My initial impression of the fake "David Koch" call to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was that it wasn't a big deal, but that was obviously very wrong. Dave Weigel pointed out that Walker revealed an idea for tricking Democrats into a political maneuver that would allow them to pass their union-busting bill even without them present, and David Dayen also noted that the fake David Koch also suggested "planting some troublemakers" among the workers protesting. As Greg Sargent wrote yesterday, that drew the attention of the Madison police chief.
The "planting troublemakers" thing is significant because conservatives spent the last couple of years insisting that anyone at a Tea Party rally hurling a racial slur or carrying a racist sign was a liberal plant. Here, you have an actual Republican governor telling a big donor he "thought about" planting troublemakers. Maybe he was just being polite with a donor, but if the situation were reversed, I don't think a Democratic governor mulling over "planting troublemakers" would be given the benefit of the doubt. It would be held up as incontrovertible proof that every incident involving misbehavior at a Tea Party protest was the result of liberal sabotage, that the protesters who spit on Rep. John Lewis were just covert liberal operatives.
I don't think the call confirms the theory of the Kochs as the ultimate conservative puppet masters. One of the reasons why is that Walker, despite taking political donations from Koch Industries, doesn't know them personally very well, since as Ben Smith points out, the impression done by the prank caller was terrible. But as Ezra Klein writes, the fact of the call itself displays the kind of clout and access that can be secured by a rich donor, even one a politician isn't particularly close to. Walker isn't busting the unions because the Kochs told him to but because he is an ideologue who hates unions.
Reihan Salam is surely correct that Walker's deference to a wealthy donor is likely endemic among politicians of all stripes, but it nonetheless undermines the ideological rationales for public union busting. If the point is that public-sector unions cannot be allowed to exist because they create an irreconcilable conflict of interest for politicians, than the kind of easy access granted the fake "David Koch," as well as the fact that politicians of both parties have brought public sector unions to heel, undermines the argument. I think it's pretty cynical to argue that you shouldn't be able to limit the political contributions but that public workers should be denied freedom of association because they work for a state government.
I think my initial reaction to the call was premised on my general distaste for "sting operations" as a form of "journalism." While it's clear that the call damaged Walker politically, I don't think that makes it journalism. I still think good reporting is done through...reporting, not by deceiving people into revealing their "true selves." The most disturbing aspects about Walker's agenda, his naked attempt to crush the unions by using a budget crisis he created as pretext, are things that were discovered through people working the phones, digging through rules on parliamentary procedure and budget documents, not because someone walked into the state Capitol wearing a pimp suit.
