Politics

Obama's Labor Pains

By Matt Cooper

Matt Cooper reports from Denver: At the AFL-CIO panel on the economy at Colorado Convention Center. What strikes me is how nervous labor officials and their backers are about Barack Obama.

Will he push for an aggressive new progressive era like FDR and LBJ, or will it be more like Clinton and Carter? They obviously want the former. There's a belief that there's a fight for Obama's soul, and a need to push him in a progressive direction.

"Our work begins in January," says Sherrod Brown the Democratic freshman senator from Ohio. Robert Kuttner, the editor of the liberal American Prospect, worries about how Obama, despite his progressive instincts, sometimes goes "all Hopi"—meaning that he's high falutin, even spiritual when he should be more populist.

Matt Cooper

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Full post as published by Portfolio.com: Capital on August 26, 2008 (boomark / email).