Wisconsin Governor fends off recall attempt

WAUKESHA, Wis. — Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) survived a furious recall campaign on Tuesday, emerging as the victor in a bitter fight over state budgets and collective bargaining rights.

NBC News declared Walker the projected winner over Democratic challenger Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee, in the closely-watched campaign, an outgrowth of a contentious fight in early 2011 after Walker drove a bill stripping public employee unions of their collective bargaining rights through Wisconsin's legislature.

Walker's victory served as a symbolic victory for a generation of reform-minded conservatives; the crowd at Walker's Waukesha election night party let out a large cheer when a local NBC affiliate showed the projection of Walker's victory.

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Good. I don't care for the man's politics but this was an abuse of the recall. The appropriate time to fire a politician whose policies you don't like is in regularly scheduled general elections, not through recalls engineered by big money special interest groups who were offended. A recall should be reserved for corruption or a gross abuse of power. This sort of thing is a slippery slope. Once you start down it no one will ever be able to undertake any kind of controversial policy decisions without having to worry about which special interest with deep pockets is going to try to throw him/her out of office early. That threat has become much more acute with the SCOTUS effectively opening the floodgates to unlimited political contributions by entities that can't vote.