Heather Mac Donald thinks that if "Wisconsin’s Republicans, including Walker, are swept out of power because of this vote, they will have gone down for a superb cause." She looks ahead:

This coming empirical test may be a harbinger of the likelihood of significant cuts to entitlements.  I would have thought that it would have been much easier to cut public employee benefits, since they are a finite special interest group, however powerful, than it would be to cut population-wide entitlements.  If it proves impossible even to cut back on government workers’ fat benefits packages, things don’t look good for broader entitlement cuts.

But they could have made their cause far more popular by not slipping into the legislation the ban on most collective bargaining, which went unmentioned in the campaign, thereby avoiding a far larger backlash which created the massive crowd in Madison this weekend – the size of which eclipsed any tea-party march. Over-reaching fiscal conservatives may do more harm to the general cause of fiscal conservatism than Heather grasps.

(Photo: This weekend's anti-Walker rally in Madison, Wisconsin. By Scott Olson/Getty.)