Bloomberg: UFT Endorsement Is "Kiss Of Death"

He's kinda right about this:

The candidates vying to succeed him can "shill" all they want for the teachers union, but they may very well be wasting their time, Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters today, during a press conference at the education department headquarters near City Hall.

"The last time the U.F.T.'s endorsement got somebody elected was better than two decades ago, O.K.?" said Bloomberg. "It's almost the kiss of death."

Mulgrew responded:

 In a statement, UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, "Dozens of candidates in local and citywide elections have won with UFT backing in recent years, and many are seeking it this year, while running away from Bloomberg and his record. Right now most candidates would rather be the victim of zombie attack than get a Michael Bloomberg endorsement."

Actually Bloomberg is closer to the truth than Mulgrew and the UFT leadership want to admit.

The UFT hasn't endorsed a winning mayoral candidate since Dinkins.

The UFT rank and file don't even vote in their own union elections.

And the biggest GOTV effort the UFT put forth in the 2012 election was in Florida with retired teachers - you know, the kind who are ineligible to vote in a NYC mayoral election.

So the UFT leadership may think the UFT endorsement is "coveted," but frankly, Bloomberg isn't all that far off with his statement.

Unions Won't Help Obama In 2012

So goes one theory of how the union leadership is planning the 2012 election cycle:

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.