There’s some confusion going on with regard to the intentions and plans of the fourteen AWOL Democratic state senators from Wisconsin who have been hiding from their job responsibilities for the last two weeks. They are or are not or are or are not or are or are not* about to give up and just come back in; what is actually going to happen is still to be determined. On the other hand, it’s easy enough to see what did happen over the weekend: the fourteen AWOL senators lost whatever unit cohesion that they might have had in the first place. Two weeks of living on the lam and being politely chased by private citizens with video cameras will do that to a group, after all.

You see, we tend to forget that politicians are not identical, like potatoes: these fourteen men and women are just that – men and women – and it’s easy to believe that they’re getting tired, sore, and fuming about how they’ve somehow become the surrogate whipping boys for a national debate on public sector unions. Some of them might even be thinking that they didn’t actually sign up for this, that this wasn’t in the job description, and that the people urging them to exile in Illinois might not really give a tinker’s dam about them or their problems. And that this situation that they’re in is getting old. Oh, sure, no doubt a few of the AWOL senators are having a ball… but some of them are not, and the loss of message discipline in the last few days shows that.

And it only takes one AWOL senators to end this nonsense.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Via @kevinbinversie: the Democratic Senators want a sit-down with the Governor. At least, that’s what Wisconsin Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller says. How much clout he has with his colleagues to make a deal right now is very much up in the air.

*Warning: that link goes to an advocate of mob violence.