For the record, this is not Wednesday morning Quarterbacking, this is nothing I haven't said before.
So consider this a warning for 2012. If you think you're going to be able to hold your nose and wind up with a Democrat in the White House, you're kidding yourself. As you saw from this Recall battle, the opposition is well funded, and now given cover by the Supreme Court.
That's not to say that Scott Walker shouldn't be scared as well. Those were primarily red districts that went for Obama in 2008, and the ones you won last night you barely held onto. They were also rural. Once bigger cities like Madison get involved, your ass could be smoked...
...but that's only if you show up.
In the meantime, I find it interesting how much the Wisconsin story isn't getting covered in the press today. Not only is there not a lot of hand-wringing or nazel gazing, there's just not much of anything...period. Andrew Sullivan didn't mention it. Neither did Ezra Klein. I'm just waiting for the first Professional Lefter to come out and blame the White House for "not doing enough"...when it was y'alls fault in the first place.
Josh Marshall provided this in response to a reader today, and I thought it beared repeating.
There are different ways to see what happened last night. Legislative recalls are extremely, extremely uncommon in the United States. Winning two of them last night was a big victory. Both senators won in 2010 and in the big Obama year of 2008. And the Democrats came very close to knocking off two more. Still, let's be honest: they wanted to steal away the GOP's unitary hold on the state government. And they didn't. They came up short. And there's a lot of very real and merited disappointment over that.
But it's wrong to see political energy and resources as finite and something to be marshaled. It's not a zero sum game. This kind of effort doesn't take away from something else. It adds to it. It builds organizational muscle. In fact, it's like muscle. You build it by exercising it. I don't lose part of my allotment of muscle by doing some bench presses. I build it up. And the exercise itself demonstrates that a political movement can bite back.
In the recent budget and debt battle I saw numerous readers write in to say, Hey, how'd this Norquist guy get all this power? Or, Why is it that every time they can get every last member of their caucus to toe the line? Yes, Norquist's got tons of cash from various moneyed interests. But his power is based on working this issue for literally decades in out of the way races across the country. Again, building muscle through the exercise of muscle. How do Republicans enforce such crazy amounts of party discipline? Because they have a record of primarying people. And over time people get that message. So yes, the Dems and the unions in Wisconsin came up short. But two Republican senators already lost their jobs over this. And people will remember that.
Politics ain't bean bag and it also ain't easy. It takes time. It would be a mistake to see this as a distraction, a big mistake.
