In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.Gail Collins: David I’m really sad about the results from Wisconsin. I can’t find a silver lining. You and I totally disagree about what this vote means, and my analysis is much more depressing.
Although I am kind of excited about the fact that we’re so opposed. You’re generally so reasonable, it’s hard to have a real knock-down fight.
David Brooks: As Sonny Liston said to Cassius Clay, “Bring it on.” It’s O.K. to have a knock-down disagreement once in a while. I’ll just start out by noting that a lot of Democrats agree with me on this one. Scott Walker won easily in Wisconsin, a state that went for Barack Obama by 14 points last time and will probably go for him again (if you believe last night’s exit polls, though I don’t see why any of us should since they also suggested that the recall vote was close).
Gail: You see the recall as a test case on whether the public will make the hard choices when it comes to reducing our debt. I saw it as a test of the current Republican strategy of putting all the sacrifice on the backs of the un-wealthy. Announcing that public employees have to get fewer benefits and lose their power to negotiate isn’t a hard choice if you happen to be the party that does not benefit from much union support.
Andy Manis/Getty ImagesA group sang a union song at an election rally in Madison, Wis.David: I’m not sure what you mean by less wealthy. These particular public employees were receiving benefits and pensions far above those received by the median earner in Wisconsin. But this is a national problem. In state after state, from New York to Illinois to California, the lavish over-promises made to public employees are squeezing budgets, making it harder to fund schools and social programs and all the rest.
These promises weren’t a Robin Hood venture. Quite the reverse.
Gail: The issue here wasn’t whether the public employee benefits should be cut. Walker campaigned on that when he ran for governor and he won. But he never mentioned eliminating the unions’ collective bargaining power – it was, as he said in what he thought was a private conversation with a big-bucks Republican, his “bomb.”
David: Now, as I wrote in my column the other day, I think Walker should have taken a whack out of a Republican group, too. It takes more than one governor to bring fiscal sanity, and that means you have to construct a long-term agenda that will be followed by both Democrats and Republicans. You need bipartisan buy-in.
Still, I have to give Walker credit. He did do the hard thing. The proof that it was hard was that he had to go through this whole recall effort. Not many people are willing to do that. It took guts.
Gail: Gutsy maybe, but not admirable. This is a Wisconsin version of what we see in Congress. The Tea Partiers happily slash away at programs that their voters don’t care about and pretend they’re being heroic. They take on special interests, but only the ones that support their opponents. That’s not calling for sacrifice. That’s just raiding the enemy camp when nobody’s home but women and children.
David: There are some similarities between what’s happening in Madison and what’s happening in Washington, but I would put them differently. Both in Wisconsin and on the national level, the most expensive subsidies go to the middle and upper middle class, not to the poor. On the federal level it’s Medicare. Retirees receive two or three dollars in benefits for every dollar they have put into Medicare. Their grandchildren are involuntarily paying the bill, or will be.
Strong special interests protect that benefit. Somebody has to take them on.
But this is not about poverty programs or income distribution.
Gail: I would kind of like to believe this is a country where average people can retire to a comfortable, though far from opulent, old age. But as I said, there’s not much disagreement that something’s got to give on pensions. The question is whether all the giving comes from one side. It’s true that Walker has balanced his state’s budget. But so has Andrew Cuomo in New York. Both states are going to have to make more changes to stay in the black, but to me what Cuomo has accomplished is way more impressive. He got giveback from the unions by negotiating with them. Right now, we’re in a pretty good mood in New York, for New Yorkers. At least — unlike some states I could mention — we don’t have any instances of people running over their spouses in an attempt to get to the polls.
David: In this case I’m with you. Walker was needlessly partisan and confrontational. I’ve spoken to several other governors, and the lesson they’ve learned is that you have to take on the sort of interests he took on, but you don’t have to be so absolute about it. I’ve gone back and forth about whether he should have settled for benefit cuts without going after the public employee unions’ collective bargaining powers.
The benefit cuts alone would have passed easily. On the other hand, the fact that states across the country face similar problems is a sign that the bargaining balance is out of whack. Private sector unions have a normal check on their ambitions that public sector unions don’t have. They don’t have to worry about bankruptcy and they get to elect management. F.D.R. understood all this when he called the idea of strikes by federal employees “unthinkable and intolerable.”
Gail: It’s unfortunate that most of what’s left of organized labor is in the public sector. But crippling the union movement, wherever it’s based, is bad for the country. Labor in general provides a critical counterbalance to the power of big business on all sorts of issues not directly related to their own members’ benefits. And of course, the big point of this for Republicans was to take out a critical Democratic support group.
David: If Walker had lost, no leader anywhere would have wanted to take on an entrenched interest to reduce debt. It would have been ruinous to our fiscal future. And I don’t see this as a verdict on organized labor as a whole. I’ve come to the conclusion that we somehow need to strengthen private sector unions, even as we restrain the public sector ones.
Gail: I’m going to hold you to that thought in the future. Meanwhile, how do you think this translates for President Obama? Do you think he should have given more help to the recall folks? All he did was send out a couple of tweets, but I’m not sure I blame him for not going up there to campaign. The people the Democrats needed to rally weren’t really his base. I guess you could argue that he should have shown more moral courage, but I’m still giving him some cred for the same-sex marriage thing. You can’t expect more than one principled stand per quarter from any elected official.
David: Nearly a fifth of the people who said they backed Obama voted for Walker. If Obama really thought Walker was wrong, it was coldhearted opportunism not to campaign. I hold out hope that Obama, in his heart of hearts, knew how bad it would be if Walker was recalled, for debt control issues everywhere.
Gail: I’m usually the one defending the president, but I don’t think you can attribute this to his passion for debt control. As far as the effect on his re-election goes, I don’t think you can turn this into a presidential race predictor. It may be contrary to the commentators’ creed, but I still think it’s too early to turn things into referendums on Obama’s chances. There’s a long, long time from June to November. But I am totally bummed out that this is going to encourage the Republicans in Congress to think they can continue their you-sacrifice-I’ll-posture campaign for the duration.
David: I don’t know if it predicts anything or not. Many people are writing that it doesn’t, but they don’t have a clue either.
The nice thing about Wisconsin is that voters got to see if the sky was falling before they had to vote. They looked at their schools, which are now saving money on health care and such and devoting more to education. They decided that the scare stories were not coming true. And this is in what is, presidentially speaking, a Democratic state. Voters in San Diego and San Jose, overwhelmingly Democrats, made the same call on Tuesday when they approved serious pension reforms. They are not fools.
Gail: We will agree to disagree intensely on this one. But your side definitely won the day. Alas.
