Trumka: AFL-CIO to Withdraw Support for Dems

posted at 3:59 pm on August 25, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Card Check ]   

Oops, there goes another rubber tree plant. Barack Obama’s high hopes of reassembling the same posse of supporters that helped him ride to a victory in 2008 took a major hit on Thursday. At a breakfast sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor, AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka formally announced that big labor plans to scale back its associations with the Democratic Party ahead of the 2012 elections.

The plan to pull support from the Democrats is nothing new. As far back as May, Trumka told the National Press Club:

We’ll be less inclined to support people in the future that aren’t standing up and actually supporting job creation and the type of things that we’re talking about. It doesn’t matter what party they come from. It will be a measuring stick.

In this morning’s comments, Trumka explained that the labor movement will begin putting in place its own political structures rather than rely on—and contribute to—the Democratic Party’s political operation.

The decision is a major blow to the Obama campaign. It also represents a complete 180-degree turn from a statement made exactly two weeks ago by AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer, who told The Hill:

Organized labor won’t sit out President Obama’s reelection campaign and let a Republican win the presidency.

Despite the frustration labor activists have expressed toward the administration for the deals it has cut with congressional Republicans, Obama is still a better alternative to a potential Republican president.

Apparently, the top dog has had a change of heart. In explaining the union’s position, Trumka told reporters:

Let’s assume we spent $100 in the last election. The day after Election Day, we were no stronger than we were the day before. If we had spent that [$100] on creating a structure for working people that would be there year round, then we are stronger.

Trumka’s relationship with the Obama administration has cooled over its failure to pass card check and its support for free-trade agreements with Colombia, South Korea, and Panama. But the final straw, the union boss said, was the president’s lack of backbone in the debates on the debt ceiling:

I think he made a strategic mistake when he confused job crisis with deficit crisis. He started playing on the Republican ground.

He’s going to give a speech in a couple of weeks on job creation. If he’s talking about another percent or two break from a tax here and doing something with patent control, and doing three years down the road something with infrastructure bank, that’s not going to get the job done.

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