The conventional wisdom on the collective bargaining fight in Wisconsin goes like this: Union members, who sleepwalked through the 2010 midterms, are now mobilizing to defend their rights – a boon for all Democrats, especially President Obama in 2012.
But that might not be true – especially the helping-Obama part.
Labor officials, along with Democratic operatives close to unions, say the wave of challenges to organized labor across the Midwest has stoked a powerful urge for payback in the next election cycle, but the rage will likely be focused on the state legislators who are furiously green-lighting cuts to public employee pensions and bargaining rights.
Obama won’t exactly be an afterthought, but his tepid support of the dead-as-Eugene Debs Employee Free Choice Act and his unwillingness to actually walk the picket line with workers (as he once promised) has tempered union fervor.
That’s not to say labor won’t push for hard for him in ’12 – especially when his anti-labor GOP opponent is picked – but the battle dearest to union hearts will be to reassert their power in local races and reverse the historic statehouse gains made by Republicans in 2010, according to one top U.S. labor figure.
That attitude will have concrete implications: The biggest public sector national unions – AFSCME, SEIU, AFT – are likely to devote millions to targeting state-level races next time, money that might have gone to pro-Obama outreach efforts. And while Obama is likely to benefit from the mustering of his 2008 volunteer army, unions will divert a substantial part of their phone-banking and door-knocking operations to labor-intensive local races, Democrats say – thinning the ranks of Obama’s 2012 ground operation.
When Obama's people come calling for union help with their GOTV operations, EVERY union person ought to say they'd really like to help and they will, as soon as they find their comfortable shoes.
Then they ought to go back to knocking off the anti-union politicians in BOTH parties.
Obama and other mainstream Dems have calibrated their response to the events in Wisconsin and elsewhere very carefully: they've been just supportive enough (they think) to keep the union campaign contributions coming, but not enough to do much of anything.
ReplyDeleteI would say that Obama's politics are a cowardly disgrace, but that would imply that he actually had some values that he turned away from or was fearful of pursuing. But the reality is that his only allegiance is to his personal political brand, and the competent management of oligarchy and empire. That just leads to working people being played.