In Pursuit of the Labor Vote (The Hunt for a Blue November)

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.counterpunch.org/macaray10022007.html

By DAVID MACARAY

"I could hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."

-- Jay Gould, Wall Street financier, 1886

It's not a happy time for labor unions. The institution that gave us the weekend, vacations, pensions and health insurance, and is credited with having more or less "invented" the middle-class, is now viewed as anachronistic and lame or, worse, parasitic and corrupt.

If Wes Craven were to make a horror movie about the economy, labor unions would be cast as the zombies. We walk the earth, we are sentient, we appear menacing; but we are neither alive nor dead. We are the American economy's Undead.

Unless there's a strike, racketeering scandal or rumor that Hoffa's body has been found, organized labor tends to be ignored by politicians and mainstream media. There's nothing particularly revealing in this neglect, other than showing that garden-variety union business doesn't generate much interest-not among the movers and shakers, not among the moved and the shaken.

This changes come election time. Every four years, like clockwork, unions get nudged into the limelight, as national audiences are treated to media analyses and predictions of that coveted, elusive prize: the "labor vote." And 2008 will be no exception.

During the 2004 primaries, as Democratic candidates toured the factories and union halls of Blue states-with the AFL-CIO remaining tantalizingly uncommitted, its 13 million members awaiting their "marching orders"-there was intense speculation over who would win labor's endorsement. ABC's Peter Jennings called Howard Dean "labor's man." CNN's Chris Matthews said Richard Gephardt was labor's "best friend." PBS's Mark Shields described John Kerry's labor record as "tepid."

Although the AFL-CIO-organized labor's version of the Pentagon-cautiously withheld its endorsement until fairly late in the campaign (when it declared, anti-climatically, for Kerry), several prominent unions had come out early and aggressively for Gephardt and Dean, well in advance of the targeted Iowa caucus.

FULL story at link.