In his article “The Class War Has Begun” in New York Magazine, Frank Rich notes the similarities between the ‘Bonus Marchers’ of an earlier era and the Occupy Wall St. movement and surveys prospects for the protests awakening stronger class consciousness in the U.S.
Harold Meyerson’s WaPo column, “It’s hard to hate these occupiers,” distills the significance of the Occupy Wall St. protests into finding a worthy target: “It’s channeling ire — our ire — where ire should go: toward the banks that have fostered and profited from America’s decline.”
In the current issue of Dissent, Mark Engler writes about “The Future of the #Occupy Movement: Solidarity and Escalation.” Says Engler: “If the #Occupy movement is to remain in the media spotlight and continue gaining momentum, it must escalate. That could involve many steps, including occupying banks, continuing to use direct action against foreclosures, and embracing further international days of action.”
Joan McCarter reports at Daily Kos that “Lawmakers want to cut military benefits.” As McCarter says, “Putting defense contractor welfare above personnel, Congress and the Defense Department are doubling down on the Simpson-Bowles recommendations for catfood for veterans.” Republicans can often get away with screwing vets because of their upscale districts, but Dems who sign on are flirting with political suicide.
The Electoral College may be toast before long, if the latest Gallup Poll (conducted 10/6-9) numbers hold for a while. According to Politico, “Americans want to dump the Electoral College for a popular vote system by a margin of nearly 2-1…for the first time in a decade, a majority – 53 percent – of Republicans now favor the popular vote over the Electoral College. Democratic Party support for replacing the Electoral College with a popular vote system has been above 70 percent for the last decade.”
Tom Cohen of CNN Election Center discusses the possibility that President Obama’s foreign policy successes, including facilitating the dethroning if Gadhafi with no U.S, ground troops, killing bin Laden and ending the occupation of Iraq, will be a formidable campaign asset during the next year — particularly if he accelerates withdrawal from Afghanistan during 2012.
Although many people say they support the principle of ‘divided government,’ Ben W. Heineman, Jr.’s interesting post in The Atlantic, “The 4-Letter Word That Can Boost Obama’s 2012 Chances: V-E-T-O: Can the president win re-election by pledging to block Republicans?,” may be a little dicey in that it assumes a lot of “what if?” strategic voting. Still, in a close election…
Eric Alterman’s current post, “Think Again: The Continuing Curse of ‘On the One-Handism‘” at the Center for American Progress web pages explores a couple of the ways Republicans play the MSM for suckers. “What we have here is a prime example of what I have called “on the one-handism,” what Paul Krugman calls “the cult of balance” and what James Fallows calls the problem of “false equivalence.” The phenomenon derives from a multiplicity of causes but rests on two essential insights…”
“Republican House members have more than twice as many followers as their Democratic counterparts — about 1.3 million versus roughly 600,000 — and are far more active on Twitter with more than 157,000 individual Twitter messages, versus roughly 62,000 for Democrats,” reports Jennifer Steinhauer in her New York Times article, “The G.O.P.’s Very Rapid Response Team.”
In her WaPo The Fix post, “Race and redistricting: Unholy alliance starting to fray,” Rachel Weiner has some good news for Dems: The GOP redistricting practices of ‘cracking’ (diluting) African American votes and/or ‘packing’ it into districts to benefit Republicans in adjacent ‘whitewashed’ districts, which has long bedeviled Dems, particularly in the South, seems to be coming to an end for two major reasons….
If you want to see which GOP presidential candidates various Senators and members of congress have endorsed, The Hill has a round-up here.
Sam Stein’s “Presidential Campaigns Seek Fundraising’s Holy Grail: Mobile Donations” in HuffPo flags an important fund-raising trend: “Developing easy ways for people to donate to political campaigns using their cellphones has been the holy grail of campaign finance teams for several cycles now.” Apparently many people who don’t like giving their charge card numbers to political campaigns, are much more comfortable with just adding the contribution to their phone bills.
Month: October 2011
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
When the entire candidate field opened fire on Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax proposal in Tuesday night’s Republican debate in Las Vegas, you could almost hear the sound of hundreds of exhaled breaths in elite GOP circles. Cain’s improbable rise in national and early-state polls would now end, they probably figured, as GOP voters discovered the pizza man’s signature policy proposal wasn’t terribly well thought out. But it’s likely that Cain could have overcome the criticisms surrounding his tax proposal. What he will struggle to live down, on the other hand, are his recent comments on abortion.
The mounting criticisms of Cain’s 9-9-9 plan were troublesome, but far from fatal for the candidate. To begin, it’s unclear whether rank-and-file conservatives attracted to Cain in the first place will accept second-hand analysis from the “liberal” Tax Policy Center against the authority of Herman’s own web page and his humble Ohio economic advisors. Moreover, tax plans can be endlessly fiddled with, as Cain showed yesterday in his Detroit speech laying out a complicated “opportunity zone” exception to 9-9-9, which will address claims that it is highly regressive. And the heat that’s now on Cain for promoting a controversial set of tax reforms could soon be transferred to Rick Perry, who will unveil his own “flat tax” proposal next week.
But debate over Cain’s vulnerability on 9-9-9 might not matter as much now, because the candidate has subsequently committed an unforced error of much greater magnitude–and on an issue where tolerance of heresy in the GOP ranks has shrunk to the disappearing point: abortion. At a time when the veto power of the Right-to-Life movement over national Republican tickets has become plain as day (just ask John McCain, whose top two vice-presidential choices had to be dropped in favor of Sarah Palin), Cain somehow managed to flub answers to simple, familiar questions on abortion policy in an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan.
It was surprising enough that Cain seemed to back rape and incest exceptions to a hypothetical abortion ban, since he said he didn’t as recently as two days ago (indeed, his hard-core anti-choice position was fundamental to his one prior candidacy, his unsuccessful 2004 Senate bid in Georgia against a rare pro-choice Republican, Johnny Isakson). But of far greater concern to the Right-to-Life lobby is the logic of Cain’s rambling answer, which seems to concede that abortion is generally a matter for families, not government, to decide. The highly influential proprietor of The Iowa Republican, Craig Robinson, made this clear in a post that opened up on Cain with both barrels:
Basically, Cain’s position as a candidate is that of pro-abortion activists. The government has no right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her body. The difference is that a pro-life individual believes that child inside the womb is a life with inherent rights and that the mother should not be allowed to infringe it’s right to life [sic].
Cain will likely clarify his position, but how many times and on how many different subjects will he be allowed to ask for a “do-over” before he loses trust and credibility with voters?
Robinson’s piece–entitled “Do We Really Know Who Herman Cain Is?”–is quite certainly ricocheting around Iowa political circles. And Cain, whose front-runner status in Iowa is already vulnerable to his lack of organization and personal attention to the state, could not have picked a worse subject on which to stumble. The Iowa GOP is a place where right-to-lifers walk tall, and where “social issues” have not lost any of their old punch. Rick Santorum, who has already attacked Cain for his gaffe, is undoubtedly seeing this as a God-given opening to poach on Cain’s intensely conservative voter base, as will Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and the man whom so many Cain voters were supporting a month ago, Rick Perry.
Pro-lifers in Iowa and around the country will quickly be reminded that Cain joined the already-suspect Mitt Romney and the presumed RINO Jon Huntsman as the only candidates who refused to sign the Susan B. Anthony List’s “Pro-Life Presidential Leadership Pledge,” which promises all-out war on abortion supporters and providers, earlier this year. And like Robinson, agents of Cain’s rivals will use this incident to raise basic questions about the Tea Party favorite’s ideological reliability on other issues, including taxes. Cain is lucky that this weekend’s Des Moines banquet for Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition will involve candidate speeches rather than a full-on debate, though he may well draw fire over abortion from his rivals anyway.
Herman is a smooth operator with the soul of a born salesman, but this time his silver tongue may have undone him. Tax plans can be written or unwritten. For people who think legalized abortion represents an ongoing American Holocaust, however, the correct position is always the same, and any wrinkle or nuance that complicates “No!” is just going to get the candidate in deep trouble.
UPDATE: Cain did indeed “clarify” his position on abortion, and did indeed put himself back in the “illegal with no exceptions” camp that is the only safe territory for conservatives. But in seeking to rationalize his prior remarks, Cain also seemed to be saying his talk about the “choice” families faced with respect to specific abortions referred to the “choice” to break the law. Politico‘s headline on the clarification was apt: “Herman Cain keeps digging on abortion answer.” He got through the Faith and Freedom Coalition appearance without incident (but also without his usual boffo reception), but the residual damage might be best reflected by this comment on his gyrations from Iowa social conservative poohbah Bob Vander Plaats: “That sounds just like John Kerry in 2004.”
by Andrew Levison
Recent events ranging from the massive recall and repeal campaigns in Wisconsin and Ohio, the protests in the streets of downtown New York and the broad progressive coalition meeting in Washington to jump-start the “American Dream” movement have all dramatically raised progressives’ hopes that a new independent progressive movement might be emerging – one that will be able to successfully challenge the hold of Fox News and the Tea Party on ordinary Americans.
The hard and inescapable reality, however, is that any progressive organizing effort will quickly find itself grinding to a halt if it does not honestly and immediately confront a critical problem – the existence of two profoundly condescending and deeply destructive assumptions about ordinary working Americans that are widespread in the progressive world.
Read the entire memo here
While Democracy Corps frequent memos are read by essentially every major political commentator and analyst, there are few if any articles or commentaries that examine the unique aspects of D-Corps methodology and the quite significant methodological advances they have recently introduced.
In order to better understand these topics, The Democratic Strategist interviewed Erica Seifert, the co-author of recent memos with Stan Greenberg and the chief coordinator of D-Corps’ day to day activities.
Read the entire memo here
President Obama’s 2008 victories in VA, NC and FL have taught the political commentariat to be a tad wary of overgeneralizing about regional electoral predispositions. And yet there are strategic considerations that come with every region. Toward that end, Sasha Abramsky’s “The Democratic Plan to Recapture the West ” in The Nation provides some invaluable insights for the 2012 presidential and congressional elections.
Reporting from the Project New West Summit, a gathering of mountain west progressives, Abramsky recounts the litany of economic distress currently afflicting several western states and puts it into recent historical context:
In 2008, the economic malaise helped push much of this region into Barack Obama’s camp in the presidential election, and contributed to the Democratic victories in both houses of Congress. Increasingly urban–the combined population of Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, Albuquerque and Salt Lake City has grown by 38 percent since 2000, according to research carried out by University of Nevada in Las Vegas sociologists–and increasingly an ethnic pastiche, the interior West was no longer a reliably conservative voting bloc.
But in 2010, despite the urbanizing trends, that same malaise played to the Republicans’ advantage. With fewer people voting, and with those who did vote disproportionately allied with the GOP, Democrats in the region lost many Congressional seats and statehouses.
Although political leaders tout the region’s moderation and pragmatism–its resistance to extremes, its ability to negotiate workable budgets even in the face of partisan sparring–the Tea Party organized early and fiercely in the West. The anti-tax rebellions that have morphed into an anti-government monster also originated largely in the West, as have recent swells of anti-immigrant sentiment. (The Tea Party did, however, receive a bloody nose in Nevada, Colorado and Washington, where extreme GOP candidates fell to Democratic incumbents in 2010 Senate races.)
Despite the rise of the tea party and the accompanying government-bashing irrationality, pragmatic, forward-looking policies have emerged in the western states, as Abramsky notes:
Yet amid the nastiness, many of the country’s most innovative environmental and water management measures are coming out of the West. Colorado, for example, recently passed legislation converting all state-run coal power plants to natural gas. Many of the region’s states have, via the initiative process, raised their minimum wages in recent years. Changing demographics are giving more power to cities and to progressive Democrats. And despite all the hardship there’s still a can-do optimism that’s fairly pervasive in the region. The historian Wallace Stegner once noted that the West is “the native home of hope,” and while that emotion has taken quite a beating in recent years, it hasn’t entirely vanished.
Conceding that “For many residents in the region, the battle for 2012 is about basic economic survival,” while noting the region’s embrace of innovative policies at the local level, Abramsky quotes Project New West President Jill Hanauer: “Now more than ever, the nation should look west for new ideas. We vote for the person, not the party; the policy position and leadership, not the ideology.”
Political leaders attending the Summit echoed the need for the western states to continue to embrace innovative development policies:
Repeatedly, summit participants–such as Senators Harry Reid, Tom and Mark Udall, and Mike Bennet, as well as influential House members like Colorado’s Diana DeGette–emphasized the need to generate clean energy and biotech jobs, to educate more people up to and beyond the college level, and to secure federal investment in large-scale infrastructure projects. Such investment, they argued, was the only way to bring impoverished and technologically underserved rural areas into a more prosperous era, and to generate large-scale clean-energy projects capable of competing with fossil fuels and the nuclear industry.
Such a concerted effort to kick-start the region’s economy was, they also argued, the surest way to bring Western independent voters back to the Democratic Party in large enough numbers to secure Obama’s re-election. Since independents will likely choose America’s next president, this is hardly an insignificant task.
As for the west’s big-picture political potential,
“The West is the focus of the presidential election,” Colorado Senator Mike Bennet told The Nation, and “Colorado is a critically important state.” If Obama wins Colorado’s nine Electoral College votes, he can afford to lose Ohio; if he wins Colorado plus New Mexico, Nevada, Montana and Arizona–admittedly a long shot–the president could, in theory, be re-elected even without the large battleground states of Ohio and Florida. Winning the West is also crucial to securing control of the Senate: if Democrats hope to retain their Senate majority in 2012, they will have to hold seats in New Mexico, Montana and elsewhere.
Beyond the area’s pre-eminent role in 2012 strategic thinking, its importance is increasing with each election cycle. According to Census figures, the West is experiencing rapid population growth. Nowhere is this more the case than in Nevada, which has the fastest rate of growth in the country. For the first 119 years of the state’s existence it had one Congressman; now the state has four. As a result, the party that puts down the deepest roots in the region will reap dividends for decades to come.
Progressive Western strategists grouped around the Project New West leadership, as well as many political leaders, think they see a way to do this: emphasize a combination of environmentally sensitive and pro-growth policies; talk about education; push public investments in roads, bridges and water pipelines; and reach out to the “minority” voters who increasingly constitute majorities.
These strategists also think that the GOP line in the sand on barring tax hikes for millionaires isn’t playing well here. Polling shows the public is deeply dissatisfied with the preservation of tax benefits for the wealthiest few at the expense of basic social insurance and safety net programs for the many…
Abramsky notes that the impressive western turnouts linked to Occupy Wall St. that were also recently cited in Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight post result from the concern for economic fairness shared by many westerners — in particular the free ride in taxation that the Republicans are demanding for millionaires. “The West could be America’s firewall against GOP extremism,” Abramsky concludes.
Any Democrat called to challenge deficit hawk arguments against investing in jobs will find an excellent resource in Ari Berman’s article in The Nation, “How the Austerity Class Rules Washington.” Berman has distilled some of the better arguments from top progressive experts, begining with his stage-setting opener:
In September the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a bipartisan deficit-hawk group based at the New America Foundation, held a high-profile symposium urging the Congressional “supercommittee” to “go big” and approve a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan over the next decade, which is well beyond its $1.2 trillion mandate. The hearing began with an alarming video of top policy-makers describing the national debt as “the most serious threat that this country has ever had” (Alan Simpson) and “a threat to the whole idea of self-government” (Mitch Daniels). If the debt continues to rise, predicted former New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, there would be “strikes, riots, who knows what?” A looming fiscal crisis was portrayed as being just around the corner.
The event spotlighted a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis–when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them–did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue in the country? And why, when the global evidence clearly indicates that austerity measures will raise unemployment and hinder, not accelerate, growth, do advocates of austerity retain such distinction today?
An explanation can be found in the prominence of an influential and aggressive austerity class–an allegedly centrist coalition of politicians, wonks and pundits who are considered indisputably wise custodians of US economic policy. These “very serious people,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wryly dubs them, have achieved what University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong calls “intellectual hegemony over the course of the debate in Washington, from 2009 until today.”
Berman i.d.’s the deficit hawk elite spokespersons and organizations and then he describes how they leverage influence:
No one doubts that the outcome of the 2012 elections depends more on the economic trends in the final weeks and months of the campaign than anything else. But if you had to bet right now, the Dems’ have a better shot at winning back control of the House of Reps than holding the Senate, where they have to defend 23 seats compared to the Republicans’ 10.
But winning back a House majority is going to be a daunting challenge if current economic conditions hold, which is the most prudent conclusion that can be drawn from Kyle Kondik’s “Fortress Blue, Fortress Red: The partisan bedrock of the new House” at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. As Kondik explains:
Based on the latest Crystal Ball ratings, less than one in four of the 435 House seats will be competitive next year, and if one only considers the seats we rate as “leaning” to one party or the other or as “toss-ups,” there are only 46 truly competitive contests, or about 10% of all House seats….Republicans have, based on the Crystal Ball’s ratings, 186 safe seats going into the 2012 election. While some of these seats could become competitive as the election gets closer, we feel confident that they will be part of the Republican column when the 113th Congress convenes in 2013….While Republicans control much of the South and the Heartland, the heart of the Democrats’ power in the House — 150 seats that the Crystal Ball believes are safe for Team Blue, at least for now — is on the East and West coasts….
Kondik presents a chart breaking down the full House delegation of every state into “Safe,” “Likely,” and “Lean” categories for both parties, as well as “Toss-up.” He also provides separate charts for “Competitive House Races” for Dems and the GOP, each divided into “Toss-up,” “Lean” and “Likely” sub-categories. Only 7 Dems seats are rated “Toss-Ups,” compared to 8 for Republicans. Kondik rates 13 Dem-held seats as leaning Democratic, with 18 GOP-held seats leaning Republican. For seats designated “Likely,” he sees Republicans having an 8-seat advantage.
These ratings are more useful to both parties in terms of allocating economic and manpower resources than for predicting outcomes. Kondik also provides regional and state analysis, which may be of use in budgeting for media ads.
All of the usual caveats for snapshot data analysis apply, and Kondik notes that the redistricting process is not yet complete across the nation, a significant factor. Barring a “throw all the bums out” sentiment sweeping the nation next fall, or a broad public souring on GOP obstructionism, one year out, it looks like Dems will have to work harder than ever win House control.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on October 19, 2011.
Rob Stein, Founder of the Democracy Alliance, has a sobering, must-read for Democrats in his HuffPo article “The Grand New Alliance.” Stein skillfully dissects the component elements of the right wing coalition of his post’s title (‘GNA’ in shorthand), provides a thoughtful assessment of their cumulative power and makes a compelling argument that it promises serious trouble for Democrats and Progressives in 2012 — and beyond.
A profoundly significant new political alignment within the right flank of the Republican Party is becoming entrenched in American politics.
For the modern, somewhat more mainstream economic and neo-conservative Reagan-Bush-Bush-Cheney Republican Establishment, it is a threat far more dangerous to its control of the Conservative-Right than, in their time, were the rambunctious John Birch Society, the youthful Goldwater Rebellion, or the Lee Atwater upstarts who orchestrated the Reagan Revolution.
For Independents, moderate Republicans and Democrats this new alignment should be a wake-up call that the foundations of Democracy are always fragile and the promises of America must never be taken for granted…An harmonic convergence — a “grand new alliance” — is occurring among Libertarians, the Christian Right and the disparate legions of Tea Party activists that is transforming politics as we have known it.
Stein acknowledges significant “tensions and fissures” in this multi-tentacled right-wing coalition, “around the environment, the legitimacy of Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, and gay marriage.” He adds, however, that,
Today, the Libertarian-Religious-Tea Party Alliance is a consciously strategic federation of separate, but inter-connected, wings of a potent right-wing political machine that is energized by the frightening uncertainties of the economic downturn, mobilized in rigid opposition to a President they cannot abide, emboldened by confrontation with some of their historic allies within the broader Republican conservative movement, and fueled by a new avalanche of post-Citizen’s United-inspired financial resources.
Its political power has risen rapidly and dramatically. In just the past twelve months, the GNAs’ successes have affected virtually every nook and cranny of American politics – sweeping victories in the 2010 Congressional and state elections, grid-locked legislative stand-off with Congressional Democrats and President Obama, scorched earth political wars in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey and other states with overwhelming Republican elected majorities, and a dramatic hijacking of the current Republican Presidential Primary process through the candidacies of Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.
Stein goes on to describe the three key elements of the GNA — libertarians, the religious right, and the tea party — their numerical strength, what they believe, how they get funded, work together and resolve their differences. He notes that the dominant element, the tea party, successfully projects a “powerfully resonant right-wing populist economic (anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-government, anti-Obama) message that is drowning out reasoned debate, causing legislative gridlock, and strengthening reactionary forces.”
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on October 17, 2011.
Ah, some new data rendering the myth of the ‘liberal media’ into a pile of rubble. As Politico’s Keach Hagey reports on a new Pew Research study of “11,500 news outlets — including news websites and transcripts of radio and television broadcasts, at both the local and national levels — as well as hundreds of thousands of blogs”:
Sarah Palin put an end to her possible presidential candidacy this month with a familiar parting critique: President Barack Obama has an unfair advantage as a candidate because he’s got “about 90 percent of the media still there in his back pocket.”
…But a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that, in the past five months, the reverse has actually been true: Obama has received the most unremittingly negative press of any of the presidential candidates by a wide margin, with negative assessments outweighing positive ones by four to one.
Pew found that just 9 percent of the president’s coverage was positive, while 34 percent was negative — a stark contrast to the 32 percent positive coverage and 20 percent negative that it found Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the most covered Republican, received.
“His coverage has been substantially more negative in every one of the last 23 weeks of the last five months — even the week that Bin Laden was killed,” Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said of the president’s treatment in the media compared with that of the GOP field.
The wingnuttiest Republicans got plenty of positive coverage, as Pew reports:
The top four most favorably covered candidates, the study found, were all tea party favorites: Perry was followed by Palin, with 31 percent positive coverage and 22 percent negative; Michele Bachmann, with 31 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative; and Herman Cain, with 28 percent positive coverage and 23 percent negative…Mitt Romney’s positive and negative coverage were almost in a dead heat at 26 percent and 27 percent, respectively.
Of course there is always a cautionary note with this kind of data. Some publications carry a lot more weight than others, as do some stories. Associated Press stories, for example, tend to appear in hundreds of newspapers. Hagey quotes one AP story that put a negative spin even on the killing of bin Laden:
A nation surly over rising gas prices, stubbornly high unemployment and nasty partisan politics poured into the street to wildly cheer President Barack Obama’s announcement that Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, had been killed by U.S. forces after a decadelong manhunt. The outcome could not have come at a better time for Obama, sagging in the polls as he embarks on his reelection campaign.
Hagey goes on to show that, despite negative stories in the “liberal” media, Perry and Palin have gotten pretty positive coverage, according to the Pew data (Gingrich not so good). Ron Paul has done well on the blogosphere, but not as well in the MSM, while Herman Cain’s coverage has perked up considerably. Hagen quotes Newsweek analyst Jonathan Alter:
…Over the last 2½ years, Obama never got a honeymoon, if you actually look back into the early days of his presidency. He got very positive press on the first day, and he’s been in the scrum ever since…The truth about the American media is that we have gone, over the last 15 years, from something that could accurately be called a dominant liberal media — through the period of American liberalism, from the end of World War II to the founding of Fox News in 1996 — to a dominant conservative media in this country.
Moreover, President Obama is taking plenty of heat from the left flank inside his party, so the cumulative criticism is cited by both the left and right as proof of his growing unpopularity. Yet he still does much better in opinion polls than the Republican Party and surprisingly well in head-to-head horse race polls, considering the current economic situation.
Hagen closes with an inconclusive discussion about whether it is good strategy to attack the media for bias. But what remains clear is that conservative whining about ‘liberal media bias’ won’t find any verification in the best data out there.
This item by Ed Kilgore was cross-posted from Salon on October 12, 2011.
After fierce but inconclusive battles in Wisconsin, the great labor struggle of 2011 is now centered in that ultimate swing state of Ohio. A richly funded national right-wing effort to break the economic and political power of the labor movement in its Midwestern heartland is now facing a ballot test in a Nov. 8 referendum to affirm or overturn a union-busting law, known as Senate Bill 5.
As in Wisconsin and other states, conservatives in Ohio have focused their fire on public-sector unions, which are easy to identify with unpopular levels of government spending and taxation. But just as there is little doubt the assault on public-sector unions this year is part of a broader effort to weaken collective bargaining rights and undermine labor’s political strength, efforts to repeal Senate Bill 5 will depend on the solidarity of private-sector union members who are not directly affected by the legislation, but can see the handwriting on the wall.
The heart of Senate Bill 5, as enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by GOP Gov. John Kasich, is a set of provisions limiting collective bargaining by public employees to wage and hour issues. Strikes by public employees (who constitute nearly half the state’s unionized workforce) would be banned, as they already are for police and fire department employees. Pensions and benefits, and a variety of ancillary issues affecting conditions of employment, such as class sizes for teachers, would be permanently off the table.
Of equal importance is a provision banning “fair-share” assessments from non-union members who benefit from union collective bargaining efforts, a step that would seriously damage incentives to join public-sector unions. This is perhaps the most obvious feature of Senate Bill 5 that might set a precedent for future attacks on private sector unions in Ohio and on unions in other states. Nationally, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is pushing state right-to-work laws banning “union shops.” Some, including, so far, at least two Republican presidential candidates, are even promoting a national right-to-work law.
Proponents of SB 5 are trying mightily to claim the legislation is mainly about “runaway” pensions and benefits, and often tout a provision requiring public employees to pay at least 10 percent of the cost of pensions and 15 percent of the cost of healthcare premiums. Unfortunately for this argument, many if not most public employees already contribute to pensions and benefits at this level or more. Just as important, public employee unions in Ohio and elsewhere have traditionally sacrificed wage increases to pension and benefit needs. Indeed, in 2008 alone, Ohio public-sector unions made $250 million in wage and benefit concessions to state and local governments.
The conservative talk about disparities between public and private-sector employees is a transparent ploy to drive a wedge between the two wings of the labor movement, while distracting attention from the more egregiously anti-union provisions of the SB 5. Polling has shown the benefit and pension issues are the only provisions of SB 5 that are reasonably popular.
These efforts certainly have not worked at the level of union or political-party leadership. The drive to repeal SB 5, spearheaded by a union-funded umbrella group called We Are Ohio, has conspicuously featured private-sector union leaders. This weekend, a Columbus-area phone-bank and door-to-door canvassing effort was personally led by Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen, with strong participation from other private-sector unions ranging from the Steelworkers to the Plumbers & Pipefitters to the Food and Commercial Workers.
Mike Gillis of the Ohio AFL-CIO told me that building trades unions, who fear an effort to kill Project Labor Agreements ensuring union jobs for major public works projects, are also very active in the repeal campaign. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed Kasich’s approval ratings among voters in union households to be deeply “underwater” with 27 percent positive and 68 percent negative. And beyond the union ranks, the Ohio Democratic Party has been an unambiguous opponent of SB 5 from the beginning.
The apparent strategy of conservative anti-union activists to target public-sector employees as a less-popular “weak link” in the union ranks is based on questionable assumptions. Though there is little in the way of public polling on this subject, a February 2011 Pew survey showed public- and private-sector unions having almost identical favorable/unfavorable ratings from the public at large. The poll found 48 percent have favorable view of private-sector unions with 37 percent negative. For public section unions, the figures were 48 percent favorable, 40 percent unfavorable.
