Here is my Commentator piece on the Wisconsin election:

The key fact in last night’s Wisconsin recall election? Over 30 percent of households with a union member in them voted for Walker. A strong majority of people in Wisconsin got the core Tea Party political and moral message: stop unaffordable spending

We are going to have to deal with a sprawling moral hazard issue in democracy itself as the bills dumped on the future continue to rise, but the people required to pay them decline in numbers as demographic trends unfold. Under what circumstances should people who don’t work have a claim on the product of those who do, or will?

Putting it another way, why should Germans work well into their 60s to pay for EU olive-belters who retire well before that? Why should Germans work well into their 60s to pay for EU olive-belters who retire well before that? Why should Germans work well into their 60s to pay for EU olive-belters who retire well before that?

This explains why it is a Good Thing that the Walker camp outspent the anti-Walker camp. To those who wail that Big Money is now unfairly buying political outcomes, the answer is that that is a far sounder basis for long-term public spending than Big Stupidity using monopoly power to define the options and ending up creating ruin, as has happened for far too long across much of the European Union.

Meanwhile Peggy Noonan is thinking along similar lines:

President Obama’s problem now isn’t what Wisconsin did, it’s how he looks each day—careening around, always in flight, a superfluous figure. No one even looks to him for leadership now. He doesn’t go to Wisconsin, where the fight is. He goes to Sarah Jessica Parker’s place, where the money is…

Any president will, in a presidential election year, be political. But there is a startling sense with Mr. Obama that that’s all he is now, that he and his people are all politics, all the time, undeviatingly, on every issue. He isn’t even trying to lead, he’s just trying to win.

Most ominously, there are the national-security leaks that are becoming a national scandal—the "avalanche of leaks," according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, that are somehow and for some reason coming out of the administration. A terrorist "kill list," reports of U.S. spies infiltrating Al Qaeda in Yemen, stories about Osama bin Laden’s DNA and how America got it, and U.S. involvement in the Stuxnet computer virus, used against Iranian nuclear facilities. These leaks, say the California Democrat, put "American lives in jeopardy," put "our nation’s security in jeopardy."

This isn’t the usual—this is something different. A special counsel may be appointed.

And where is the president in all this? On his way to Anna Wintour’s house. He’s busy. He’s running for president. But why? He could be president now if he wanted to be.

That last line is very sharp.