To add insult to injury perhaps, a disgruntled supporter of unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett slapped the mayor in the face last night after he conceded to Gov. Scott Walker in the hotly contested Wisconsin recall election.
Apparently the woman believed that the mayor acted prematurely in giving his concession speech in that votes were still being counted. Various news agencies had already projected a Walker victory about an hour after the polls closed, however. Barret wound up with about 46% of the vote as the standard bearer for the Democrats.
Barrett has been the mayor of Milwaukee since 2004. He has run for governor three times, losing in the Democrat primary in 2002 to Jim Doyle, and losing to Republican Scott Walker twice–in 2010 and in yesterday’s recall. Barrett also served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993 to 2003, representing Wisconsin’s 5th congressional district.
Writing in the New York Post , Rich Lowry offers two reasons for the recall falling short:
First, the public unions weren’t defending rights, but privileges. There is nothing written in stone that says public-sector workers must have collective-bargaining rights (they don’t at the federal level); that the state must collect dues for the unions (other organizations don’t get that benefit); that members of government unions must pay only 0.2 percent of their wages into their pensions and 6 percent of their health-care premiums (far below the averages in the private sector).
Second, the reforms worked. School districts took advantage of their new flexibility under the Walker reforms to achieve significant savings. In an irony that says much about last night’s outcome, Walker’s opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, himself used the reforms to save an estimated $10 million for his city.
In a related development in California, voters yesterday in the cities of San Diego and San Jose by a landslide approved pension cuts for public sector workers.
[image credit: barrett4wi ]
