Budget deficits and the nation’s growing debt load have emerged in the last few weeks as the consuming issues in Washington and in state capitals, and they are now shaping the early stages of the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Not a single candidate has formally opened a campaign yet — and some of those delivering the toughest talk on the budget may never do so — but the subject is giving focus and energy to a contest that has so far been largely unformed.
The growing profile of the issue has given Republicans an opportunity to cast President Obama as a weak leader, unwilling or unable to confront the tough issues, and has added fuel to the conservative drive for smaller government.
But it has also highlighted divisions among Republicans about how aggressively to cut domestic spending; the wisdom of supporting specific steps to address long-term problems in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; and the proper balance between emphasizing fiscal issues and social ones like same-sex marriage.
With a budget-cutting and reform zeal unseen since the mid-1990s, a group of Republican chief executives are using difficult economic times to press an ambitious policy agenda that makes their GOP counterparts in Washington seem like timid incrementalists.
Their goal: to shatter a bipartisan consensus on public labor that’s shaped politics in the West, the Northeast and the Upper Midwest since the 1960s.
Welfare reform was the centerpiece legislation at issue for the new GOP governors in the 90s. Today, public employee rights and benefits are on the firing line. Between the two, there is an important distinction: the political stakes are much greater now.
Aside from social justice advocates and traditional liberals, welfare recipients had little political clout. To take on the well-organized and politically connected teachers and state workers, however, is to strike at the heart of the Democratic Party in many states.
If Walker, who is trying to curb collective-bargaining rights, and Christie, who is attempting to overhaul teacher tenure, manage to succeed, they’ll only embolden their counterparts elsewhere — and potentially do grave damage to what is one of the Democrats’ most important financial and grass-roots constituencies. Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, among other Republicans, are watching carefully, bracing for similar showdowns.
Much of the attention in Wisconsin is devoted to Walker’s proposal to strip state employees of the right to bargain collectively for anything besides their pay and to make them pay more for their health care and pensions.
Yet another element of the legislation could have even greater political consequences. The Republican would end the automatic deduction from their workers paychecks and make the unions collect the dues themselves, a move that would almost surely result in less cash flowing into labor coffers. It would block unions from collecting money from consenting workers’ paychecks for political operations and it would force annual elections on whether state workers even want a union, a lethal threat to public sector labor.
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