Obama's fundraising collides with his rhetoric-Union says senator did little to save jobs

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-galesburg_obama_webfeb01,0,4286527.story

By Bob Secter | Tribune reporter
12:47 PM CST, February 2, 2008

GALESBURG, Ill. - Maytag workers whose jobs were shipped to Mexico serve as consistent characters in Barack Obama's stump speech. He employs their stories in railing against corporations that use trade pacts to replace well-paid union workers with low-cost foreign ones.

It is a ready applause line for the Illinois presidential hopeful, one that he has been reciting almost verbatim since he was a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2004, when appliance giant Maytag was in the process of shutting a refrigerator plant here, putting 1,600 people out of work.

But the union that represented most of those Galesburg workers isn't impressed with Obama's advocacy. It has endorsed his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Its leaders say they wish he had done more about their members' plight.

What rankles some is what Obama didn't do even as he expressed solidarity four years ago with workers mounting a desperate fight to save their jobs.

Obama had a special connection to Maytag: Lester Crown, one of the company's directors and biggest investors whose family, records show, has raised tens of thousands of dollars for Obama's campaigns since 2003. But Crown says Obama never raised the fate of the Galesburg plant with him, and the billionaire industrialist insists any jawboning would have been futile.

Obama's chief political strategist, David Axelrod, said late Thursday that the senator did not know Crown sat on Maytag's board until the Tribune noted it last September in a story about the closing of the Maytag headquarters in Newton, Iowa.

FULL story at link.

[Kermitt Gribble]

1. Seems we are slowly getting

more of a glimpse of the man behind the curtain.

[BeatleBoot]

2. The Audacity of Revealing His Real Record!

Look, all of these charges are easily answered.

When you look at his real record, simply take a big swig of the Kool-Aid and employ the Ostrich Technique by burying your head in the sand.

It works everytime!

His supporters have it down pat.

[AX10]

3. It's all about the show with Obama.

Behind the curtain we see that he is not all he says he is.

[jaxx]

4. Interesting hit piece.

I live here, Galesburg IL. I can tell you that when Maytag said it was closing, it was a done deal. Like the others before them, OMC, state Research Hospital. And after, Butler Mfg. Obama is welcome in Galesburg, and he is well liked. What the president of the national union says in his endorsement of Obama's opponent in this primary is of little value to the people who lost their jobs, what did he do to stop the bleeding?

Obama came, he listened, and he remembered. And so do we.

[HeraldSquare212]

5. What? A candidate got donations from the head of a company, and the company moved jobs to Mexico?

Quelle scandale! That's such a unique occurrence in American history of the last twenty years that it must be immediately investigated!