Labor Day ’07 finds America’s union movement in a paradoxical situation with respect to its political influence. First, the bad news. Union representation has been declining significantly, as E. J. Dionne points out in his Labor Day column at WaPo.

Labor’s political gains have occurred in the face of a steady decline in its private-sector role. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 24 percent of the American work force was unionized in 1973 and unionization rates were roughly equal in the public and private sectors. The latest figures, for 2006, show a decline in unionization to 12 percent of the workforce and a radical shift in labor’s composition: Now only 7 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions, compared with 36 percent in the public sector.

But numbers can be deceptive, as Dionne concludes:

The shift in labor’s base and the overall drop in membership may be central to both the growing political sophistication and influence of the unions. The public-sector unions, with an obvious interest in the outcome of elections, have developed highly effective political operations. This is true of the teachers and nurses, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the police and firefighters, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
…Thus the paradox on Labor Day 2007: At a moment of organizational weakness, labor’s political influence and ideological appeal may be as strong as at any time since the New Deal. Every Democrat running for president seems to know this.

In terms of issues, health care reform now tops Labor’s agenda. In his Labor Day message, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, launched a campaign for universal, comprehensive health care. Sweeney points out that one fourth of voters in ’06 were union members, and says:

it’s painful this Labor Day to look around and see America isn’t working the way it should… One of the greatest economic burdens working families face today is the insane, out-of-control cost of health care. One in four Americans say their family has had a problem paying for medical care during the past year. The cost of health care — rising far faster than workers’ wages or inflation — is a major factor in housing problems and bankruptcies. In fact, every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem.
Meanwhile, insurance and drug companies are making stunning profits, health insurance CEOs averaged $8.7 million in 2006 compensation and pharmaceutical company CEOs pulled down an average of $4.4 million.
The rest of us aren’t faring so well. The annual premium cost for a family health plan has close to doubled since 2000, from $6,351 to an astonishing $11,480…As costs grow higher, fewer employers are providing health coverage for employees–and fewer workers are able to afford their share of the costs or to buy policies on their own. The outrageous price tags on insurance policies are driving increases in the number of people without coverage. The federal government just let us know that another 2.2 million people — including 600,000 more children — lost health insurance last year, meaning 47 million of us now cannot afford to get sick.
In the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth, that is just not acceptable. In America, no one should go without health care.

See also the AFL-CIO’s guide to where each of the presidential candidates of both parties stand on six key “working family issues”: the Employee Free Choice Act; Good Jobs; Health Care; Trade and Manufacturing; Retirement Security; and Education.
Union endorsements of presidential candidates are somewhat spread out thus far. Dodd has been endorsed by the Firefighters union. Clinton has the nod from the Machinists and the United Transportation Union. Edwards, who may get the lion’s share of endorsements in the months ahead, has been endorsed by the Carpenters Union. Change to Win Chair Anna Burger, quoted in Dionne’s column, says the labor movement sees a field of Democratic candidates who believe that “unions are the solution, not the problem
In an interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales on Democracy Now, Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union and author of “A Country That Works: Getting America Back On Track,” also expressed his concern about Democratic leaders’ need for unity on health care reform:

…the employer-based healthcare system served us well, but it’s a relic of the industrial era. We need a new universal 21st century healthcare system, because in the end, our employers just can’t compete in a global economy when they are putting the price of healthcare on the cost of their products and their competitors aren’t. It’s just not good economics. And at the same time, we have the greatest healthcare system in the world, and now 46 million people don’t have access to it.
…I’m so encouraged that we may see a change in Washington, but yet I’m so concerned that Democrats don’t understand. Most people get up every day, and they don’t think about whether they are in a red state or a blue state. They think about how they’re going to get their kids to work, how they’re going to be able to take care of their aging mother, and how are they going to pay their healthcare bills. Half of the bankruptcies in the United States are due to unpaid healthcare bills. CAP and SEIU just released a report about how middle-income people can’t afford one medical emergency. How can Democrats say we don’t need a new universal healthcare system? I mean, it is so basic and so important to America’s competitiveness. If the Democrats want to be the leaders in the House and the leaders in the Senate, which I hope they soon will be, then they need to lead, as well.

Stern, who lead a group of unions into a new labor coalition, Change to Win in 2005, says “We are at a crucial moment, a moment that makes us ask what kind of country we want to be.” He advocates “new models of organizing” and had this to say about the importance of a stronger union movement in his HuffPo post for Labor Day:

This Labor Day, a greater percentage of the economy is going to profits than to wages, and a majority of parents believe their children will be worse off economically. Tens of millions of people in the U.S. are working harder than ever before, but they’re still falling behind….The answer to that question must include more workers uniting in unions — the labor movement. Unions have always been the best anti-poverty, best pro-health care, best pro-family program around. Unions have done more to help working people experience economic success than any other program.

But the war in Iraq remains a potent obstacle to winning social reforms in all of these areas. Both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win web pages have little to say about the Iraq quagmire, an ignored ‘elephant in the room.’ Yet it makes no sense to avoid the issue, when Iraq-related expenditures now consume 10 percent of the federal budget, according to Robert Sunshine, assistant director for budget analysis of the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
As the traditional end of Summer, Labor Day marks the moment when greater numbers of Americans begin to pay more attention to the upcomming primary races. In the months ahead, American voters will increasingly turn their attention to the positions of candidates on the key issues noted by Sweeney and Stern. But voters also understand that progress on the social and economic agendas of both labor and the Democratic Party is being held hostage to the Iraq War. Ending it should be the central priority of both unions and the Democrats.

We’re pleased to introduce another addition to our TDS blogging stable, J.P. Green. He’s written on political issues and social change for newspapers, magazines, television and websites. He has also worked as a speechwriter, lobbyist and activist/organizer in labor, civil rights and other progressive organizations since the 1970’s.
This seasoned voice is the perfect one to offer some ruminations on the current role of the labor movement in progressive politics. His post will be up momentarily.

Aside from the primary date manueverings noted in today’s Staff post, there are other political calendar items worth noting. Adam Nagourney of the New York Times offers a useful if hardly comprehensive list of upcoming political “moments” that we already know about, including three in the next week (Fred Thompson’s announcement on 9/6, Oprah Winfrey’s “house party” fundraiser for Obama on 9/8, and the release of the Petraeus report on Iraq on 9/10). You get the feeling–if only from the frequent references to not-so-viable candidate John McCain–that Nagourney and/or his research assistants put this item into the can some time ago. But it merits a look.

That six Democratic presidential candidates, Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Obama, and Richardson, have agreed not to campaign in states that violate the DNC’s rules about primary scheduling should come as welcome news to anxious Democrats. If reason prevails, that should put an end to the states’ early primary leapfrogging. States violating the rules will now lose much of the economic benefit and media spotlight they would otherwise receive, as well as the political clout of voting delegates at next year’s Democratic convention in Denver. It’s hard to imagine Michigan and Florida going forward with their early primary plans with such a costly penalty now locked in place.
There will be grumbling about privilege and fairness. At present, rules permit only four states — Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina — to vote in January. In his statement supporting the pledge not to campaign in states violating the Party’s rules, John Edwards addressed the issue this way, according to Mark Z Barabbak’s L.A. Times report:

The four “need to be first because in these states ideas count, not just money,” Edwards said in a written statement. “This tried-and-true nominating system is the only way for voters to judge the field based on the quality of the candidate, not the depth of their war chest.”

But the agreement of a majority of the Democratic presidential field should help, and the Democratic Party’s national leadership is committed to holding firm. As DNC member and Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile, who had an op-ed on the topic in yesterday’s Washington Post, explained,

Failure to apply the rules would have been an affront to the states that adhered to them — and an invitation for more states to break them…the nominating system should not be determined by a state’s economic development plan or a desire to have candidates focus on parochial issues.

In her New York Times report, Sarah Wheaton explains why the less well-funded candidates may have been the first to sign the pledge not to campaign in the states violating the Party’s early primary rules:

…To campaign in large states like Michigan and Florida, while also stumping in the approved early states, would probably require significant ad buys in expensive media markets. The campaigns of Senators Obama and Clinton may be able to afford that — the others can’t, regardless of strategic priorities for either retail politics or mass messaging.

There is some talk of Michigan and Florida going ahead with non-binding early primaries, detaching the delegate-selection process to a later date to comply with the rules. But it is unclear whether the candidates’ pledge not to campaign in early primary states would still apply under those circumstances.
The GOP rules currently penalize early primary (before Feb. 5) states — including New Hampshire — with the loss of some, but not all delegates, thereby setting the stage for what may prove to be an even more contentious dispute.

Karl Rove’s last day, Tony Snow bails, Gonzales probed, mounting calls for Senator Craig’s resignation and worst of all for the pachyderms, the retirement announcement of Senator John Warner — a likely pick-up for the donkeys, especially if former Virginia Governor Mark Warner decides to run. And for a nice kicker, check out John Judis’s TNR article (well-flagged by Open Left’s Matt Stoller), predicting a Democratic pickup of as many as seven U.S. Senate seats in ’08. Makes for a sweet last weekend of summer.

It’s increasingly obvious that proto-candidate for president Fred Thompson is joining Rudy Giuliani in basically writing off the traditional first two states of the nominating contest–IA and NH–and staking his candidacy on a breakthrough later on.
If that’s not the case, then Fred’s campaign is in even worse trouble than we thought. As Marc Ambinder reminds us, Thompson’s initial foray into Iowa, an appearance at the State Fair a couple of weeks ago, got panned by none other than Fox News, which noted that Thompson had offended Iowans by tooling around the fairgrounds in a golf cart (a prerogative reserved for people with disabilities, or for major Fair donors, but not for politicians), wearing Gucci loafers, no less.
And in NH, Thompson was publicly warned the other day by the powerful Manchester Union-Leader that he’d best declare in candidacy in time to participate in the first Republican candidate forum in the state on September 5. His campaign promptly let it be known that he’d finally announce on–you guessed it–September 6.
Over at DailyKos, Adam B usefullly explains that September 6 is the earliest day on which Thompson can announce and still avoid having to file a third-quarter financial report with the FEC (which among other things, might show an embrassingly poor total).
Meanwhile, the Michigan legislature has expressed even greater disrespect for the IA/NH duopoly tradition, overwhelmingly approving a move to a January 15 presidential primary for both parties. Gov. Jennifer Granholm has said she will sign the bill immediately. Democratic state party chairman Mark Brewer has held out the possibility that delegates will be selected at a later caucus, which would avoid DNC sanctions and turn the primary into a non-binding “beauty contest.” But MI Republicans, like their counterparts in FL, seem inclined to go ahead and dare the national party to sanction them.
If the MI decision sticks, then it’s increasingly likely that we’ll be looking at a nominating contest calendar that begins right after the New Year in IA, continues to NH on January 8, MI on January 15, SC on January 19, FL on January 29, and then to a state near you on the February 5 mega-primary (lost in the shuffle has been the DNC-sanctioned Nevada Democratic Caucus on January 19, the same day as SC). For that to happen, IA will have to modify a state law requiring an 8-day window between its Caucuses and NH, but IA Democrats are pledging to do just that to avoid slipping back into December.
In terms of the MI decision’s impact on the contest itself: who knows? On the Republican side, IA/NH front-runner Mitt Romney has long-standing ties to the state due to his father’s tenure as governor. But it’s also likely to be friendlier territory for Rudy Giuliani than IA or NH, giving him a chance to interrupt Romney’s momentum well before the February 5 primaries when Rudy’s expected to make his big push.
On the Democratic side, all of the Big Three candidates (Clinton, Obama and Edwards) have natural strengths in MI. If it does emerge as a legitimate battleground, it’s mainly bad news for the other candidates, given the cost of campaigning there.
Here’s hoping that MI’s gambit will be the last calendar surprise for 2008.

Read more…

Today marks the second anniversary of Hurricaine Katrina’s landfall on the Gulf Coast, and in New Orleans, retrospectives quickly turn into assessments of how much damage–material and human–remains unaddressed.
George W. Bush is in New Orleans today, and as usual, he is combining an event highlighting conservative policy prescriptions for New Orleans–in this case, school “choice”–with numbing recitations of the amount of money Washington has provided for Katrina relief and recovery.
But the locals aren’t buying it. Today’s New Orleans Times-Picayune features an editorial entitled: “Treat Us Fairly, Mr. President,” which notes the administration’s favoritism towards Republican-governed Mississippi in Katrina recovery funding:

Louisiana had three times more damaged homes and seven times more severely damaged homes than Mississippi. Universities in this state had three times as many students displaced and had four times the losses of Mississippi’s campuses. Louisiana fisheries suffered almost 75 percent of the damage done by Katrina, and our hospitals lost 97 percent of the hospital beds closed by the storm.
Yet in every case, Mississippi ended up with a disproportionate share of aid. Housing grants, for instance: Mississippi got $5.5 billion in Community Development Block Grant money for its 61,000 damaged homes. Louisiana, with 204,000 damaged homes, got $10.4 billion. If the aid were given out proportionately, this state would have gotten twice that much….
All Louisiana wants is to be treated fairly. But that hasn’t happened.

But that’s a mild assessment compared to many others. In last Sunday’s Washington Post, historian Douglas Brinkley, whose book The Great Deluge stands as the most comprehensive account of Katrina, penned an op-ed reporting his discussions with New Orleans volunteers stunned by the devastation of neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth War:

The stalled recovery can’t be blamed on bureaucratic inertia or red tape alone. Many volunteers come to understand what I’ve concluded is the heartless reality: The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine….
Still unfinished is the overhaul of what some call the “Lego levees,” the notoriously flawed 350-mile “flood protection system” that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers starting building in 1965.
The Corps has been busy fixing the three principal holes that opened in August 2005. Its hard work has, in fact, paid a partial dividend. A decent defensive floodwall is now on the east side of the Industrial Canal, attempting to protect the Lower Ninth Ward.
Unfortunately, that is where the upbeat news nosedives. The federal government has refused to shut the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet canal that helped cause the Katrina “funnel effect” flooding two years ago. In addition, entire neglected neighborhoods still have no adequate flood control.

In other words, despite all the promises and all the tardy presidential visits, the Bush administration continues to treat New Orleans as a low priority, and also continues to blame state and local officials for the slow recovery, even as it implicitly endorses a policy of abandonment for neighborhoods in low-lying areas.
Several Democratic presidentials candidates (and even one Republican, Mike Huckabee) have been in New Orleans over the last few days, deploring the administration’s inaction and offering their own plans. There’s a lot of overlap, with some distinctions. Hillary Clinton’s plan forcuses on Cat-5-proof levees. Edwards is proposing a so-called “Brownie’s Law” to require that political appointees in agencies like FEMA demonstrate they are qualified for their jobs. Obama has promised to shut down the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal.
More generally, memories of Katrina’s aftermath and how it was handled by the current administration will continue to operate as a backdrop to the presidential campaign, serving as a reminder of the positive role of domestic government and of the consequences of decades of conservative anti-government rhetoric. It’s a bit of a cliche by now, but still arguably true, that in 2005, events in two cities–New Orleans and Baghdad–permanently damaged George W. Bush’s credibility and paved the way to the Democratic midterm victory of 2006. And it will be a long time before either city’s scars can be hidden or removed.

After decades of snarky Republican comments besmirching the masculinity of Democratic politicians, Dems can hardly be blamed for a little schadenfreude, watching Republicans squirm when members of their ranks are outed for various transgressions of their much-trumpeted “family values.”
On sober reflection, however, there is probably not much benefit for Dems in the latest GOP scandal involving Senator Craig. For one thing, if Craig resigns, Idaho has a Republican Governor. And, guilty or innocent, Senator Craig will likely be replaced by another Republican, as Stuart Rothenberg reports:

Even though it’s an open seat, Democrats still face a very difficult bid in Idaho. George W. Bush won the state with 67% in 2000 and 68% in 2004, behind only Wyoming and Utah. Idaho hasn’t gone Democratic for President since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 when Barry Goldwater (R) won only a handful of states. The last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate race was legendary Sen. Frank Church (D) in 1974. But he lost reelection six years later.

MSNBC’s national affairs writer Tom Curry speculates that the scandal may even help Republicans — “Perhaps he will opt for retirement and open the way for another Republican to run for his seat.” But Curry also notes:

…Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network said “the direct impact of this is that its going to mean a couple of million dollars early” for [Idaho] Democratic Senate contender Larry LaRocco.
…Among Democratic donors nationwide, Rosenberg said, “There’s an enormous amount of money waiting to be deployed. This race goes to the front of the pack in Democratic Senate fundraising.”

While it may seem unlikely that there will be a Senate seat pick-up for Dems in Idaho, the cumulative piling on of GOP disasters could give LaRocca an unexpected edge. Barring the revelation of conclusive proof that Craig was somehow “framed,” the incident will further tarnish the GOP’s image and brand it as the party of hypocritical intolerance. The more Craig protests, the longer the media speculation about his past continues, and he becomes the GOP’s unwelcome poster boy for “family values.”

The end of the Gonzales era at the Justice Department has spurred a lot of spin-off stories, most notably about the Bush administration’s systemic habit of politicizing the executive branch of the federal government, with the U.S. Attorney scandal being the most recent example. This is a phenomenon that has been apparent from the very beginning of the Bush presidency, driven from the very top (see Bruce Reed’s amusing and insightful 2004 Washington Monthly piece on the “hack/wonk” imbalance in the Bush White House).
But it’s useful to drill a bit deeper and sort out the various types of political appointments that Bush and his predecessors–and indeed, executives at the state and local government levels–often make, in order to assess their actual impact.
I’d suggest three categories: true hacks; commissars; and ideological transformers.
True hacks are political people (operatives, supporters, even donors, or sometimes their family members) who are given public employment as a reward or as an inter-campaign holding pen, regardless of their qualifications. This is old-fashioned “patronage” of the sort that various waves of civil service reforms dating from the nineteenth century were intended to rein in (leading most often to the creation of even more lavish political jobs at the top of the bureaucratic pyramid). It’s no secret that latter-day Republican administrations in Washington have infested federal agencies with a disproportionate number of true hacks, for a simple reason: if you don’t believe in various agencies’ missions, and don’t have the guts or political capital to abolish them, then it’s tempting to treat them as jobs programs for your friends and supporters.
The Bush administration’s most notable exercises in mass hack hirings were at FEMA during the Michael Brown era, and in Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority occupation regime in Baghdad. It’s probably not an accident that these agencies were responsible for two of the more spectacular failures of the entire Bush presidency.
Commissars are appointees placed in key agency positions to ensure that the political and ideological goals of the administration are pursued regardless of the agency’s formal mission. These are invariably the most hated of political appointees, since they are by definition disloyal to their ostensible superiors, and often spend most of their time keeping tabs on their colleagues. Monica Goodling, the Justice Department White House liaison who’s been in hot water over the U.S. Attorney Scandal, was the perfect example of the Commissar. (Going back a ways, Paul Craig Roberts, now a scourge of the neocons, was installed at Treasury in Ronald Reagan’s first term to ensure fidelity to the supply-side gospel, as noted in David Stockman’s definitive account of the era).
Ideological transformers are appointees, usually at a very high level, whose job is to actively subvert or fundamentally change an agency’s mission, without benefit of legal authorization. If you look at the high subcabinet posts for virtually every agency that regulates corporations in every Republican administration since Reagan’s election, you find a lot of such appointees. Bush 43 has famously made a habit of appointing people to regulatory commissions and science review boards who are foxes-in-the-henhouse, fighting their jobs instead of performing them.
(One of the most bizarre examples of this kind of appointee occurred in 1983, when Reagan named Alfred S. Regnery–of the right-wing publishing family–to head the Office of Juvenile Justice, responsible for anti-child-abuse programs. During Regnery’s confirmation hearings, someone spotted his car at the Capitol sporting a bumper sticker that read: “Have you slugged your kid today?”).
While the current administration hasn’t, to my knowledge, created any new categories of political appointees, there is one unique aspect to its deployment of them. Typically, political appointments soar at the beginning of a presidency, when there are tons of campaign staff to offload; high levels of paranoia about the loyalities of holdover officials; and all sorts of ambitious ideological goals to implement. They tend to tail off later on, though sometimes you see a fair number of true hacks who haven’t gotten rewarded yet get last-minute placeholder jobs. But as the U.S. Attorney scandal itself has illustrated, this administration seems to be engaging in wholesale politicization of the executive branch at an undiminished pace nearly seven years into its tenure. Perhaps the Bushies think the next president will be a Republican who will continue these practices. Or perhaps they simply want to do as much damage to the integrity and competence of the federal government as they possibly can, out of sheer spite and habitual recklessness.