Monday, May 12, 2008
Super Tuesday might not bring much drama in the Buckeye state, but labor and other groups are mobilized for a fierce fight to defeat President Bush in November.
Mar 1, 2004 | One clue to the outcome of the November presidential election could be found last Thursday afternoon on the east side of downtown Cleveland, in the windowless cubicle of a modest blue and gray storefront just across from the Board of Elections building. There were eight union members sitting in front of computers and telephone auto-dialers, talking into their headsets as they urged fellow unionists to vote for John Kerry in Tuesday's primary election. But the significance of this operation was not so much its boost for Kerry as what it reveals about a much broader campaign -- extending beyond the labor movement -- to block President George W. Bush from winning a second term no matter who the Democratic candidate might be.
Though Kerry and Sen. John Edwards will fight it out in a dozen states in this week's Super Tuesday presidential primaries, there's little drama in the vote. Polls show Kerry leading his main challenger by 20 points or more in Ohio, California and New York. Far from being complacent, though, many here are already locked on to the fall campaign, certain that Ohio will be one of a handful of battleground states that could, in the end, determine the outcome of the race.
It's a state that Democratic and Republican presidential winners, with few exceptions, have long needed for victory. Bush defeated Gore here four years ago by only 3.5 percentage points, but many state political strategists blame that loss on Gore's decision to pull the plug on his campaign in Ohio for the last three weeks of the campaign. This year, many of them are more hopeful, partly because of Bush's vulnerabilities, especially on jobs and the economy, but also because of a combination of organization and passion among core Democratic voters. "Ohio is the Florida of 2004," said Gerald Austin, who has run many Ohio campaigns and Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential bid. "This state is up for grabs."
Taking a break from his phone dialing, Laborers International Union political coordinator Jim Goggin, a white-haired man with a strong Irish accent, shared Austin's enthusiasm. "Everyone thinks Ohio is winnable," he said. "We have major economic problems." Ohio has lost 265,000 jobs since 2001, including nearly 67,000 last year. Roughly 160,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost, with at least one-sixth lost because of foreign trade and job shifts out of the country, according to a report by Policy Matters Ohio, a local think tank.
But people like Goggin are as important as those grim statistics in the political calculation. As Goggin returned to his computer, veteran Cleveland politician Tim Hagan, running this year for county commissioner, dropped by the modest office. He had just addressed a new pilot project launched by the AFL-CIO, called Working America, to sign up people from nonunion households who agree with core union principles and want to receive information about issues and candidates. The trial project, underway in both Cleveland and Cincinnati, could greatly expand the audience for the labor movement's political message.
Hagan, who uses his campaign rallies mainly to attack Bush rather than his opponent in the primary, was optimistic about the Democratic presidential prospects. Why? "You're in the middle of it," he said. "It's the labor movement. It's more galvanized than ever, long before the summer months. That's why this primary process is kind of a run-through for the presidential race."
It's not just labor, though unions are stronger and more politically active in Ohio than in much of the country. Hagan reports that he's never seen as much commitment and participation from hardcore party loyalists so early in a presidential race. That's partly because "people in the Democratic Party despise Bush more than Nixon or Reagan," he said. "You can feel it in this state." But like many other Ohio political observers, he thinks that the primary has strengthened front-runner Kerry as a candidate, solidified the party by remaining relatively civil, and partly thanks to Howard Dean, it has defined the Democratic Party better. "There's a sense that we know again who we are," Hagan said. "Besides being opposed to Bush, we are a party with principles."
Hopes for a Democratic victory also reflect a variety of ambitious efforts underway to register and educate voters by local community groups and by national organizations, such as the Ohio operation of America Coming Together, one of the new "527" groups emerging after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform. Some are traditional nonpartisan voter drives in minority and poor white neighborhoods (involving 50 different participating groups in Cleveland alone); others are more partisan, or simply more opposed to Bush. But all are likely to help the Democratic nominee mobilize the Democratic base in cities like Cleveland, which have to generate big majorities to compensate for the Republican strongholds in the southern and rural parts of the state. "What will determine this election is whether people in the cities turn out," Austin said, "and I think they will. One of the messages the Democrats have to carry is that Bush, like [former President Gerald] Ford, has told the cities to drop dead."
As executive secretary of the Cleveland AFL-CIO, John Ryan has made his union federation's political operation, based on mobilizing hundreds of volunteers, into a local powerhouse and a model for the country. The national AFL-CIO only endorsed Kerry on Feb. 19; the Cleveland AFL-CIO almost immediately began calling and sending mailings to members on behalf of Kerry. On the weekend before the primary election, hundreds of union volunteers took part in two different neighborhood walks -- one a nonpartisan effort to encourage people to vote, the other a door-to-door effort on behalf of Kerry, Hagan and key national and local issues, including an arts- and environment-oriented economic development bond issue.
"The timing's tough," Ryan said. "If we had more time, we could deliver a bigger vote. But about equally important to pulling the lever is to get people to listen to and understand Kerry's record. This helps educate even those who don't vote in the Democratic primary, independents and even some Republicans."
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