Still concerned that the Wisconsin Senate recall elections were too expensive and produced too few results? The Rachel Maddow Show last night suggested otherwise, in an unexpected way.
In Ohio, citizens rose up earlier this year and signed over one million names on petitions putting a referendum on that state's fall ballot to rescind Gov. John Kasich's anti-collective bargaining law for public employee unions. Kasich has said all along that he won't even talk to progressives or Democrats, much less bargain with them, but suddenly, this week, he's making a lot of noise about finding "compromise" on the union bill, which won't go into effect until and if the referendum fails to rescind it.
But polling shows the vast majority of Ohio voters do want to rescind it, and backers of the referendum in the Democratic Party quickly turned down Kasich's invitation this week. Kill the bill, they said, and then we'll talk.
Maddow provided circumstantial evidence to suggest Kasich's sudden turnabout just a couple days after the last round of Wisconsin recall elections, in which Democrats held on to all their challenged seats, was a panicky reaction to the success Wisconsin progressives had in removing two Republican state senators. Here's the link:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/08/18/139760338/unions-rej…
ADDENDUM: Kasich's kumbaya moment followed a similar overture by Gov. Scott Walker, who called for both parties in the Wisconsin legislature to work together in a spirit of compromise. The language of both GOP governors took a sudden and unusual new turn from their former "my way or the highway" stances. One has to suspect that this was no coincidence at all. Despite GOP claims that the party "won" the recall elections because it didn't surrender absolute numerical control of the Wisconsin Senate, it's obvious that Republican Party officials at the state and national level are taking the results -- and the underlying analysis showing that more Democrats voted than Republicans in the August recalls -- and running scared.