"Scott Walker's Real Motive"

Jonathan Chait:

Scott Walker's Real Motive, by Jonathan Chait: ...Howard Fineman really advances the ball here:

The real political math in Wisconsin isn't about the state budget or the collective-bargaining rights of public employees... It is about which party controls governorships and, with them, the balance of power on the ground in the 2012 elections.

For all of the valid concern about reining in state spending..., the underlying strategic Wisconsin story is this: Gov. Scott Walker, a Tea Party-tinged Republican, is the advance guard of a new GOP push to dismantle public-sector unions as an electoral force. ...[A]ccording to ... GOP strategists and Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi -- who chaired the Republican Governors Association in 2010 -- the power and money of public-employee unions was the reason.

"We are never going to win most of these states until we can do something about those unions"... "They have so much incentive to work hard politically because they are, in effect, electing their own bosses -- the Democrats who are going to pay them better and give them more benefits. And the Democrats have the incentive to be generous."

This is how top Republicans see the matter: a vicious cycle of union-to-Democrat-to-union power that they are determined to break.