Richard Moore

How many times have we heard the lament: If only we had a leader who wouldn’t stick his or her finger in the air to see which way the wind was blowing, who wouldn’t govern by reading the polls every morning?

We’ve all asked that question at one time or another. We’ve all wished for someone who would act according to principles rather than polls.

Like his principles or not, we’ve got such a leader. In fact, Gov. Scott Walker took to his Twitter account this past weekend to pass along an article from the Weekly Standard – more about that in a second – which Walker termed “a good reminder why long-term leadership matters more than temporary poll watching.”

The governor is absolutely right.

To be sure, to use a popular word from last year, Walker and the Republicans are taking a shellacking in public surveys. Everyone looks for bias in polling, but even those usually tagged as leaning toward conservatives show Walker’s numbers in the tank, his approval ratings in the low 40s.

There are several reasons why this has happened, all of them predictable.

First, the liberal mainstream media has framed debate in a way that has automatically biased the public conversation. Reporters and editors, their headlines and stories, all talk about the governor’s efforts to strip away public employees’ collective bargaining “rights.”

Never mind that collective bargaining is not a constitutional right. Never mind that collective bargaining is not a human right. Never mind that two-million federal employees don’t have collective bargaining, nor do public employees in some other states.

Never mind all that. If you frame the debate that way, if you ask Americans if someone’s “rights” should be taken away, they are going to say no. It’s a question that’s answered before it’s asked.

But collective bargaining is only a legislated privilege. As with any privilege that has been abused, it should be rescinded. Frame the debate that way and you will have a very different public dialogue. Ask the questions that way and you’ll get very different answers.

Then, too, the governor’s message is more complicated than the simplistic union line. The unions say they have agreed to benefit and pension concessions, so Walker should give up something, too, namely his demand to do away with collective bargaining.

Sounds reasonable, but it’s collective bargaining that got us here in the first place. Ending collective bargaining in the public sector is inextricably tied to containing costs in the future, not just now. And one or two union leaders offering concessions can’t speak for hundreds of local unions that might not be so concessionary even now; indeed, history indicates they wouldn’t be, and so does the current rush to complete fat contracts before the budget-repair bill passes.

Indeed, those union leaders offering concessions can’t really offer them, because the union rank-and-file has to ratify any deals they make and there’s no guarantee they would.

There are other threads in the fabric of the argument, and it’s all a lot harder to make in a sound bite than the union’s simplistic mantra about compromise.

Finally, there are many union members in Wisconsin, and many families with union members in them, and some private-sector workers have been frightened into thinking they are next, though federal law protects their collective bargaining privileges.

So the polls don’t look good, but, as the governor suggested, so what?

Walker and the GOP senators should toss them into the garbage disposal and flip the switch. They should dispose of them now because the pages of history are filled with stories of leaders who took stands unpopular at the time but who came back to be rewarded.

There’s the Weekly Standard article the governor mentioned, for example. In it, former Michigan U.S. Sen. Spencer Abraham recounts what he calls the Michigan Experience, when newly elected GOP Gov. John Engler toughly tackled taxes and spending.

Then, as now, there were howls of protest. As Abraham recounts it, massive demonstrations hit the capitol lawn. Jesse Jackson showed up there, too.

Sure enough, Engler’s poll numbers plunged – into the 20s, Abraham remembers – and few thought he could be re-elected. Still, by staying the course,  Engler turned the state around. He went on to win re-election with 60 percent of the vote and then won a third term.

There’s a more direct and more recent comparison with Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. After the newly elected Daniels rescinded collective bargaining privileges by executive order, he too sank in the surveys, sagging to 42 percent by May of 2005.

But, again, Daniels stayed the course and won overwhelming re-election. His approval ratings have topped 75 percent.

The biggest long-term threats to Walker are not negative polls, but a collapse of leadership in the Senate. If GOP senators break with Walker and “compromise” – aka, the art of surrender – the unions will have stalled reform. Blocking Walker’s agenda will make it harder for the state to recover economically and for the governor to deliver on his promise of creating jobs.

And if the state isn’t doing well fiscally or economically, then the governor will suffer in the only poll that matters, the one taken on Election Day.

True, the polls might not bounce back in time to help vulnerable Republicans facing recalls, and there are several out there, most notably Dan Kapanke, Randy Hopper and Alberta Darling. (On the Democratic side, Sen. Jim Holperin is the most vulnerable.)

But there’s a compensating factor in the recall races, and that is voter disapproval of the Democrats’ flight to Illinois. As much as they want the governor to compromise, voters also want the senators back. That combined with the stark reality of the numbers and the difficulty of recall success in the first place, make it unlikely that the Democrats could pick up more than two seats, even in the very best of scenarios for them.

That would still give the GOP a margin of one, and a margin of one is all the governor needs.

The way to victory for Walker and the GOP senators is to continue to provide leadership that is not poll-driven, though surrendering to the polls is exactly what the Democrats and the mainstream media want to bait him into doing.

It looks as if Walker will stand his ground. Let’s hope the GOP senators do, too, for the sake of the future.