Myerson on Labor

On the heels of several "unity" events discussed previously, Harold Meyerson provides a nonetheless sober account of the state of the unions.

DNC Wednesday Nite WrapUp

Okay, these are getting increasingly less thorough as I get tired-er and you all do such an awesome, elaborate job with the real-time analysis. If anybody has any specific questions about any of this, feel free to post in the comments and I'll hold the eff forth like a sandwich-man holds forth the produce of his chrome sandwich-maker.

Some things:

1. As Wobs and Dave discussed in the long commentary below, I had some very high highs tonight. In particular, seeing the Korean guy from Lost was hype! Not to mention Mika Brezinski (swoon) and "Morning Joe" (triple swoon). Jeepers!
   
2. Seriously, though, I had a few "we can't lose" moments, but afterwards at the hotel bar (brownies and milk, thank you very much) I found myself a little bit freaked out. I am worried that about Obama's appearance after Biden's speech. Why do it, Barry? Sure, I was happy, but only after quickly repressing the thought that, shucks, it was a little like he was worried about the Clintons and/or Biden stealing "his" show. Even his attempt at explaining why his acceptance speech needs to be at a 75,000 person football arena - sure, it's because he believes in the people, okay - seemed a little control freak-y, like he wanted to preempt the GOP's criticism of him as being a self-absorbed demagogue by acknowledging that's what they were going to do, and trying to answer it in advance but instead dignifying the criticism.
   
3. Yes, I am horrified about tomorrow night.
   
4. Yes, the roll call drama was beautiful and chill-up-spine inducing.
   
5. Yes, I am surrounded by Hillary supporters - political professionals mostly, not zealots - who are no doubt "on board," but nonetheless doing some naysaying.
   
6. Dear St. Axelrod, keep playing this perfecly. Yr doing such a good job that my catholic arse can only assume there's a reckoning coming.
7. 'Saw HRC talk at an SEIU-sponsored healthcare event avec Rendell, Strickland, Patrick, Daschle, Stern. HRC is very impressive talking about l'healthcare.
   

DNC report Tuesday, pt. 2

Impressions from the Evening Program

• I spent the evening seated next to a lady from Winchester, TN, just some dozen miles down the mountain from Sewanee. She assured me that Bennet's Pharmacy continues to thrive, serving milkshakes and their famous, fructose-heavy "Bloody Martys" to Franklin County. She also informed me that, within her congressman-husband's district, Sewanee was the only town to vote for Obama in the TN primary...!
  
• I saw the person I think of as "C-SPAN GUY" - cannot find a pic - riding the Pepsi Center's downward escalator and snarfing a long, tall bag of popcorn.
  
• In terms of messaging and placement in the program schedule, Change to Win kicked the AFL-CIO's butt last night. Anna Berger and the "walk a day in my shoes" home healthcare worker both had close-to-primtetime slots, whereas Sweeney's bracing teleprompter recitation was buried amidst the hour of snoozeville that ensued between Janet Napolitano and Bob Casey.
  

dnc Tuesday report - Part 1

AFL-CIO and the American Prospect, All Boats Rising: Transforming the American Economy

• feat. Richard Trumka, Sen. Sherrod Brown, Jullianne Malveaux, Paul Krugman, Robert Kuttner, Ezra Klein, John Sweeney, Harold Myerson, Rep. Donna Edwards and Sen. Amy Klobuchar
• What the hell is Paul Krugman doing at this here? Apparently he and Kuttner have had long-running feuds around free trade and Krugman's allegiance to what we could call "Rubinomics." (My question, naturally, was where the hell is Dean Baker?) Anywho, Ezra Klein discussed what seemed like an "ideological convergence" among left and center-left wonks, pointing to how 60% of congressional dems opposed NAFTA, and a decade later 93% opposed CAFTA.
  
• Krugman agreed that, alas, he looks forward to the time where the situation is less dire and they can resume their feuding. Krugman continued on to note that Rubinomics had resulted in a Clinton-era budget surplus that was rendered moot by the Bush tax cuts; that tax reform and social services were necessary and important, but ultimately what the macro-economy needs is a fix to the wage inequality John Sweeney calls "obscene." Krugman continued to assert that unions are the best means of rolling back this inequality, and that Friedmanites who would assert that unions were a necessary casualty of free trade should, shucks, looks to an obscure nation like Canada for an alternative example. (This underlines the argument so many of us have arrived at separately: American unions' decline is better understood as a political consequence of the Reagan era than as an economic inevitablility.)
  
• Ohio's Sharrod Brown is definitely the "economic populist" face of the 2006-era blue wave, and he made the great point that Democrats can overcome the "god, guns and gays" tactics of Republican campaigning if they actually, actively enunciate not just the tepid Democratic economic platform, but a working families-centered, union-centered one. '(Beats starting a Third Party or passing arcane "fusion" legislation, no? )
  
• Ezra Klein then turned to Bob Kuttner, asking how or why we can believe that Obama - whose economic plans have been okay but hardly even post-Keynesian, and who has moved towards the center in so many other ways - could lead us to something like a "new" New Deal (Kuttner's new book tackles exactly this topic.) Kuttner evoked LBJ, Lincoln and FDR, and reminded us that in the case of each administration, "more needed to be done than seemed possible." While Obama's polices did strike academics like Krugman (and I) as the least progressive when compared with Edwards and Clinton, as a genuine nice guy and charismatic leader, BHO always seemed most capable of the hegemonic work of shifting "the horizons of the possible." Kuttner continued, noting how Obama's Cooper Union speech on financial regulation was brilliant, suggested that global financial deregulation may ultimately harm workers more than free trade, but also noted the serious difficulties Obama faced in courting unionists, latinos and retirees. Obama needs these constituencies for more than electoral reasons - as Sweeney suggests, labor and other key groups will have to "have his back" if we can expect him to take a chance on serious reform.
  
• Like Krugman before her, Julianne Malveaux cited the "small-ism" of progressive legislation today, and lamented how the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era has all but taken job creating - what we need most, in her mind - completely off the table. A woman of color, Malveaux had a powerful admonishment for white unionists in regards to the "elephant in the room" that is Obama's skin tone - "we cannot afford to lose this election because you are afraid to talk to have the race conversation."
  
• Ezra Klein evoked FDR's famous "make me do it" challenge, and asked no less a brainiac than Richard Trumka how it was that labor planned to push Obama towards worker-friendly macroeconomic reforms. Trumka agreed that the Reagan-era political project has shrunk popular expectations for what government can do, and limited progressives in congress to putting out daily fires rather than intervening upon their root causes. He moved on to assert that since Reagan, economic problems in the USA have related neither to growth nor to income, but to distribution (I peed myself, at this point). Trumka continued to cite Working America's massive GOTV mobilization and their plan for after the election, and elaborated upon labor's vision for "wage-led growth" under the Employee Free Choice Act and the Obama administration.
  
• Harold Myserson - who called Working America progressives' "best shot" for getting through to working-class whites - took us back to the election at hand, and asked how Obama could take on some economic populist characteristics without, shucks, falling into the "Angry Black Man" posture his campaign has taken pains to eschew. He lauded the AFL-CIO's "meet Barack Obama" initiatives in form and content, praised Joe Biden as a veep choice, but then returned to the question of a growing sense of outrage about our economy and society.
  
• Donna Edwards (swoon!) contrasted our ticket, which is fundamentally about "working people," to the current administration comprised of two oil men. 'There's not a dime's bit of difference between Bush and McCain," she said, "and if there were a dime, it wouldn't go to working people." She suggested that with Biden, Obama's campaign can (and should) harness the omnipresent frustration to win a new mandate.
  
• When asked for specific transformative programs that could make an Obama administration truly great, Kuttner concluded that, as was the case for medicare and social security, it will be necessary for Obama to "think big," and to shitcan the "fiscal responsibility" rhetoric and be prepared for deficit spending. Whether or not BHO and his coterie of neoliberal advisors agree, who knows? But the issue is, what are labor, minorities and other historically left-leaning consituencies ready to do to pull him leftward? Maybe Richard Trumka could be the new John L. Lewis? I dunno
  

(After the forum I was lucky enough to meet Thomas Frank, buy his new book, and tell him how the Baffler changed my life when I was sixteen more than any hardcore record. Combined with the aforementioned forum, I knew then that nothing I'd see that night at the DNC would make me feel anywhere near as starstruck and fired up. I was right, of course.)

More DNC Gab

• Here's the always interesting, must-read Washington Note with a more positive spin on Biden's foreign policy CV.
  
• Tom Hayden predicts Obama will lose. Does anybody care? I dunno, but note the references to the violence on the Denver streets.
  
• The good people at Venezuela Analysis are hoping that........Obama's election means a change in the USA's Latin American policy.
• Did I mention we love us some Rachel Maddow in Me-burg?
• Unlike James Carville, Chris Cilizza seems to grasp what Michelle O's address was actually about.
  
• 10 sins of the Father (i.e., John Kerry) that BHO mustn't repeat.
• Ted Kennedy as Ulysses? Maybe I just take my comparisons to "the big U" more seriously than others.
  

dnc report, Monday

Okay then.... 'Wish I hadn't looked at CNN so soon after returning from the Pepsi Center. Alas, it would seem that Gergen and Carville would have us believe that the evening was wasted, opportunities lost, etc. I am a bit confused as to what they expected, I guess. Was Michelle Obama supposed to hammer John McCain and argue against offshore drilling? Was the senior senator from Massachusetts supposed to come out of his convalescence and insult Cindy?

Only time will tell if the convention - and tonight in particular - will succeed in inuring BHO to swing-state voters, independents, et al. But I thought that the Claire McCaskill/Michelle Obama block was a very effective way of introducing Barack - and by extension, the post-Clinton, 21st Century, "50 state strategy" Democratic Party - to the at-large viewership: hence the "One Nation" theme and sentimental biopics, respectively. There will be plenty of time to hammer John McCain - and if Hillary, Warner, Biden and Bill don't hammer and hammer and hammer, than they're not worth spitting at - but that's not what
tonight was about.

Now, mebbe yr saying, that's the point, Lex! What was tonight about? Well, I gave you my impression, but it's the impression of somebody who's in the hall, not somebody watching tv like the overwhelming number of Americans who are just starting to think about this election, and just now tuning in to see who exactly the Dems are, and who exactly the Obamas are, in 2008. So why don't you tell me whether you thought tonight worked or not. And I'll throw out a few more general observations:

• The convention is better lit, and has much better music than 2000....
  
• Same stilted, staged and vapid infomercials re: the economy. I wonder if we've embarked upon a new era in which "working families" will come to be as overused a term as "middle class."
  
• Nancy Pelosi's speech was dullsville.
  
• The crowd went bat-crap when Joe Biden did an impromptu walk-through; ditto for Ted Kennedy, naturally.
  
• Just like in 2000, Jimmy Carter was acknowledged and allowed to take a bow, but not allotted any time to speak. 'Makes me kind of sad.
  
• I am not sure that Iowa Republican Jim Leach did very much for anybody. Being drunk on 20th century American history I kind of enjoyed his digression re: the Four Great debates in American history. Me and four other people. That said, the idea that Tom Harkin was reduced to little more than introducing Leach seemed kind of like a waste. I wonder if that whole half-hour was aimed at winning Iowa in Novemebr... How many electoral votes do they have over there, -2?
  
• Tomorrow is a big day for me.... Onwards to the AFL-CIO Economic Forum.
  

More DNC Gab

1. No reason not to keep your eyes trained on the Nation's DNC coverage, seeing how they themselves set a nice, inside-outside standard for supporting BHO without conflating him with the risen Christ.
   
2. Oof! Tough thoughts from the Left contra Biden: both foreign and domestic.
   
3. Also, Kasama has great coverage from the far Left, such as this. That said, what exactly were the gains made during the 1968 DNC that socialist/communist/anarchist/anti-globalization protesters are so hot to recreate?
   
4. Another major question for BHO: will he "own" the economy issue by the time he's through convention-ing? He better, because that, women and chaps, is the whole ballgame. And if Biden helps on that score, then I'm prepared to forget about that credit card/bankruptcy vote (just as I've, uh, repressed BHO's switch on FISA.)
5. Rules committee wrap-up featuring somebody I know.
6. Michael Moore doing what he does best, mouthing Uncle's anti-McCain talking point #1. Actually, mebbe Uncle could produce us a White Paper contra McCain. I, for one, am still somewhat attracted by the AZ senator's "maverick" posture. It was so rebellious of him to oppose a national holiday for Martin Luther King, par example!
7. Did I mention who I get to be in the same room with tonight?
   

In Advance of Le Speech

What say you?

1. Will we hear the "Yes, We Can" chant from BHO on Thursday nite, or is that a little bit too 'movement-y' for the General Election? Has he tamped down the Cesar Chavez-inspired credo because he doesn't want to overuse it, or because he thinks a black man leading throngs of supporters in an act of empowering self-affirmation is a little too too? Coming as it is on the anniversary of "I Have a Dream," to what extent will the speech try to harness the civil rights legacy, and how sanitized will representations of said movement be?
   
2. Will Iraq be referred to as "a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged," or will that sort of outright denunciation be curtailed?
   
3. Will Hugo Chavez be referred to in the same breath as Ahmadinejad? You know I love it when them Democrats do that.
   

dnc Sunday report

Okay, now we're talking. Things got underway yesterday at the Convention Center - not to be confused with the Pepsi Center - wherein representatives from various faith groups held an interfaith service celebrating religiosity as such and BHO in particular, and wherein the AFL-CIO held an amazing rally.

Important qualification: my days out here are super-regimented, and owing to the fact that I cannot bring my laptop into the Hall, these reports will be ex post facto as well as rough. Forgive me?

Heading into the arena I was pleased to visit with a whole array of ANGRY secularist protesters. Inspired by BHO's recent tip-of-the-chapeau to 'faith-based initiatives,' these atheists/humanists/agnostics brandished placards reading "The Iraq War was a Faith-Based Initiative" (to which I say, "Amen.")

Other protesters included the anti-choice crowd with their usual terminated fetus porn, and PETA, who advanced their characteristically, uh, evocative platform w/ the new slogan "Stop Global Warming: Tax Meat!"

But back to the anti-choice wankers. Their placards read, "A vote for Obama is a vote for Dead Children," to which I would have loved to reply, "A vote for McCain is a vote for Dead Soldiers."

Anywho by the time I settled into the interfaith blah-blah I was semi-impressed with the speakers and ready to be all "big tent" about the Dean strategy and everybody having a "seat" at the "table." Then two consecutive speakers respectively decried "routinized murder" (i.e. abortion) and then championed the fundamental right of School Choice.

Suffice it to say I was pleased to then dive headlong into a genuinely impressive labor rally, featuring more "rock star" labor leaders than I've ever seen in one place.

Recently, my Uncle and I have been having discussions about the tendency to so-called "rank-and-filism" in labor history and labor studies, which posits - sometimes despite a lot of evidence au contraire - that union workers are constantly primed for class warfare, and constantly let down by their conservative leadership. Well, let me say that yesterday's event belied that claim. The message - from Change to Win, the AFL-CIO, the NEA, et. al - was loud and clear: BHO needs to be the next President, labor cannot afford to wait, and most impressively, unionists need to "call bullshit" (lotta profanity at this meeting - which I loved) on co-workers looking for an excuse to avoid voting for a black man. Honestly, with the exception of GTFF meetings and some of my exploits with the brothers and sisters in Guadeloupe, I have never rolled my eyes or stifled back sardonic laughter less at a labor rally.

1. AFL-CIO exec veep Arlene Holt Baker emceed the event, and established the theme of "giving America back to the working people who built it."
2. Next, Colorado's AFL-CIO president got up and talked - in very familiar terms and frames - about the wide range of union-busting ballot initiatives coming down in CO.
   
3. Steve Deberra - famous for his very moving appearance at the AFL-CIO Presidential Forum last Summer - brought us all to tears and then made a really funny mistake, confusing John Sweeney with George Meany. I think JS dug the comparison.
   
4. John Sweeney was fiery and proud of labor's electoral clout: 17 million unionists, 28 million union households, and 2.5 million members of Working America who recently have been coming on board at a pace of 50,000/week. Sweeney also spoke of Labor 2008's voter security program, about which I'd like to know more: "We'll keep John McCain honest, we'll have Barack Obama's back, and we'll make sure that every vote is counted."
   
5. Sweeney then introduced Change to Win's "estimable" executive veep Anna Berger, who was quick to tell us about how BHO is just like her federation: "He dreams big, he acts boldly, and he changes people's lives." It's a "fight for power" we're in, "not an election." As usual, Change to Win never lacks for impressive rhetoric.
   
6. AFSCME leader and former HRC supporter Gerald McEntee summarized everything great and everything ambiguous about the Sweeney-era "Changing to Organize" coalition represented on the panel. With something of a scowl, but also with great fervor, he encouraged every union member to be prepared to engage with workers who might be McCain supporters; to push them to own up to the fact that their recalcitrance about BHO isn't about lapel pins, or Islam, but about his skin tone; and to look them in the eye and say "that's bullshit! this is 2008." How smug can I really be about labor leaders - and there were many others after McEntee - unafraid of foregrounding the difficult topic of race in their BHO raps?
   
7. Next came a Teachers' Union medley, wherein NEA President Reg Weaver gave a funny, fancy, inspiring call to arms, and I got my first glimpse of new AFT prez Randi Weingarten. All I really know about the latter is her infamous decision to throw AFT support behind NY's former Repbublican governor, George Pataki. Well, Reg Weaver she was not, oratorically speaking... but she more than anybody else on the bill highlighted pattyjoe issues re: privatization, healthcare and expanded government services. She also made a credible, lucid plea for Hillary supporters (of which she's one) to "come along" to the BHO bandwagon.
   
8. And then - oh my god! - Andy Stern graced us with his presence and made some perfunctory comments. Andy Stern is enough of a celeb on this blog, so what can I say?
9. Unite-Here's Bruce Raynor gave a rousing speech invoking labor's historic role in creating social security (a lotta people would disagree with that claim), and citing the potential for a 'New' New Deal under an Obama presidency. Like many other speakers, Raynor spoke of the need for labor to continue organizing publicly and electorally after November so as to give President Obama the "coverage" he needs to truly make progressive social change.
   
10. Next came the one and only James Hoffa, who in his demeanor never fails to provide an-all-too realistic portrait of the ideological mish-mash that is today's labor movement. In a move that'd make my Uncle shutter, he managed to go from expressing intense solidarity with the Anti-WTO movement and the legacy of Seattle, to decrying Free Trade's favoring "foreigners" over "Americans." Can we please learn to enunciate an anti-corporate politics without succumbing to xenophobia, James? Believe me, it really is possible.
    
11. I was very pleased to see the Steelworkers' Leo Girard, who greeted us with a caveat: "I feel like Elizabeth Taylor's late husband in the bedroom: I know what to do but I can't promise that I can make it interesting." Zing!
    
12. Girard then introduced Director Stuart Townsend, whose film the Battle in Seattle is threatening to visit the proverbial theatre near (the proverbial) "you." Woody Harrelson is in this film, really?
    
13. AFL-CIO brainiac Richard Trumka came on, again pressing the race issue, and again underscoring how all of the Rev. Wright/lapel pin/Islam/Indonesia/"he's different" stuff is ultimately simply an attempt to give an alibi for those who are too embarrassed to be explicit about their fear of black people.
    
14. LIUNA's Terry O'Sullivan calls George Bush a "mope" - "a moron who couldn't get a dog outta the pound with a fistfull of fifties." Okay....
15. CWA's Larry Cohen wrapped things up - after a great, short BHO/AFL-CIO film - with a long talk about the AFL-CIO's Million Worker mobilization around the Employee Free Choice Act.
    

Some random thoughts:

• it occured to me that the line-up at the dais - Change-to-Winners included - was pretty much the same coalition that elected Sweeney's "Changing to Organize" ticket to the AFL-CIO leadership back in them heady 1990s. it's kind of frustrating to note how "pale, male and stale" the leadership looks, but would my staffer-friends be living and working in this movement without this crowd and their intervention?
  
• labor's political program is more sophisticated, and frankly, often more enthusiastic, than its organizing program. is it worth it, if said political program a) elects BHO and b) gets us the Employee Free Choice Act?
  
• overwhelmingly, the attendees of this meeting (and the Internationals represented by the speakers) were from public-service unions. overwhelmingly, the election literature and Obama video were directed to the private sector and the building trades...is this crap or not crap? i dunno, but i plan to dissertate about it in depth.
  
• notwithstanding the very impressive sense of unity when it came to BHO and the importance of this election, the animus between a lot of these different individual was palpable.
• again, despite my, uh, faith, in, uh, the revolutionary potential of the labor movement....uh, yeah. anyway, despite that, i want to reiterate that on Sunday i witnessed a Labor-Left that struck me as way, way out front of much of the rank and file. should i be surprised and/or depressed about this? should i see it as a contradiction?
  

On the way home from these two events, we were joined on the light rail by an NJ delegate (and Obama supporter) from Asbury Park, and I witnessed exactly the sort of dialogue between HRC and BHO advocates that you would hope to see. That said, there remain some real disconnects. HRC supporters, many of whom are establishment Dems who seemingly "discovered" media misogyny during the 2008 primary, are more than willing to produce a "hit list" of media figures who were unduly critical of Hillary. So doing, they often fail to distinguish between the misogynist Boys' Club and, shucks, those progressives who maligned HRC's political stances on Iraq, Iran, etc. I think that's what irks me the most, though again I want to restate that I think HRC has done right by BHO, at least ever since she got around to conceding. In short, I do not think that HRC is to blame for some of her more, uh, ardent supporters. But I would also like to reiterate that a lot of this might have been avoided had she conceded earlier. That said, there is still plenty of reason to believe that the competitive primary will end up being a net gain.... or so I hope.

Meanwhile, I have met more than one Obama supporter who has wondered what it will take, exactly, to smooth things over. One Committee member also admitted to suspecting their were uncredentialed agents sabouteurs attempting to stir the DNC pot. Luckily, I think that the Clinton and Obama leaderships are working in concert to curtail those shennanigans. We'll see.

The point is that I have a very unanthropological lack of sympathy for certain HRC supporters, who I am convinced are less motivated by righteous outrage than they are by a more smug sense that they have had their party whisked away by Obama/Dean forces. I would love to hear from those more attuned to feminist media analysis and/or the Clinton 'public' as to the nature of the ongoing discontent, and I would love to parse this bloc and separate the bitter establishment Dems from the understandably-annoyed opponents of sexism. But I would also like to ask the angry Hillary masses, how is media bias BHO's fault? In what ways did he and his campaign participate in the misogyny?

Me and the DNC

Okay, here I am, with my traveling companion, awaiting the whole damned thing.

I have already had enough of the hand-wringing over Hillary, and I should say that EZ would be right at home with a bunch of Baby Boomer women I've met here. My traveling companion says that the Rules Committee headed off a fledgling floor fight over HRC/BHO...but I think there are plenty of histrionics still in store.

On the positive side, there is some amazing wonkishness awaiting me, including this Main Event on Tuesday.

Today? Diss. work/Pool/Schmoozing/and, apparently, an AFL-CIO event. No grievances to organize for a whole 5 days, but plenty of a-nerding to do.