The Washington Post's Richard Cohen writes about the greed of public sector unions--whose members he belives are comparable to college students at an elite private university:
But, really, enough is enough. The Wisconsin state employees who are demonstrating in Madison have my sympathy but not my total support. I recognize that they have offered givebacks, and I recognize, too, that Gov. Scott Walker has gone too far - if not trying to bust the unions, as it is alleged, then surely trying to cripple them. In the manner of Ronald Reagan taking on student demonstrators at Berkeley in 1966, Walker will become the champion of the common man, the Middle American and all of that. This works. Reagan, you might recall, went on to become president.
Reagan personified the disgust many Americans felt toward unruly (and ungrateful) college students. Walker is personifying the feeling of resentment and anger toward government workers who have so gamed the system that some of them retire on larger stipends than the average American makes in salary - and with health care, too. Like Reagan, Walker has tapped into a feeling of disgust - the always-dangerous sense that you and I have played by the rules and saved for our modest retirements, while government workers, on our dime, have run off with pensions they do not deserve. We feel we have been played for a fool.
In 1966, Reagan "took on" student demonstrators in a mostly rhetorical sense. By 1969, Reagan was calling in the National Guard:
"The rally, which drew 3,000 people, soon turned into a riot, as the crowd moved down Telegraph (Ave.) towards the park. That day, known as Bloody Thursday, three students suffered punctured lungs, another a shattered leg, 13 people were hospitalized with shotgun wounds, and one police officer was stabbed. James Rector, who was watching the riot from a rooftop, was shot by police gunfire; he died four days later.
"At the request of the Berkeley mayor, Governor Ronald Reagan declared a state of emergency and sent 2,200 National Guard troops into Berkeley. Some of these guardsmen were even Cal students. At least one young man had participated in the riots, been shot at by police, gotten patched up, and then returned to his dorm to find a notice to report for guard duty. In the following days approximately 1,000 people were arrested: 200 were booked for felonies, and 500 were taken to Santa Rita jail."
The implication here is not so much that Walker needs to "take on" public workers, but that Cohen might approve of Walker ending the Wisconsin protests through state force. Walker has indeed threatened to call in the National Guard, so it's not as though the notion is completely abstract. Perhaps I'm being uncharitable and the implication is inadvertent.
Obviously there's no one who could possibly understand the greed of Wisconsin's rather modestly compensated public sector workers quite as acutely as a beltway columnist who gets paid to write 700 word columns repeating an argument you read on a blog last week. This sort of maddening, paternalistic commentary about Wisconsin, infantalizing people who actually work for a living as nothing more than a bunch of dirty hippies who need a Real American Hero to stomp them in the face, has given me stronger feelings about the role of unions than I think I've ever had before.
