Andy Kroll is an investigative journalist living in Washington, DC. He works for Mother Jones magazine, and is an associate editor at TomDispatch.com. His writing has been published at AlterNet, The Nation, Salon, CBSNews.com, CNN.com, Truthout, The Detroit News, YouthVote.WashingtonPost.com, and a number of other publications.
He is a two-time recipient of a Larry Lourain Journalism Grant from the Detroit chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2008 and 2009, and was named one of the “UWIRE 100? top student journalists in the country in 2008 and 2009
Why electoral politics sold out the popular uprising in the Badger State — and why it's not all over.
by Andy Kroll
The revelers watched in stunned disbelief, cocktails in hand, dressed for a night to remember. On the big-screen TV a headline screamed in crimson red: "Projected Winner: Scott Walker." It was 8:49 pm In parts of Milwaukee, people learned that news networks had declared Wisconsin's governor the winner while still in line to cast their votes. At the election night party for Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, supporters talked and cried and ordered more drinks. Barrett soon took the stage to concede, then waded into the crowd where a distraught woman slapped him in the face.
Walker is the first governor in American history to win a recall election. His lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, dispatched her recall challenger no less decisively. So, too, did three Republican state senators in their recall elections. Democrats avoided a GOP sweep with a win in the sixth and final senate recall vote of the season, in Wisconsin's southeastern 21st district, but that was small consolation. Put simply, Democrats and labor unions got rolled.
The results of Tuesday's elections are being heralded as the death of public-employee unions, if not the death of organized labor itself. Tuesday's results are also seen as the final chapter in the story of the populist uprising that burst into life last year in the state capital of Madison. The Cheddar Revolution, so the argument goes, was buried in a mountain of ballots.