Why won't Governor Walker accept unions' offer and declare victory?

By Greg Sargent

It's worth stating as clearly as possible that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is refusing to take a route out of the standoff that, while not giving him everything he wants, would allow him to declare victory over the public employee unions and even to assert that he had ground them down into submission.

As you know, the Wisconsin public employee unions have agreed to accept the wage and benefit reductions that Walker has asked for, in exchange for dropping his proposal to roll back their bargaining rights. Walker has refused.

Why? It isn't clear that there's any public support for this position in Wisconsin. One key finding from today's poll by the Dem firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner is this one showing overwhelming support for this compromise:

Nearly three fourths think the workers should keep their collective bargaining rights if they agree to concessions on health care and retirement. Even 47 percent of Republicans believe this. Yes, this is a Dem firm and the poll was bankrolled by unions, but if this is anything close to an accurate representation of public opinion, it's quite remarkable.

The real tell here, the one that clearly reveals the real game plan, is that Walker won't accept this compromise despite apparently overwhelming support for it in his own state. After all, so doing would allow him to declare victory. He could very plausibly argue that his hard line forced public employees to cough up the concessions he demanded. You'd think this alone would win him plaudits from more reasonable conservative observers.

There are only three imaginable reasons why Walker isn't doing this. The first is that he really believes that rolling back employee bargaining rights -- in addition to winning the fiscal concessions he himself asked for -- is the only way to put the state on sounder fiscal footing. But if this were the case, he would have agreed to GOP State Senator Dale Schultz's proposal to roll back those rights temporarily, until 2013. Walker didn't do this either.

The second reason for rejecting the union compromise is that his goal is nothing less than to completely break the unions, pure and simple, as part of a broader drive to destroy one of the last institutions in American life battling the creep of inequality and defending the economic interests of the working- and middle-class. The third reason is that Walker's intended audience is no longer his own constituents; it's national conservatives who share the above goals and see any compromise as needlessly delaying the long-coveted "Waterloo" moment for organized labor that they suddenly sense is within reach.

For all of Walker's pieties about how he really, honestly, truly isn't out to bust unions, his own conduct makes it entirely clear what this is really all about.

