The Wisconsin farm country bordering Minnesota to the east is also Walker territory, where "We stand with Scott Walker" campaign signs backing the Republican governor in the historic June 5 recall election far outnumber those for his opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.
It's a part of the state far removed from Madison -- the city that former Gov. Lee Dreyfus once described as "30 square miles surrounded by reality" -- where tens of thousands of protesters drew the nation's attention to the State Capitol in 2011 after Walker launched his full-scale assault on public-employee unions.
The New York Times was among the news outlets that dispatched reporters to chronicle the Madison revolt, but the spot national coverage failed to reflect the antitax, antiunion fervor elsewhere in the state that helped Walker defeat Barrett in their Round 1 matchup in fall 2010. The deep political divide in Wisconsin, much like the divisiveness in Minnesota, has been exacerbated by painful postrecession deleveraging in both the private and public sectors.
Walker, who inherited a $3.6 billion budget deficit, campaigned as a fiscal conservative, so it was no surprise that he sought concessions from teachers and other public workers. But the governor and GOP Legislature overplayed their hand -- and ignited the regrettable recall -- by stripping the majority of government workers of most of their collective-bargaining rights.
As we've stated previously on this page, Walker used the deficit as an excuse to take away the fundamental rights of public workers even though the unions had all but agreed to necessary salary and benefit givebacks. Walker went for organized labor's jugular, and his administration has been in survival mode ever since.
Although we disagree with Walker on bargaining rights and other issues, this is not an endorsement of either candidate in the Wisconsin race. Rather, it's a rejection of a recall system that should be used to remove corrupt officeholders -- not to protest legislation passed by elected representatives.
In Minnesota, recall can be considered only in documented, court-reviewed cases of "serious malfeasance or nonfeasance ... in the performance of the duties of the office, or conviction during the term of office of a serious crime." Wisconsin would do better with a similar stricture.
Under Wisconsin law, Walker's opponents needed 540,208 signatures to trigger the recall election -- just 25 percent of all the votes cast in the November 2010 election. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin said it collected more than 1 million; the state's Government Accountability Board put the official total at 931,042.
