Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Teamsters may break ranks with Gore's union supporters and back Pat Buchanan.
Apr 20, 2000 | If there were a sure bet in this presidential campaign, it seemed to be Al Gore's support from unions. That was before Teamsters' president James Hoffa took a good, long look at Pat Buchanan.
Teamsters spokesman Bret Caldwell said the economic policies of Buchanan, the presumptive Reform Party presidential candidate, have more than earned the erstwhile CNN pundit the attention of Hoffa and the Teamsters.
"No party should assume that the Teamsters is going to support them," Caldwell said. "We're open to all the candidates at this point, and that includes Buchanan. I think that what you have to look at is the difference and the influence of big business on [both] major parties.
"We're looking out for the best interest of our members," he said. "We're the largest affiliate of the AFL-CIO, and we're not going to rush to a decision."
Of course, good old-fashioned brown-nosing doesn't hurt. During his address to a Teamsters rally during the protests in Washington last week, Buchanan said that should he become president, he knew who he would appoint as U.S. Trade Representative. "If I get there, it won't be [U.S. Trade Representative] Charlene Barshefsky sitting down in Beijing, it'll be Jim Hoffa."
Hoffa returned the compliment. "Pat Buchanan is probably the only person who has it right with regard to trade," he told CNN's Judy Woodruff. "Gore doesn't talk about it. Bush doesn't talk about it."
If nothing else, the courtship between Hoffa and Buchanan is like a co-dependent relationship between two headline junkies who use each other to get their fix. But if the Teamsters really do break ranks with the AFL-CIO, it would be a major black eye to the vice president's campaign.
The Teamsters, the largest member group of the AFL-CIO with 1.5 million members, has a reputation for being an unpredictable lot. The union has broken ranks in the past to support Republican candidates, backing Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and George Bush in 1988.
Buchanan, of course, has a long, well-documented history of alienating large numbers of people -- some, presumably who are in unions -- from Jews to immigrants ("Jose, we ain't gonna let you in again.") to gays ("With 80,000 dead of AIDS, 3,000 more buried each month, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide.").
And yet on policy, he sounds pretty fair to the Teamsters. Caldwell said the Teamsters' reluctance to endorse the vice president can be pinned, in part, to the union's opposition to a bill that would normalize trade relations with China. The measure comes up before the House on May 22, and enjoys the strong support of the Clinton administration -- and Gore. Buchanan, not surprisingly, opposes the bill.
Other labor groups oppose the bill, but most have already backed Gore. At its fall meeting in Los Angeles in October, the AFL-CIO endorsed the vice president. "We're not going to take anything for granted, but we feel good that working people and labor leaders understand that Al Gore is the candidate who will fight for working families," said Gore spokesman Doug Hattaway.
Reform Party national vice chairman Gerry Moan said his party, with Buchanan as the presumptive nominee, is the only political party looking out for American workers. "We're the only party that represents true labor," he said. "Buchanan's our lead candidate at this point in time, and he's truly got an 'America First' message. It's not plain vanilla like some of the other folks. An endorsement from the Teamsters would be a natural fit."
Get Salon in your mailbox!