it looks very much like Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, is going to keep his job. If that's the case, and assuming he doesn't go down in the ongoing John Doe investigation in Milwaukee, I predict that he will have an "exploratory committee" set up in Iowa within the month, and he will suddenly discover a deeply held desire to spend a lot of time in places like Nashua and Manchester. Make no mistake: If he hangs on, he will be the biggest star in the Republican party. Chris Christie yells at all the right people, but has he ever faced down the existential threat that schoolteachers and snowplow drivers brought to bear on Walker? Marco Rubio? Has he withstood the wrath of organized janitors and professors of the humanities? If Walker wins in June, it wouldn't take very much effort at all for Fox News and for the vast universe of conservative sugar-daddies and their organization to decide that Walker should be the odds-on choice for 2016.

Dear Debbie Wasserman-Schultz: That heinous future actually could happen if you don't get out of the Green Room and get the DNC off the stick here. I'm still not kidding. If the Democrats blow this one, and if it's proven that the DNC could have helped in any way and didn't, you should be fired before the sun goes down. In 1990, the DNC declined to help fully a congressional candidate named David Worley in Georgia. The Worley people were begging for money, for organizers, for a lifeline of any kind. Very little was forthcoming. Worley lost to Newt Gingrich by 978 votes. How would the subsequent 10 years have been different if Gingrich's political career had ended ignominiously in 1990? That's the kind of chance that you seem to be allowing to go a'glimmering in Wisconsin. Let Walker win, and Democrats not yet born will curse your name.

I am less than optimistic about Tom Barrett's chances because he's getting outspent about 20-1, and because the numbers stubbornly refuse to move. This should be a base-vs.-base election, but it's being played, at least by the Democrats, as yet another unicorn-hunt after "independent voters." Barrett keeps talking about the "civil war" that Walker incited in Wisconsin. But that's not the argument. There should have been a "civil war" over what Walker was trying to do. There wouldn't even be a recall without what Barrett calls "the civil war." The "civil war" was entirely appropriate. Sometimes, in politics, there are issues worth screaming about. I'm no expert, but the end of collective bargaining during an era of flat-lining wages would seem to be one of those. By citing the "civil war" as the reason for voting for him, and without, I believe, intending to do so, Barrett makes all those people standing in the cold last January marginally complicit in what he says as the problem the recall was meant to solve. But the problem with Scott Walker was not that he inspired an outburst of incivility. It's that he tried to screw the workers of the state of Wisconsin, and that he got more than halfway there, and that he apparently intends to go the rest of the way if he manages to survive the recall. It's not idle speculation to say that a lot more is riding on this than who gets to be governor of Wisconsin. This is the first real fight of the 2016 presidential election.

(Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog)

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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