Christian Schneider of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute criticizes Gov. Scott Walker … for not being aggressive enough:

Each one of Walker’s three television ads to date feature someone in the education field (teacher, school board member) explaining that they are standing behind Walker for making the tough choices to balance the state’s $3.6 billion budget deficit. Two of the ads end with Walker himself calmly reassuring voters that Wisconsin’s best days are ahead. (The teacher in the second ad recently revealed she has been receiving threats for appearing in a pro-Walker advertisement.)

The ads are well produced. They make excellent, well-reasoned points and adequately defend Walker’s position. They are also a complete and total waste of money.

As an old campaign guru once said, “nobody ever successfully defended anything; there is only attack, attack, and more attack.” Walker is fighting the battle for his political life with a shield and not a sword; every dollar he wastes trying to explain his policy to the voters of Wisconsin, who have been saturated with stories about his policy for almost a year now, is a dollar he can’t spend aggressively moving votes in his direction.

Walker can no longer run against a concept, such as public sector collective bargaining. He needs to run against a bad guy — and the nomination for Wisconsin’s most obnoxious union loyalist currently stands as a 1,000-person tie.

Hours of footage exists of protesters screaming and being dragged feet-first from committee hearings. One young woman chained her head to a railing in the Assembly chambers while floor session was going on. Walker has received death threats and his children have been targeted on Facebook. Rabid union demonstrators have been arrested for pouring beer on lawmakers. Organized labor loyalists have disrupted Special Olympics award ceremonies and booed Walker at the state’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Union misanthropes are free to scream expletives at 14-year old girls.

Wisconsin has become a place where public vulgarity is not only tolerated, but expected (here’s a compendium of people online inviting Walker to engage in intercourse with himself. Language warning, of course).

The message is simple: If Walker is recalled, these people win. Their grotesque tactics will be vindicated, further ripping the state apart. Wisconsin will cease being the state its residents love; it will instead be a place where threats and intimidation reign. …

Walker is moving in the right direction. In a recent interview with Politico, he said he wasn’t afraid of “the national big government union bosses.”  (The article is puzzlingly titled “Walker vows to crush ‘union bosses,’” even though he didn’t say anything remotely that inflammatory.) It shows he is willing to find a tangible target with which to contrast his common-sense policies. …

If he continues to appeal to reason while the unions appeal to emotion, he could soon hand the unions the nationwide win they have craved since he took office. It is now time for him to pull out his blowtorch and clear his path to victory. Until then, it is only his campaign money that he is lighting on fire.

If you’re asking whether Walker was not politically aggressive enough, I would agree. What worse than Recallarama would have happened had Walker gotten the Legislature to eliminate public employee collective bargaining (a right federal employees do not get, by the way) entirely?  The unimpressive job numbers from the past month suggest as well that Walker hasn’t gone nearly far enough to reverse Wisconsin’s bad business climate. It is undeniably true that politics is a zero-sum game, like it or not — you win, the other side loses.

On the other hand, do Wisconsinites really want still more scorched earth? I got criticized last week on Facebook for calling public employee unions “scumbags.” (Which, if you look at Schneider’s examples, turns out to be the correct name for them after all.) Some voters may see some validity in both the unions’ and Walker’s positions, and are waiting to see how Walker reacts before deciding how to vote in the likely recall election. I suspect even more people are sick of all of this. I can call people what I want, because this is my blog, my opinions are my own, and I’m not running for anything. The people who we elect to hold office are supposed to be held to higher standards than “union misanthropes.”

Demonstrating the numerous examples of misanthropic union behavior — Special Olympics ceremonies …

… shouting down 14-year-old girls …

… giving Nazi salutes at a veterans ceremony …

… or various threats of death and violence (pick your own example) and public employee unions’ pernicious political influence on this state would seem a more appropriate responsibility of one of those third-party groups. All they need t0 do is run those or other clips with the message that this is the face of the Wisconsin Democratic Party today.