Legal Commentary

"Forgetting" Unions Is Not A Winning Strategy

By Big Tent Democrat

Steve Benen neatly encapsules the blinders of the Village Dems and bloggers regarding the the political toxicity of the excise tax contained in the Senate health bill:

[I]s there anything Dems can do to get the winds to blow back in the other direction? [. . . we talked earlier about David Plouffe's advice to the party, with suggestions that struck me as sound: "pass a meaningful health insurance reform package without delay"

In these two posts, Benen never mentions the political problem that is caused by the excise tax. Not once. Others have a better grasp of the problem:

My friend Leo Maley, a longtime labor and political organizer, (currently a Community Organizer with the Massachusetts Nurses Association, and chair of the Amherst Democratic Town Committee), writes at Blue Mass Group that a post at the AFL-CIO blog is a "must read for all Democratic Party activists and engaged union members." And he is absolutely right.

Despite a heroic, last minute effort from labor, Coakley "lost the union vote by 3 percent" according to a Hart poll. How come? Jeff Crosby offers some sound explanations in his post: Hey, Democrats, Remember Us?[.]

From the post from the AFL-CIO blog:

[. . .] “Jeff, you guys at the Union Hall aren’t listening to us! You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth. We’re fighting the benefits tax, and now you’re telling us to vote for someone who will tax our benefits! The guys here are voting for Scotty Brown.”

That was just one of the calls and e-mails that I received during the week before the Senate vote in Massachusetts. An AFSCME delegate to our labor council calculated the impact of the Obama tax on union plans and e-mailed us all to “Vote Brown!” For a year and a half, we campaigned against the tax on our health care benefits. We trudged through neighboring New Hampshire with fliers explaining that Sen. John McCain wanted to fund health care expansion by a benefits tax.

[But] [i]n the last week of the Coakley campaign, the papers were full of the story: “Obama Supports “Cadillac Tax.” Sen. John Kerry cited an MIT economist who said the tax would increase wages for grateful working stiffs. I can usually figure out which chalkboard equation the classical economists are fondling: Absent merely life itself, they present a circular logic that proves itself. But the MIT argument escaped me.

[. . .] Many working-class people who voted for Brown were voting for the blue-collar underdog against the Washington elite. Obama’s support for the benefits tax exploded among union members just as our campaign against the tax was breaking through. The Boston Globe covered the union agreement on the tax—and on the same page carried a long article explaining that the excise tax would affect millions and was exactly the kind of “middle-class” tax that Obama had promised not to implement. This was the first time the health care campaign touched every union member personally, despite our previous efforts. And with so little time to explain it, it looked like the unions had left others to foot the bill; the improvements for all workers were lost in the final three-day push.

[. . .] The “Kumbaya” of the Democrats wins them nothing. Months of touchy-feely from Democratic Sen. Max Baucus compromised away most of the health care reform features we wanted. Yet Democrats received further attacks from Republicans for their “partisanship”—and not a single Republican vote. [. . .] It’s as though Obama advisers crafted a systematic plan to unravel the president’s coalition. They succeeded.

Despite this, the Village Dem and bloggers do not see it. It is incredible. I wrote about it the other day:

John Judis argues that the biggest problem with the Senate health bill is the perception that it harms middle class voters at the expense of corporation and the wealthy:

Where Obama invited a voter backlash was by letting the burden of reducing health care costs appear to fall on senior citizens and those middle-class workers who had acquired good health insurance through decades of union battles with management, and not on the insurance and drug companies. Obama ceded too much to the policy wonks who were devising intricate schemes to show they could cut the deficit. He took his eye of off the political imperative of keeping middle America in his corner.

The excise tax was a political poison pill. Ironically, there is a chance to fix that now. Dems should jump at the chance.

Instead of arguing for jumping at that chance, Village Dems and bloggers, the champions of the excise tax in the first place, pretend the issue does not even exist. The surest way to electoral debacle in November will be to follow the path prescribed by them.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on January 24, 2010 (boomark / email).