reforms, which curtail the ability of these unions to fleece taxpayers for over-generous compensation and benefits, threaten that milk-source as never before.

In other words, the cycle of public-sector unions spending millions to elect Democrats, who then give public employees too much compensation, who then fill their unions' coffers with more money, who then spend that money to elect more Democrats, has been ended, or at least abridged, by the Wisconsin reforms.

That is what the recall was about and where big money actually came into play within it.