How long can Scott Walker hold out?

By Ezra Klein

Mother Jones's Andy Kroll has been doing some great reporting from Wisconsin, and he runs through four of the possible endgames here. They are:

1) The bill passes.

2) The collective-bargaining ban gets dropped.

3) A weird procedural effort to repackage the bill as "non-financial," which would mean the Senate Democrats don't need to be present.

4) The collective-bargaining ban gets pushed to the 2011-13 budget fight, which will happen in the spring.

The problem with trying to game out Gov. Scott Walker's negotiating style is that the guy doesn't seem like much of a negotiator. Another politician would've taken the concrete concessions on pensions and health-care benefits, threatened to revisit the collective-bargaining ban in the spring if any of the unions failed to make the promised concessions and thrown himself a parade. But not Walker.

Instead, he's rejected every compromise that's been offered -- and his allies are starting to notice. The State Journal, a paper that endorsed Walker, has advised him to take a deal. David Brooks has criticized him for an "unbalanced" approach to cuts. Andrew Sullivan, whose initial position was sympathy for Walker, has turned. And it's easy to imagine the prank-Koch call getting a lot of attention in Wisconsin and looking like one more piece of evidence that the governor is approaching this as an ideologue rather than just an executive. The first nonpartisan poll suggests Walker's position isn't as popular as he -- and many others -- initially thought.

A few days ago, the question was: How long can the Democrats hold out? Increasingly, it's how long Walker can hold out.