SEIU, AFL-CIO Driving Obama’s Ground Game

[babylonsister]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/01/seiu-afl-cio-driving-obama-s-ground-game.html


SEIU, AFL-CIO Driving Obama’s Ground Game
by Michelle Cottle
Nov 1, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

Organized labor, badly divided in 2010, has stopped its internal bickering—and is out in force for the reelection campaign. Michelle Cottle on the engine driving the Dems’ ground game.

snip//

But while the general electorate may be ambivalent about the outcome on Nov. 6, one key player is not: organized labor. As SEIU president Mary Kay Henry assured me: “We are fired up and ready to go!”

Henry herself is clearly en fuego. By Oct. 25, she had already made campaign-related stops in 19 cities this month, including Columbus, Toledo, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, and Detroit. The rest of SEIU’s leadership team has been following similarly brutal travel schedules, while rank-and-filers are being recruited by the thousands for the campaign home stretch. (Goal: field 25,000 volunteers for the final four days of the race.) Members from safe states are being shuffled into battlegrounds like Colorado and Nevada. Targeted outreach efforts are underway to Latino and African-American communities, including special teams aimed at combatting efforts to intimidate minority voters or suppress turnout.

To be sure, labor is always central to the Democratic ground game. But the current frenzy is just the tail end of what has been more than a year and a half of nonstop, single-minded political obsession on the part of pretty much the entire labor movement. For that, President Obama can thank Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his GOP compatriots who came to power in 2010.

“In 2010, people voted for a large number of Republican governors who campaigned on creating jobs,” explains Michael Podhorzer, political director for the behemoth AFL-CIO. “Almost the first thing those governors did was come after labor unions in Wisconsin, Ohio, and so forth. That really galvanized the labor unions.”

Since the midterms, there has been “an unprecedented amount of legislation” aimed at weakening unions, confirms Richard Hurd, a professor of labor studies at Cornell University. “In response to that, labor has coordinated its effort over the past two years in a way it had not been able to before that.”

snip//

Obama may not be perfect, but the Republican gains of 2010 gave labor a glimpse of a future that it is fiercely determined to prevent.

As Podhorzer puts it, “They kicked the hornet’s nest.”

[abumbyanyothername]

1. So what you are saying is . . .

that the Koch brothers did quite a bit to help re-elect the President.

[frazzled]

2. With all due respect, I don't think they are driving it

Tens of thousands of OFA volunteers, regular unaffiliated citizens, having been knocking on doors and making calls for months and months. I'm signed up for four call shifts at the Obama headquarters this weekend and through election day.

It always helps to have the unions pitch in, and their help is greatly appreciated, but that's not the only group that's driving the ground game for Obama: it's students and housewives and senior citizens too.

[babylonsister]

3. And I hope you're not taking this

opinion too personally. What everyone is doing is equally important imo. I just thought this was interesting because I seem to recall reading recently that (some?) unions wouldn't be participating in getting Obama reelected. I was happy to read this, and thanks for all YOU'VE been doing!

[demosincebirth]

4. As a union member for forty years labor has always worked for the election of Labor friendly

candidates, which always happen to be democrats...simple as that.

[frazzled]

5. I certainly was not disputing that

I'm just disputing the idea that labor has been "driving" the Obama ground game. That's what the OP's article is claiming, but the facts don't support it.

OFA was a grass-roots organization that was created in 2004 and has been working on both issues and elections ever since.