That rarest of things, Madison conservative David Blaska, wrote two columns for Isthmus about who may run and what would happen should Gov. Scott Walker lose a recall election.

The Democrats’ own polling shows no one can beat Walker except declared non-candidate Russ Feingold — and he, only barely. Even if Russ Feingold repudiates his serial denials and takes the bait, what will the Democrats’ platform look like? I asked that question last week. (What would Russ do?)

Clearly, government employees will want all limits on collective bargaining overturned. (They already have more collective bargaining rights than President Obama’s federal employees.)

Make no mistake, they will demand the immediate revocation of contributions toward their health insurance and pensions required by Walker. (Which remains half of what private sector employees pay, on average.) Sure, Madison city, county, and school employees made a few concessions — but only with Walker’s reforms looming. Instead, they rushed, arm-in-arm with local liberals beholden to union election muscle, to ratify contracts that avoided most of the shared sacrifice. Milwaukee’s teachers infamously scuttled 350 of their fellow union members rather than concede a dime.

It is fair to ask, just how high will Democrats raise taxes if Walker is recalled?

That’s a question that everyone who is asked to sign a Walker recall petition should be asking. Here’s the other: What, exactly, is not working?

Government employees would argue they have a God-given, or Gaia-given, or given-from-somewhere right to collective bargaining. Such right exists nowhere in any founding document for this country or this state. The law that established public-employee collective bargaining in the late 1950s was a grotesque mistake, should never have been passed, and should be repealed. In collective bargaining, there is no representation at all for the taxpayer, because taxpayers are not represented by the “management” side of government. That is how Rolls–Royce benefits are awarded to public-sector employees.

Those who oppose Walker’s reforms also argue they haven’t been listened to. I’m guessing those people, whose candidates lost left and, well, left in November 2010, can recall no instances where Republican input was used in the disaster that was the state’s 2009–11 budget. Democrats’ rejoinder to the billion-dollar deficits Democrats approved was to (1) deny that those deficits existed and (2) propose raising taxes. Those answers go a long way to explaining the state’s consistently bad business climate rankings, something for which Democrats consistently have no answer.

Regarding Feingold, Blaska says:

The former U.S. senator remains a super hero to the Left: Spiderman with a PAC. But he is still trying to digest the rancid meat of his defeat one year ago. …

Whether Gov. Scott Walker’s challenger is Russ Feingold, Jon Erpenbach, The (Former) Kathleen, or the Charismatic Firefighter — the question is the same. What would they do different? Put another way, how much would they raise taxes?

Not even Russ Feingold hath the powers to bring the statewide teachers union to heel. Does anyone believe the Milwaukee teachers union, the one that demands taxpayer-subsidized Viagra, would wear sackcloth just because Russ said pretty please? They want their political muscle back. You think they won’t exercise it after putting a Democrat in the East Wing?

Having invested what is left of their compulsory dues into the recall and subsequent election, if successful, the unions will thrust sharpened knives into the fatted bird. Government workers and their chattels in the service-provider industry will have restored the circle: government of, by and for government employees! …

Walker and the Republican legislature:

• balanced the budget
• did so without raising taxes
• restored power to local elected officials vis-a-vis their employees
• continued essential services (unlike Minnesota)
• without layoffs (unlike Michigan and Illinois)
• enabled government employees (not the union bosses) to decide for themselves if they want to contribute to political campaigns
• helped break the power of the anti-reform teachers unions.

Ask the nearest Progressive and Liberal what, exactly, is not working? And why are government employees entitled to better perks than the private sector and more collective bargain[ing] rights than federal employees and 90 percent of the private sector? Remind them that you do not speak drum.

Feingold is an interesting case. Wisconsinites discovered in 2010 that, contrary to his image during his three terms in the Senate, he wasn’t a maverick at all. His “listening sessions” were opportunities for input from only his left-leaning constituents. The same senator who touted his courage for voting against the Constitution-shredding Patriot Act also touted his sponsorship of the Constitution-shredding McCain–Feingold campaign finance deform law. Had Feingold been the financially responsible maverick he claimed to be, there is no way Feingold would have lost the 2010 election.

Unlike Walker and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (who has already lost a run for governor), Feingold has no experience running in an executive-level election, let alone running a unit of government as its CEO; nor does the aforementioned Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D–Middleton). The one candidate Blaska mentioned who does have said executive experience is former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk, who nonetheless is 0-for-her-political career in statewide elections, and for good reason. Wisconsin voters have decided they do not want someone who represents the worst excesses of the People’s Republic of Madison to wreak havoc over the entire state.

So if you sign a recall petition, your choices to run against Walker may include someone who already lost to Walker (Barrett), someone who lost during the same election (Feingold), someone who has lost two statewide races (Falk), and a member of the Fleeing Fourteen (Erpenbach), all of whom can be counted to be wrong on the issues affecting the state — the issues (see Blaska’s bullet points) on which Walker was elected.

Moreover, the idea that removing Walker from office will lead to a new era of comity and compromise for the common good in Wisconsin is, frankly, nuts. The 2009–10 Legislature, the last one in which voters saw fit to give Democrats complete control, fit the definition of “compromise” only if that means compromising between left and way-left positions. Republicans will control at least the Assembly until the November 2012 elections. Note the rhetoric and death threats occurring from the Recall types, and remember that’s who you’ll be voting for when the recall election takes place. A Walker defeat will meant that the era of bad feeling, which will be the case in our politics for the foreseeable future anyway, will get only nastier.

Back in July, I proved that those who claimed that candidate Scott Walker hid his desire to emasculate public  employee unions during his 2010 campaign were wrong.

My evidence then was two Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stories from June and August 2010, as well as a teacher union publication, brought to my attention by an alert reader:

Now, thanks to talk show host Vicki McKenna, a second teacher union publication, the October 2010 Lakewood Lookout, has reappeared reporting the exact same thing to a second audience:

This is another piece of evidence that the Recall Walker movement, similar to the Recall ______ movements of earlier this year, is perpetuating a fraud upon the taxpayers and voters of Wisconsin. But voters should be used to this by now. How often were the words “collective bargaining” used by Democratic challengers during Recallarama I? Not once. Instead we got unconvincing sob stories about how Wisconsin’s (overrated) public schools were being destroyed by budget cuts, similar to the claims being made this recallaround.

(How can I claim that Wisconsin’s public schools are overrated? Simple.  Wisconsin schools have been near the top in per-pupil spending, when compared with other states, for decades. And yet Wisconsin has trailed the nation in per-capita personal income growth for more than three decades. The billions of dollars Wisconsinites spend on their public schools every year evidently is  not paying off in better incomes.)

We were told numerous times earlier this year by teacher union heads that government employees were perfectly willing to pay more for their benefits and retirement. (Something that never previously came up when public-sector employee benefits far exceeded private-sector benefits well before this year.) Every time a union head said that, he or she was making a completely unverifiable statement, an assertion unsupportable by evidence. There is no statewide teacher contract; every union contract with this state’s more than 400 school districts must be approved by that school district’s teacher union. (Look at Oshkosh Corp., whose union management negotiated a contract with the company, only to have the union members overwhelmingly reject it.)

The troll who calls itself “Wisconsin Fact Check” will probably continue to criticize Walker for not being specific enough in his plans against public employee unions — certification elections or something else about most taxpayers and voters could not care less. Such a level of specificity would be a standard to which Democrats are never held, of course. And you will not hear from the left one single admission about Gov. James Doyle’s pledge, “We should not, we must not, and I will not raise taxes,” before he raised taxes by $2.1 billion.

In fact, given all the Sturm und Drang over Walker’s successfully restricting public-employee collective bargaining, instead of outlawing public employee unions and their collective bargaining entirely, a Twitter follower of mine wondered if Walker shouldn’t have gone ahead and undone Gov. Gaylord Nelson’s bad idea completely, or in the alternative fired thousands of state employees. (Or both.)

While the right to belong to a union is generally recognized in the U.S. Constitution, collective bargaining is not. Had Walker done what he should have done and permanently retired the likes of Martin Beil (pronounced “bile”), John Matthews and other leeches of taxpayer dollars, the screaming from the left would have been no worse than it is now. Consider that RecallScottWalker.com was registered Nov. 2, 2010. What happened Nov. 2, 2010? Walker was elected. So on the day voters chose Walker and a wave of Republicans, the efforts were under way to undo the election, two months before Walker was inaugurated.