With Reasonable Doubts, Unions Line Up for Obama

[Omaha Steve]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20080626/cm_thenation/45332888

Thu Jun 26, 3:36 PM ET

The Nation -- There nation's largest union federation, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), was going to endorse Barack Obama for president.

Once the race for the Democratic nomination was settled, that was not up for debate. Not since Richard Nixon in 1972 has a Republican made a serious effort to appeal for labor neutrality in a presidential race -- let alone take steps that might justify an endorsement of a party that long ago distanced itself from Abraham Lincoln's view that, "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

And Obama can lay a stronger claim to labor's endorsement than more than a few of the Democrats who have carried labor's mantle over the years.

The Illinois senator, who got his start working closely with the United Steelworkers union as a community organizer in Chicago, has throughout his political career voted in relatively close alignment with the labor movement. He was an AFL-CIO ally in the Illinois state Senate and, since his arrival in Washington in 2005, he's earned a 98 percent pro-union rating. (Obama's one real area of weakness -- and it is a serious one -- has always been in the area of trade policy, where the senator has never seemed to fully recognize the extent to which our current free-trade regime favors the interests of multinational corporations while harming the interests of workers, the environment and communities in the U.S. and abroad.)

Republican John McCain, on the other hand, makes George Bush and Dick Cheney look like Joe Hill and Mother Jones. Militantly anti-labor not just since his recent turning to the hard right but throughout a congressional career that dates back to the early 1980s, McCain votes with labor only about 16 percent of the time. And on trade issues, he is not just worse than Obama, he's worse than Bush or Bill Clinton.

So Obama, who has already receieved endorsements from most of the AFL-CIO's 56 member unions (as well as that of the Change to Win coalition that includes the powerful Service Employees International Union and other labor groups have broken with the federation), was going to gain the full support of the House of Labor.

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