The Day After

You may have heard: Scott Walker is still the governor of Wisconsin. If anything, he's now stronger than he was before all the drama, because he's had a mid-term reaffirmation of his standing with the voters of the state. We've witnessed a 16-month tantrum that led up to yesterday's election. And to the eternal credit of the citizenry of Wisconsin, we've seen that tantrums are rejected.

So what to make of this? Let's put on the ol' amateur pundit hat. First, remember the face of the protesters from last year? Here is a sample, in full throat. Attractive group, right? We'll get back to that:

Pay attention to MEEEEEEEEE!!!

• As you could have predicted, challenger Tom Barrett won Dane County and Milwaukee County pretty easily, which gave him a 200,000 vote advantage. Nearly everywhere else, Walker crushed him. The visual map at the link gives you a pretty good look at the state of play. Walker won 62 of the 72 counties in Wisconsin, and in most of them ran up a 60-40 advantage.
• As usual, Waukesha County was a huge factor in this race, It went 72-27 for Walker. The plan for Democrats, both in Wisconsin and elsewhere, has been to limit the impact of suburban voters. They certainly didn't yesterday.
• If you scan around the web and look at the lefty websites, you hear a lot of complaining about the Citizens United decision and how it was Big Money that won this election. You can believe that if you'd like, but it's silly. This electorate didn't need campaign ads to see what was happening. People outside of Dane County don't have a lot of affection for the street theater and self-indulgence that was on display, day after day after day after day. . . well, you get the idea. There was a lot of revulsion with the tactics. If you are a Democrat today, you can blame the money and Emanuel Goldstein the Koch brothers all you want. But a better place to look might be in the mirror. Especially if you look like the people in the picture.
• Anger is self-limiting and usually counterproductive. Riddle me this -- when you see people with the facial expressions you see in the picture, what is your reaction? Do you think highly of them? A lot of people who don't get down to Madison much didn't think very highly of them, then or now. And they were able to register their views yesterday.

• Walker is a cool customer. His victory speech last night was very good and sounded all the right notes: let's put this behind us, let's work together, let's go have brats and beer. I hope that the Democrats take him up on the offer, but I'm skeptical.
• Public sector unionism is in trouble now. Now that Walker has survived, it's highly likely that Act 10 will survive as well. It's difficult to imagine that the unions in Wisconsin will be able to keep people on the membership rolls if they can't forcibly extract dues from their paychecks. The fundamental corruption of having unions buying the team on the other side of the bargaining table is now over in Wisconsin. And other governors are going to take notice.
• Take another look at the picture, which dates back to March, 2011. If you look in the background, you see a sign that says "Where is Obama?" Well, he certainly wasn't in Wisconsin recently. Of course, who wants to hang out with angry people?