The Veep, The Shrub, and the Left

Okay, what’s a four-letter word for “our next president”? If you said Gore, you have about a 50 percent chance of being right next November, but it’s early yet.

Vice-President Al Gore emerged from the primary season relatively unscathed, and certainly with far fewer scathes than GOP nominee-to-be George W. Bush. Pre-convention national polls are, at press time, inconclusive. As November shapes up, the Veep looks strong in the Northeast and Pacific Coast states, while W can claim the South, the Rocky Mountains, and some of the Plains states. The swing states that will determine the election run pretty much from Jersey City to Kansas City — the old industrial heartland states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and Missouri.

The problem for W. was that he ended the primary process well to the right of where he started. His electoral weakness was found chiefly among women and Catholic voters, two constituencies that were less than thrilled with his right-turn during the primary process. That he knows he needs to re-center was clear from his Super Tuesday victory speech, where he not only sought to cloak himself, however improbably, in the raiment of reform, but also relegated his tax cut to the fourth item on his list of things he’d do with the surplus (after shoring up social security and boosting spending on the military and schools). For his part, Gore began trolling for unmoored McCainites, avowing his support for campaign finance reform, as early as his last debate with Bill Bradley.

Neither Gore nor Bush is a natural fit for the McCain malcontents come November. But someone (not Pat Buchanan or Ross Perot) will lay claim to most of them, and Gore’s positions on choice, guns, and the environment — and his ability to claim some credit for the state of the economy — may ultimately attract wavering centrists, particularly if Bush attempts to personify the cause of moral regeneration. Should the election come down to a test between Gore’s credibility as a steward of the economy and Bush’s credibility as a midwife of moral rebirth, the Dems should prevail. It’s easier to see the Veep as a banker than it is the Guv as a minister, let alone a prophet.

Cross-Over Dems

When historians look back on the brief, intense primary season of campaign 2000, they will doubtless note that John McCain proved himself a far more compelling challenger in his party than Bill Bradley did in his. But they should also note that February’s bizarre primary calendar artificially inflated McCain’s stature, and further deflated Bradley’s in the process.

The weirdness of February was that Republican contests were scheduled in several key states that had no corresponding Democratic contests. As a result, Democrats, having no place else to go, flocked to crucial GOP primaries. Republicans constituted only 48 percent of the voters in their own Michigan primary, where McCain got enough support among independents and Democrats to overcome Bush’s two-to-one advantage among Republicans. The McCain problem come Super Tuesday, however, was that Democrats finally had their own Democratic primaries to vote in, and only a relative handful of Dems were willing to go behind enemy lines when they could easily vote in their own party. In Ohio and Missouri — two states where the Republican primaries were open to Democrats — fully 70 percent and 61 percent of the voters in the GOP contest were Republican, and Bush carried these states overwhelmingly. McCain simply couldn’t win anywhere that the Republicans constituted a clear majority of the Republican voters (well, anywhere except New England, where Republicans are the ideological equivalents of center-left Democrats anywhere else).

The reasons for McCain’s considerable appeal to Democrats and independents were legion. He was the onetime hawk who made friends — who made a show of making friends — with onetime doves. He made war not just on the cultural rightwing of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell but on the economic rightwing of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. His attacks on W’s tax cuts for favoring the rich (38 percent goes to the wealthiest one percent) were every bit as heretical as his affront to the Christian Right. Indeed, I suspect part of McCain’s appeal to Democrats was that he confirmed their hitherto unvoiced suspicion that reasonable Republicans, freed from the confines of party discipline, didn’t really believe all that stuff they voted for, and didn’t even want to associate with those rightwing movement types who normally surrounded them. Left to their own devices, serious Republicans would hang with liberal reporters and end up as tribunes for moderation.

In hindsight, the amount of wishful thinking that went into the McCain phenomenon — on the part of both the campaign and its Democratic supporters — was staggering. No presidential campaign can prevail that flatly rejects its party’s core program, let alone that insults the party’s activist cadres. McCain’s only chance, coming off his Michigan upset, would have been to find some way to appeal more directly to the Republican base. Problem was, the Republican base already had a candidate, and almost everything McCain said after Michigan — his attacks on the Christian Right especially — only increased the determination of core Republicans to vote for Bush. On Tuesday, the religious right cast their vote for Boy George over McCain by margins ranging from three-to-one to eight-to-one.

Dollar Bill

McCain, at least, can comfort himself with the knowledge that he himself provoked his obliteration at the hands of his party base. Poor Bill Bradley, on the other hand, fared even worse among hard-core Democrats than McCain did with the Republican right, and these Democratic cadres were precisely the voters that Bradley targeted most of all. From the day he first intimated he was thinking of seeking the presidency, Bradley said his number-one concern would be to shine a light on American racism. No presidential candidate had ever before decried the racial profiling that is common practice among police, or the disproportionate effect that the war on drugs has had on non-white communities. No mainstream campaign since Robert Kennedy’s has ever exhibited such a strong preferential option for the poor, with its call for linking increases in the minimum wage to those in the median wage, and for establishing universal health insurance.

And few mainstream Democratic campaigns have ever fared quite so poorly among the poor and non-white. One Bradley problem was that Black America remains fiercely loyal to Bill Clinton, and was not about to vote for anyone but his Veep. Bradley lost to Gore among African-American voters by margins of six-and-seven-to-one; in Georgia, it was a breathtaking 11-to-one. Similarly, the poorer the Democratic voter, the more likely he or she was to vote for Al Gore; in every single state, Bradley ran strongest among voters with incomes in excess of $100,000.

Bradley also proved to be a hugely underwhelming candidate. As the Gore campaigning was savaging his health plan in much the same manner that industry lobbies had savaged the Clinton-Gore health plan of 1994 (Gore, in essence, became his own version of Harry and Louise), Bradley seemed unable to respond. Independent analysts galore, from the Urban Institute to Consumer Reports, were on record preferring Bradley’s plan to Gore’s — it would insure far more of the uninsured than Gore’s, while mainstreaming the poor into universally-available programs that weren’t means-tested. Bradley cited none of his defenders, though, opting instead simply to accuse the Veep of lying. This was surely true, but it was neither as good a debating tactic or as effective a way to run for president as a simple comparison of his plan to Gore’s.

However inexpert his campaign, Bradley deserves credit for resurrecting the notion that in an era of surpluses, the government might just want to spend resources on fixing problems. Bradley’s challenge forced Gore to come up with health and education programs of his own — relatively modest efforts, but at least a clear alternative to the policy of returning the surplus to wealthy taxpayers, or using it all to pay down the debt. And during the week before the California primary, state legislators representing heavily Latino and immigrant districts, where the rate of medical uninsurance exceeded 50 percent, held hearings to shape a state health insurance program that looked suspiciously like Bradley’s. Like most Democratic pols in California, they had endorsed Gore nearly eight months earlier, but when it came to how to address their constituents’ most glaring problems, they were Bradleyites.

The Bradley Problem, ultimately, was that he wasn’t much of a Bradleyite himself. At a typical Bradley campus rally, Cornel West and Senator Paul Wellstone would work the crowd to a fever pitch, then Bradley would come on and immediately cool them down. One of the lines he used on the stump to express the sentiment that this new era of Surplus politics created a major opportunity to remedy social ills was Hillel’s third question: If not now, when? But after covering Bradley throughout his campaign, I wonder if the more germane question for the candidate isn’t Hillel’s first: If I am not for myself, who shall be for me?

Labor

Bradley also declined to offer a fair-trade alternative for Democrats in general and unions in particular who opposed the Administration’s free-trade policies, who doubted that NAFTA and Fast-Track and China’s admission to the WTO pointed the way to a more just global economy. When a plausible fair-trade candidate is available, labor is beginning to show that it will move heaven-and-earth on that candidate’s behalf. In the only really notable Democratic congressional primary of this spring, labor provided key support to California State Senator Hilda Solis, a labor-progressive who unseated 18-year Democratic congressman Marty Martinez in the San Gabriel Valley. Martinez was a cosmically lackluster pol who was the only Democratic member from California to oppose background checks on purchasers at gun shows, but what infuriated labor was his decision to give his support to the Administration’s fast-track trade proposal a few years back in return for White House backing for a freeway extension. “Labor has said for half a decade, at least, that center-right politics is not something that the Democrats should put up with,” L.A. County Labor Federation political director Fabien Nunez told me on election night, “but this is one of a very few instances where we’ve made that rhetoric into a reality.” Though unions almost never back a challenger to a fair-to-middling Democratic incumbent like Martinez, they identified 15,000 Solis supporters among their members within the district. On election day, Solis clobbered Martinez by a breathtaking 69 percent-to-31 percent margin.

To be sure, the L.A. County Fed is the most adept and battle-tested union political apparatus of the Sweeney era. Labor was crucially helpful on a national level to Gore’s nomination, as well. That labor could almost by itself put Gore over the top in the Iowa caucus was no surprise. In sparsely-unionized New Hampshire, however, unions delivered hundreds of out-of-state volunteers; about half of Gore’s ground troops were union activists, and his percentage among union household voters in the exit polls was 62 percent. Insofar as he dispatched Bill Bradley by a four-point margin, the union support was critical.

In essence, New Hampshire saw the mobilization of the Democrats’ two key campaign-worker constituencies — labor and students — on behalf of Gore and Bradley respectively. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the spirit of Seattle — Teamsters and Turtles Together At Last — lapped over into the streets of Nashua and Manchester. As Bradley and Gore volunteers walked the same blocks or held placards at the same intersections during the campaign’s final week, I noticed several instances where they put aside their candidate disagreements to affirm a common sentiment that when it came to trade, each of their candidates was godawful. On the one issue most dividing the Democrats in 2000, that of the nature of the globalized economy, the fundamental dividing line in the Democratic Party, so to speak, is horizontal rather than vertical. Within the party’s activist base, support for a mixed global economy is pervasive. At the level of the presidential candidates, it was invisible.

Triangulate

And yet, electing Al Gore is labor’s number-one priority for 2000, even if defeating China’s entry into the WTO is number-two. This means that the Teamster-Turtle alliance will be tested, and on occasion disassembled, in the course of the year.

The challenge facing labor supporters of Al Gore is that there are really two Al Gores. Confronted with conflicting positions that divide New Democrats from Old, the Vice-President at times seems unable to fuse the elements of both into a distinct third way, but rather shuttles back and forth between contradictory postures. The split in Gore, moreover, is mirrored by a split in his campaign. Intellectually — as personified by his policy operatives Elaine Kamarck, Bruce Reed and William Galston — his campaign is New Democrat all the way. Politically — as personified by his campaign manager, former Congressional Black Caucus and Rainbow Coalition staffer, Donna Brazile — his campaign is inclined toward and even invested in the core Democratic constituency groups.

If triangulation seems harder for the Veep than for the Pres, it may be because Gore is more deeply rooted than Clinton in both sides of the divide. Intellectually a creature of the DLC, Gore is at the same time politically a creature of the Beltway Democratic Party — which first and foremost means labor.

Throughout the Clinton presidency, Gore has frequently played a center-right role on matters of economic policy. As is well-known, he counseled Clinton in 1996 to sign the Republican bill ending welfare. He was also a deficit hawk right from the start, in the 1993 policy debate that set the course for the Administration’s fiscal conservatism. He is now, apparently, a debt-retirement hawk as well, telling the Wall Street Journal in a January interview that the federal budget should stay in balance even during a recession, that “just as a corporation has to cut expenses as revenues fall off…[a downturn] should be viewed as an opportunity to push that change [eliminating middle managers from the government] further before any other options are considered.” (This trashing of Keynesianism was too much even for John McCain to bear; told of Gore’s comments, he responded: “One of the options to stimulate the economy is to make investments, and that may entail deficit spending.”) On macro-economics, Gore seems to have moved beyond the fiscal austerity of such DLC paladins as Al From, and not because there’s any notable political pressure in the land for debt retirement as the north star of public policy. Left to his own devices, Gore is becoming our first Andrew Mellon Democrat.

Gore was hardly a tribune for labor issues either in the early years of the Clinton White House. With Mack McLarty, he was a champion of extending NAFTA to all of Latin America. Depending on whom you talk to, he was either an outright opponent or a lukewarm advocate of the minimum wage hike of 1996 when it first surfaced in White House deliberations in 1995.

And yet — Gore was the unions’ go-to guy in the White House. “Whenever the Clinton Administration got really bad on specific union issues,” says one former AFL-CIO official, “you went to Gore. He had a political sense of the need to accommodate labor. He has a better sense of the institutional relationship of labor to the Democratic Party than Clinton’s ever had.”

Gore spent the first six years of his vice-presidency assuming that his most likely primary opponent in 2000 would be Dick Gephardt, whose claim on labor’s allegiance might well have trumped his own. And as he saw labor in the Sweeney era was turning itself into the one truly effective operation in American electoral politics, Gore concluded that ingratiating himself to the unions was a matter of utmost urgency.

That meant that when a union needed help, in public policy or in the brave new world of organizing, Al Gore, like Tom Joad, would be there. He campaigned against California’s Proposition 226, the initiative that would have defunded unions’ political programs, when it was trailing by a 70-to-21 percent margin; he helped raise money for the opposition effort. When L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina, who is Vice-Chair of the Democratic National Committee, was reluctant to establish the public authority required to grant collective bargaining rights to L.A.’s 74,000 home care workers — a campaign SEIU had been working on for 12 years — Gore called Molina at least twice to suggest she might re-think her position. (She did.) He leaned on the Defense Department to break off its contract with Avondale Shipyards, the New Orleans facility that refused for half-a-decade to negotiate with the union its workers had voted in. Gore even phoned major property-owner associates who owned buildings where janitors were attempting to win union recognition, and suggested he’d help facilitate negotiations. The list goes on.

Right To Organize

In one very significant particular, though, Gore has managed to fuse policy and politics in a distinctly pro-union way. In what is probably the most surprising twist of his career, Al Gore over the past half-decade has become the nation’s foremost champion of workers’ right to organize.

The change here began not with Gore but John Sweeney, and his own reinvention of the labor movement. Unions’ involvement in politics, said Sweeney from the first day he became federation president, was chiefly a means to help organizing drives, to create a better climate for the movement to reverse the decline of four decades. Elected officials who got labor support would in turn be expected to support unions in struggle. The unspoken corollary was that the person who got labor’s support for president would be expected to support unions in struggle more than anyone else.

And so the federation began to bring workers who’d been fired for daring to organize, or harassed by supervisors, or denied basic rights in the workplace, and took them around to meetings of the Democratic congressional delegation, or to meet with candidates in their own states. And wherever Al Gore went to talk to a union, the rule was, have him meet with the workers. Let him see what they’re going through.

In his speeches to unions, Gore now routinely brings to the podium the workers he’s met, and tells their stories. He goes on to say that organizing is a basic American right, and that as president he’d strengthen it — though he gets no more specific than to say that he’d favor increasing the penalties on employers who find it cheaper to violate the terms of the National Labor Relations Act than to grant their workers a raise. Gore even goes so far as to discuss the right to unionize in speeches delivered to groups other than unions, though that is still more the exception than the norm.

People who worked with Gore in the administration differ on Gore’s about-face on labor issues. “I believe Gore’s conversion on labor questions is relatively sincere,” one former high-ranking administration official says, “but it’s a sincerity born of necessity. He was suspicious of labor; they hated him; but over time they came to see that they needed each other — an archetypal co-dependent relationship.”

In the end, unions are counting on being able to do business with the Political — not the Intellectual — Al Gore. “Gore understands politics the way many labor leaders do,” says one Washington-based political consultant who works with a number of unions and Democratic elected officials. “Their world is one where one performs favors and expects favors in return. Gore will infuriate labor periodically,” as he has done on the recent Permanent Normal Relations with China bill, “and Labor knows what those issues will be. But unions have a sense that this guy will play ball with them.”

Nader?
For those on the left who don’t envision Gore showing up at their ball games, there looms the gaunt and angry figure of Ralph Nader — candidate, again, of the Green Party, and this time, pledging to actually wage a campaign. Nader’s no kid: he’s 66, his hair flecked with gray, his face lined, his indignation unabated. If he had any flair for the dramatic, he’d take on a prophetic air. But Nader remains the most relentlessly undramatic figure on the left. On the stump, he speaks of the Democratic-Republican “duopoly,” for public funding of campaigns, for free media access to candidates, for a fair-trade rather than a free-trade global economy. Still, he is ever the careful lawyer sticking to his brief. On his initial campaign swing through Los Angeles, one reporter from a local African-American newspaper asked him about his views on reparations for African-Americans. Nader didn’t pause, as another speaker might have, to acknowledge the specific sins of slavery, or the specific plight of American blacks today, before dismissing the idea as divisive and impracticable. Instead, he told her that he favored bringing corporations to heel in the courts, publicly funding community organizations, making sure that no one’s right to sue was abrogated. Nothing in his answer referred in the slightest to any distinctly African-American concern as such; the reporter felt compelled to press on, “But what about African-American reparations?” she asked, as if Nader had perhaps not heard her. But heard her he had, since he nodded and continued on in exactly the same vein. In a sense, Nader is almost a parody of the stereotype of the ultra-universalist old leftist who subsumes every issue under the banner of class (and, in Nader’s case, the torts system).

Ultimately, however, the key factor for the left in determining its position in campaign 2000 is less Nader’s imperfections, and more the strategic importance of keeping W out of the White House. Gore, surely, will be better than W on a range of economic and social issues; though on many of those issues, he will be anything but progressive. The most night-and-day difference between the two comes on the labor question. The differences here are magnified because the strategic importance of unions in American politics has increased almost exponentially since John Sweeney took the helm at the AFL-CIO in 1995. It’s the unions that have brought the Democrats back to brink of retaking Congressional power; and it’s the unions that Republican strategists view as GOP Enemy Number-One. The reason that Bush most frequently gives for opposing McCain’s campaign finance reform proposal is that it doesn’t include a provision like California’s Proposition 226, which threatened to greatly diminish unions’ ability to intervene in elections. Should Bush win, particularly if the Republicans hold on to Congress, unions expect — correctly, I believe — that the most serious initiatives undertaken by the new Administration will be to weaken unions at every turn. As one former AFL-CIO senior staffer notes of the Federation’s endorsement of the Veep, “This isn’t about what Gore can do for us. This is about, ‘We’re in a world of shit if we lose the White House and don’t win back the House.’”
And so it is, for instance, that the labor-enviro alliance of Seattle won’t be nearly as visible at this summer’s Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. Unions are the linchpin of the anti-China/WTO coalition, but they won’t be found picketing, let alone attempting to shut down, Al Gore’s Big Show. They see their own fortunes so closely linked to Gore’s as to make any such action preposterous.

For progressives — who over the past half-decade have seen a resurgent union movement become the primary advocate for economic equality, for organizing the poor, for defending workers throughout the world, and for reviving American liberalism — the thought of a full-blown governmental assault on labor should be a sobering one. We don’t have to ignore Ralph Nader’s many merits or Al Gore’s manifest flaws to conclude that a Gore victory is crucial for the continued prospects of progressivism in America.