Wisconsin Recall - Onto the Next Phase

	"The most recent polls show the race to be a toss-
	up.

	For Barrett to win, he'll need to almost double the
	Democratic votes that turned out on Tuesday."

1. Barrett's Win Moves Wisconsin Recall to Next Phase (Ruth
Conniff, The Progressive)

2. Barrett vs. Walker: The Rematch (Matthew Rothschild, The
Progressive)

======

Barrett's Win Moves Wisconsin Recall to Next Phase

by Ruth Conniff

The Progressive

May 9, 2012

http://www.progressive.org/tom_barrett_wins.html

Tom Barrett won a decisive victory over his Democratic
opponents in Tuesday's recall election, 47% to 35% against
his nearest challenger, Kathleen Falk, and 61% to 31% in
Dane County, Falk's home base.

Worries about unity among Falk and Barrett supporters
dissipated, as Falk's supporters issued statements one by
one, endorsing Barrett and emphasizing the need to come
together to defeat Scott Walker.

Mike Tate, the head of Wisconsin's Democratic Party,
dismissed charges that Barrett's campaign canceled a
planned unity rally in Madison on the day after the primary
because the candidate didn't want to be photographed with
protesters and union members at the march.

"That's not true. The decision was my call," Tate said.
"What we need now is to start talking to voters and knocking
on doors."

Tate first scheduled and then canceled the rally, he said,
because polling done over the weekend by PPP and internal
polls showed it wouldn't play well, and that it's more
important to start calling voters around the state.

"We have to hit the ground running and do everything we can
in the next 28 days to reach out to voters all across the
state," Tate said.

In his victory speech, Barrett got a rise out of the crowd,
asking, "Do we want a governor who divides our state like
it's never been divided before? . . . Has the worst jobs
record in the nation . . . And has a legal defense fund?"

Dwelling on the fact that Walker has raised 60 to 70 percent
of his money from out of state, Barrett portrayed the recall
race as a contest between the people of Wisconsin and out of
state corporations trying to buy the statehouse.

"I'm going to need you like I've never needed you before,"
he said, urging all Wisconsinites to get involved in the
battle to take back their state.

[Ruth Conniff covers national politics for The Progressive
and is a voice of The Progressive on many TV and radio
programs. Conniff was a regular on CNN's Sunday Capital Gang
and is now a regular on PBS's To the Contrary. She also has
appeared frequently on C-SPAN's Washington Journal and on
NPR and Pacifica. Conniff's op-ed commentaries have appeared
in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los
Angeles Times. She also contributes regularly to Isthmus,
Madison's weekly newspaper. Conniff became The Progressive's
Associate Editor in 1991, and Managing Editor in January
1997. In recent years, she has interviewed William Greider,
Rep. Marcy Kaptur, and Elizabeth Warren.]

==========

Barrett vs. Walker: The Rematch

by Matthew Rothschild

The Progressive

May 9, 2012

http://www.progressive.org/barrett_vs_walker.html

Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee, won a decisive victory
in the Democratic primary in Wisconsin on Tuesday, setting
up a colossal rematch against Scott Walker.

Barrett won a whopping 58 percent of the vote, besting his
nearest opponent, former Dane County executive Kathleen
Falk, who had 34 percent.

So Barrett will again face Walker, who beat him in November
2010 by 52 to 47 percent, a margin of 125,000 votes.

On Tuesday, the Democratic vote totals, when combined with
the votes of leftist activist Arthur Kohl-Riggs, who ran as
a Republican, came to 685,000. Walker's totals, when
combined with the votes of a fake Democrat who ran for
governor, came to 631,000 votes. So Barrett, by this count,
starts up by 54,000. But Walker ran virtually unopposed
within his party, while the Dems had a highly contested
primary, so this is not much solace.

The most recent polls show the race to be a toss-up.

For Barrett to win, he'll need to almost double the
Democratic votes that turned out on Tuesday.

In November 2010, Walker won with 1,129,000 votes against an
undercaffeinated Barrett.

And while there are many Walker voters, especially in union
households, who have a bad case of voter remorse, Walker's
base of support remains strong. His troops will turn out on
Election Day. You can count on that.

Plus, at the end of April, he had raised - and had on hand -
ten times the amount of money that Barrett had. Even on
Election Night, Walker was saturating the airwaves with
negative ads against Barrett.

This could set up a classic matchup of people power versus
money power.

But Barrett is a standard-issue moderate Democrat, who
actually doesn't embody the forces that initiated the
recall. He offends those forces by palling around with Rahm
Emanuel. And he would be making a big mistake if he focuses
all of his attention on the tiny slice of the Wisconsin
electorate that is still undecided. (And who are these
people? Where have they been the last 15 months?) Instead,
to win, Barrett must make sure that the million people who
signed the recall petition actually show up at the polls,
and that one out of three of them manages to drag a friend
or relative along with them.

The race may turn out like Obama's in 2008, where
grandchildren begged their racist grandmothers to vote for
Obama as a favor to them. If union members, women's rights
activists, environmentalists, teachers and others who've
been assaulted by Walker are able to make it a family
affair, then Walker may lose.

If he does, it would invigorate progressive forces in
Wisconsin and around the country and reaffirm the power of
grassroots activism. It would also be a boon to Democrats in
November, who recognize that Wisconsin is a swing state. And
it should dampen the chances that Paul Ryan, who is joined
at the hip with Walker, will be Romney's VP pick.

But Walker is the darling of the vicious business class, a
hero to bosses everywhere who want to put the boot on the
throat of labor.

If their money enables Walker to prevail, it would be a
devastating blow to the million people who signed those
petitions and to the hundreds of thousands who protested in
the streets. Anti-depressants by the truckload would have to
be delivered to the Badger State.

And nationally, Walker would be lionized by the rightwing.
He'd help Romney in Wisconsin, and he'd signal that it's
open season on labor and on every other item on the
progressive agenda.

There is a lot at stake on June 5 in Wisconsin.

[Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive
magazine, which is one of the leading voices for peace and
social justice in this country. Rothschild has appeared on
Nightline, C-SPAN, The O'Reilly Factor, and NPR, and his
newspaper commentaries have run in the Chicago Tribune, the
L.A. Times, the Miami Herald, and a host of other
newspapers. Rothschild is also the author of a book entitled
You Have No Rights: Stories of America in Our Repressive Age
(New Press, 2007). A graduate of Harvard University,
Rothschild prior to coming to The Progressive worked as the
editor of Multinational Monitor, a magazine founded by Ralph
Nader. Rothschild came to The Progressive in 1983, and has
worked for the magazine in many different capacities, first
as associate editor, then managing editor, then publisher,
and since 1994 as editor.]

==========

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate