Look for the Union Label?

I have been struck over the past week by the apparent decline in the political power of unions. In politics, it seems, the union label doesn't mean what it once did.

Gov. Howard Dean had managed to get high-profile endorsements from three major unions -- AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), SEIU (Service Employees International Union), and IUPAT (International Union of Painters and Allied Trades). On paper, at least, these unions represented high-powered political muscle, and more importantly, represented bodies who could get out the vote. Rep. Dick Gephardt had gotten more union endorsements than Dean. Yet neither candidate appears to have benefitted from their endorsements. Odd, isn't it?

At some level, a candidate rises or falls on his or her own ability to capture the public imagination, but one has to wonder, given the failures of Dean and Gephardt, just what are unions bringing to the table, if not their power to influence large groups of people to support a particular candidate?

I think that a large part of the problem is that unions, like many Democrats this time around, have decided to trade principles for electability. In other words, rather than endorsing a candidate whose views and record show support for labor's causes, the unions set out to be king-makers -- if you don't believe me, consider the shuttle diplomacy by the Dean campaign between SEIU and AFSCME, which resulted in a simultaneous endorsement from two rival unions. Each set out to be the power behind Dean's ascedency, but ended up only proving their own impotence.

More recently, the AFL-CIO decided to play king maker by endorsing Sen. Kerry, who has, at best, a mixed record on issues that are important to organized labor (to name two, Kerry supported NAFTA and giving President Bush fast-track negotiating authority; purportedly, according to the New York Times, Kerry has voted for every trade agreement since the end of the Cold War [link]). Of course, given Kerry's success in the primaries before the endorsement, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney is too late to claim the mantle of king maker, so instead, he's trying to be the "guy who unites the party and delivers the White House into Democratic hands". In this vein, he declared the race over: "Today, we know the time has come to unite behind one man, one leader, one candidate." [link] Never mind that at the time he said that, fewer than 700 of the 4200 delegates at stake had been picked, and most of the Rust Belt states where labor has been most firmly entrenched have not yet had a chance to vote.

But if things go wrong -- that is, if Sweeney or AFSCME president Gerald McEntee can't deliver -- will Labor take any responsibility for the failure? To hear McEntee talk about the Dean campaign, the answer is clearly "no". Rather than take responsiblity, McEntee said of Dean, "I think he's nuts."

Moreover, when the chips were down, McEntee turned out to be a fair-weather friend. In addition to publicly pulling AFSCME's endorsement before the Wisconsin primary, McEntee trashed Dean publicly, despite Dean's dignified handling of the business of suspending his campaign. In an interview with the New York Times, McEntee had this to say:

I go to Burlington, and I meet with him. I'm telling you, I threw more ice-water on his head in about 25 minutes than he probably has ever had. And I said 'Don't go to Wisconsin, ok? Don't go in.' I told him to get out. I said, 'You can't win.' He said he's still going into Wisconsin. I said, 'We're not. We're off the train. If you think I'm going to spend $1 million to get you another point after this election is over, you're crazy.'" [link]

Thus is the enduring value of the union endorsement today. Of course, the candidates get some positive press on the day of the endorsement, but after that, I don't see that it helps all that much these days. But maybe I'm wrong -- just ask Democratic front-runners Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean.