I got a news release from Wisconsin Education Association Council President Mary Bell asserting that the recall of Gov. Scott Walker is “both historic and heroic.”

It may be dawning on Democrats that the recall of Walker is something else — a failure in progress, like watching a car crash in slow motion.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

With little more than two weeks until Wisconsin’s gubernatorial recall election, some Democratic and union officials quietly are expressing fears that they have picked a fight they won’t win and that could leave lingering injuries.

The election has taken on significance beyond Wisconsin state politics: Organized labor sees the battle as a major stand against GOP efforts to scale back collective-bargaining rights for public-sector workers, as Mr. Walker did after taking office in 2011. Some Democrats now fear mobilizing Republicans to battle the recall could carry over to help the party—and Republican Mitt Romney—in November’s presidential election. …

For the left-leaning groups that have spent months trying to oust Mr. Walker, a loss would be a deflating end to a process that began with unions and their allies gathering more than 900,000 signatures to force a recall. …

Top Democrats now say that when labor groups first raised the specter of a recall, the party’s officials urged their allies in Wisconsin to reconsider. “We told them it was a bad, bad, bad idea,” one Democratic official said.

A union official said both the Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign expressed reservations. “I don’t know that anyone was enthusiastic about it over there,” the union official said.

Party leaders also counseled against pouring money into a contested primary ahead of the recall election, the Democratic official said.

[Rep. Peter] Barca, the Wisconsin Assembly minority leader, said he had heard rumblings about the DNC’s displeasure with the recall. But Wisconsin residents weren’t seeking approval from Washington, he said.

This is where one remembers the line of Will Rogers: “I’m not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

Time magazine visited the Solidarity Sing Along:

The members of the Solidarity Sing Along are a microcosm of the anti-Walker movement: passionate about public policy, eager to fight for their values, invested in the community they have forged — and yet, not entirely on the same page. Despite the outpouring of anger at Walker, on an electoral level, the governor’s opponents have struggled to channel the enthusiasm that garnered more than 1 million recall signatures into a successful campaign.

As a result, the campaign to recall Walker is sputtering, and the governor has pulled ahead in the polls with a little over two weeks to go until the June 5 election. “There’s a lot of despair, a lot of anger,” says Chris Reeder, 41, an activist who helps lead the Solidarity Sing Along. “The polls are very scary.”

To begin with, recall proponents could have used a consensus candidate to pit against the incumbent. Tom Barrett, the Milwaukee mayor who will square off against Walker on June 5, was defeated by the governor in 2010 and advocated for some of the same changes to union benefits (including increasing the amount most public employees contribute to their pension and health care costs) as the governor. Barrett’s record of tangling with unions led labor to squander several million dollars on Dane County executive Kathleen Falk, a liberal primary challenger whom Barrett clobbered by nearly 20 points.

Walker moans about the out-of-state union money arrayed against him, but the truth, say Democrats involved in the recall fight, is that labor is tepid about Barrett and depleted by costly battles in Ohio and Indiana. The Milwaukee mayor has relentlessly attacked Walker, which is to be expected in a race that is by nature a referendum on the incumbent, but Barrett has done little to articulate a clear agenda of his own. When Republicans call Barrett a cipher, they aren’t without a point. …

The DNC’s tentativeness about plunging into the contest, which Republicans attribute to fears that a loss would tarnish President Obama’s chances in the state, has irked some local activists, who note that two-thirds of Walker’s $25 million haul came from out of state, while the RNC pledged to go “all in” to protect its imperiled star. “It’s very disheartening,“ Reeder says of the DNC’s absence in the race.

As I predicted months ago, the recall also is draining the coffers of Democrats and their allies in a year when Wisconsin is supposedly a presidential-election swing state, the state will be electing a new U.S. senator, Democrats presumably will be trying to knock off freshman Reps. Sean Duffy (R–Ashland) and Reid Ribble (R–Sherwood) while trying to retain the open seat of Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D–Madison), and there are the Senate recall elections and then the properly scheduled legislative elections this fall.

Three groups of voters are going to vote June 5 — supporters of Walker, opponents of Walker, and those who may not support what Walker did, but don’t believe his actions during his first 17 months in office warrant his recall. It seemed obvious when this ridiculousness began a year ago that the first and last groups probably outnumber the second group. I predict that of the newspapers that decide to opine on the recall, exactly two — The Capital Times and Isthmus, both in the People’s Republic of Madison — will support Tom Barrett. The rest will put themselves in the third group.

It also takes a brain to observe that, even if Barrett wins the recall June 5, Democrats have zero opportunity to seize control of both houses of the Legislature until after the November elections, and that given a 21-seat GOP margin, the Assembly’s shifting from Republican control to Democratic control in 2013 is unlikely.

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post notes the upshot of all this:

All of this bodes well for Walker and ultimately for Republicans on the ballot in November, including Mitt Romney and the eventual U.S. Senate nominee. Really, is Obama’s message any clearer than that of the recall forces? In the meantime, Republicans are organized, energized and well aware that if they can put Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes in Romney’s column, suddenly he’ll have many more options to get to 270 electoral votes.

The Troglopundit has the perfect reaction:

Guess they shoulda thought of that last November, before they set all this crap in motion.

That would require a competently run Democratic Party in Wisconsin, of course.

Jessica McBride is also looking for reasons to choose Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett instead of Gov. Scott Walker:

Mayor Tom Barrett increasingly seems to be running a “throw everything you can and see what sticks” campaign. …

And so we’re told we should oust Gov. Scott Walker midterm because, well, Walker’s supposedly the really, really angry guy (OK, whatever). Or he’s making us all really angry at each other (whatever).

We’re told we should go through the disruption of doing something we’ve never done before, oust a governor midterm, because he’s mean to women (or something).

We’re told we should oust him because some monthly jobs figures weren’t great, even though Milwaukee’s jobs figures aren’t great. And then, when Walker, under fire over jobs before he’s had a chance to really implement a job reform agenda, produces a report that shows the state has gained jobs under his tenure, we’re told we shouldn’t vote for him because he released it early. …

There are also murky asides about that looming John Doe investigation in Milwaukee County. Although the specter of that is obviously concerning, right now it hasn’t snaked its way up to Walker. So right now it’s just shadowy allegations or aides who allegedly did bad things. …

If you believe the polls, Walker is actually increasing his lead. I think this is partly because the Democrats haven’t settled on a coherent, clear message for why we need to be going through all this. They need one. Walker is not just an incumbent. He’s an incumbent they are trying to toss out of office in the middle of his term. That’s a really big deal. People get this. It means they are looking for Democrats to clearly make the case — the case for why we should.

Instead, Democrats are tossing up such a flurry of charges that no one has a clue what they are talking about anymore.

The upshot is in McBride’s last sentence: “… the fact his opponents haven’t been able to clearly explain why his central reform (remember that?) was so bad.”

Proving that great minds think alike, the Ripon Commonwealth Press:

With this redux of the 2010 gubernatorial election, Barrett tees up the ball that Walker slammed a year ago last February.

But how to improve the state?

That’s the key question for the next four weeks.

For better or worse — and it seems everyone has made up their minds on the matter — Walker has answered the question during the first one-third of his term.

And his opponent?

Barrett has yet to say how much he would spend to restore cuts to education, local governments or health care, or how he would get the money. Neither he nor his chief rival, former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, gave details during the primary campaign on how they would roll back Walker’s cuts. (Secretary of State Doug La Follette and especially state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout were more forthcoming. That they garnered few votes relative to their opponents says more about us than it does about them.)

Now it’s time for Barrett to offer a specific plan for what he would do, and undo, to keep Wisconsin’s fiscal house in order while assuring that the truly needy receive care, public schools and universities are adequately financed, aid to local units of government is sufficient and state agencies exercise the fiscal austerity shown by a private sector that has balanced budgets through efficiencies, benefit cuts, wage freezes and layoffs.

The Commonwealth Press adds this about the state’s fiscal condition, blame for which goes both directions since the state’s books are legally, not correctly, balanced:

Politics by definition … is a zero-sum game.

“Fairness” and “equity” are abstractions anchored only in the gains or losses of the observer. That will remain the case long after Barrett and Walker exit the political stage.

But what won’t, what shouldn’t, change is this: Be they Democrats or Republicans, Wisconsin’s governors and legislators should never again put this state in a position where year after year they have to scramble to offset red ink because they didn’t have the fiscal discipline — the statesmanship — to spend within their means.

Now there’s a flag to which we can all salute.