The latest Democrat to legitimize Scott Walker as a 2016 presidential candidate is Barack Obama, reports Matt Kittle:

A war of words on right-to-work broke out Monday evening between President Barack Obama and Gov. Scott Walker, who just made Wisconsin the 25th right-to-work state in the nation and looks like he wants to be the next occupant of the White House.

Obama fired first, sticking up for his big labor pals who stand to lose again when Wisconsin law ends forced union membership and payment of union dues as a condition of employment in the private sector.

The rise of the middle class, Obama asserts, coincided with the rise of labor unions.

“So it’s inexcusable that, over the past several years, just when middle-class families and workers need that kind of security the most, there’s been a sustained, coordinated assault on unions, led by powerful interests and their allies in government,” the president said in a statement.

“So I’m deeply disappointed that a new anti-worker law in Wisconsin will weaken, rather than strengthen workers in the new economy,” Obama said. “Wisconsin is a state built by labor, with a proud pro-worker past. So even as its governor claims victory over working Americans, I’d encourage him to try and score a victory for working Americans — by taking meaningful action to raise their wages and offer them the security of paid leave. That’s how you give hardworking middle-class families a fair shot in the new economy — not by stripping their rights in the workplace, but by offering them all the tools they need to get ahead.”

Walker fired back, saying the “Freedom to Work law,” as the governor calls it, “continues to put the power back in the hands of Wisconsin workers by allowing the freedom to choose whether they want to join a union and pay union dues.”

“It also gives Wisconsin one more tool to encourage job creators to continue investing and expanding in our state.  Freedom to Work, along with our investments in worker training and our work to lower the tax burden, will lead to more freedom and prosperity for all of Wisconsin,” Walker  said in a statement.

He pointed to Obama’s recent veto of the Keystone pipeline legislation, a project that “would have paved the way to create thousands of quality, middle-class jobs.”

“(T)he president should be looking to states, like Wisconsin, as an example for how to grow our economy,” Walker said.

The left, led by big labor, has accused Walker of doing the bidding of corporate interests and pocketing big donations from donors with a vested interest in union busting.

Organized labor, meanwhile, has pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars in the previous two election cycles to re-elect Obama and back the president’s union-friendly Democratic Party friends.

In the 2012 election cycle, big labor contributed more than $141 million to campaigns and committees, nearly double the almost $76 million contributed in the 2008 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org.

“The labor sector, which is made up of public sector, transportation, industrial, building trade, and other unions, has historically given more to Democrats than Republicans and the 2012 election cycle was no different — 91 percent of the industry’s contributions went to Democrats while only 9 percent went to Republicans,” the campaign-finance tracker states in a report.

“Union dollars played a major role in helping to elect President Barack Obama in 2012. He secured more than $519,000 from employees of a collection of labor organizations, which also spent millions on independent ads in support of him,” Open Secrets notes.

Much of that union money, gotten from union dues, was targeted at defeating Walker twice. Which makes unions 0 for 2 against Walker in elections, and 0 for 2 as well in issues (Act 10 and right-to-work). No wonder Walker’s becoming popular with Republicans outside Wisconsin.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty:

From a supremely cynical political perspective, it’s better for conservatives and Republicans if Hillary Clinton’s e-mails never come to light. If they’re destroyed and impossible to recover, it means she will never be able to dispel everyone’s worst suspicions.

The primary feature of Hillary’s “home-brewed” system was that it could destroy e-mails completely and permanently — no backups or third-party records that you get with Yahoo or Gmail. It would be particularly odd to build a special e-mail system with this “permanent destroy” capability and never use it.

On Greta Van Susteren’s show last night, ABC News political director Rick Klein said he was at a loss to come up with an innocuous explanation for Hillary’s “home-brewed” system. There is no innocuous explanation. The whole point of it was to create an e-mail system that Hillary and her team would control completely, that would be beyond the range of federal record-keeping rules and laws and beyond the range of FOIA requests. If any message seemed embarrassing, politically inconvenient, or incriminating, she could erase it, and rest assured it was gone forever, beyond the reach of any investigator, FOIA request, or subpoena.

Of course, it wasn’t particularly secure from hackers and/or foreign spies. And let’s face it, if you’re the Russians or Chinese — heck, maybe the Iranians, North Koreans, Cubans, or other regimes — if you’re not trying to hack into the e-mail systems of American officials, you’re not earning your paycheck.

We don’t know if foreign intelligence services ever cracked the (apparently flawed) code and got to read Hillary’s private e-mails. We do know that we would be fools to assume they hadn’t. This prospect makes a lot of Obama’s first-term foreign policy look a little different in retrospect. Was there any particular time when a foreign power seemed one step ahead of our policies? Did Moscow, Beijing, or other foreign capitals seem to know what we were thinking in our negotiations before we began? Any of our spies get burned, or sources of intelligence dry up? Was Hillary Clinton’s e-mail effectively a leak all along?

(By the way, in the interim, every imaginable White House official should be brought before Congress and asked why it didn’t seem unusual to them that Hillary Clinton never used a state.gov address, ever, at all, in a four-year span. Her use of a private e-mail was not secret within the administration.)

The answers to these questions are above my pay grade and security clearance. But if foreign spies were reading the e-mail of the Secretary of State for four years, it represents nothing less than a catastrophe, and one that is entirely the fault of Hillary Clinton herself.

Greta said she really wanted to see Hillary herself in front of a camera explaining all this. I doubt she’ll get it, or if she does, it will be under extraordinarily stage-managed circumstances. She will probably offer some version of “I’m just a confused grandmother, I don’t understand all of this technical business, I was assured this system was safest and most secure and for the best.” Of course, if she does play that card, we will have a joyful time pointing out that the most prepared, most ready, most experienced choice for president used unsecure e-mails for the entirety of her time at the State Department.