Surprise: Unions set to rally behind Obama this fall

He enjoyed a a filibuster-proof majority in Congress in 2009 and yet failed to enact the unions’ top legislative priority in the Employee Free Choice Act (card check). He would also disappoint on immigration reform, tax policy, and even health care reform with the defeat of the public option. And yet is anyone surprised to see the unions preparing to direct their organizational muscle towards President Obama’s re-election? Anyone? Via Politico (emphasis added):

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For all their gripes, the union giants that were threatening to hold off on repeating the millions of dollars of support and a nationwide grass-roots network have backed off. Like they did in 2008, they’ll organize members and they’ll have those members organize more, mostly through door-knocking, phone banks and person-to-person networking on job sites and in neighborhoods.

Obama can thank two years of anti-union activity in states like Wisconsin and Ohio for overriding labor’s feelings about his inconsistent record on their issues. And he can thank Romney’s past at Bain Capital for kicking labor’s massive effort into overdrive to keep the man the Teamsters tagged a “vulture capitalist” out of the Oval Office.

Despite taking office as the economy cratered, Obama “has led the country down the long road back to prosperity, providing relief for the middle class and fighting for workers’ rights,” Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa said in a statement. Romney represents “everything that’s wrong” with the U.S. free market system, Hoffa said, and a Romney presidency would amount to “the fox guarding the henhouse.”

We went from the summer of recovery in 2010 to the “long road back to prosperity” in 2012. It’s a very long road apparently…a long, long, long road. But is Hoffa actually suggesting we’ve regained prosperity under Obama’s leadership? If so he is truly delusional, but then you would have to be in order to claim that the President’s policies have provided any meaningful benefit to the the middle class. With income and employment growth stagnating, home values still declining, and gas prices only down slightly from all-time highs, most middle class Americans would likely take exception to Hoffa’s ridiculous statement.

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If Romney represents everything that is wrong with free enterprise in America, what does Obama represent? He’s borrowed and spent trillions implementing his vision for change, and yet all millions of Americans have to show for it is continued misery. And obviously he hasn’t achieved much for his unions allies either. But then maybe like the Russians they’ve been promised a little more flexibility in a second Obama term. Video via Breitbart TV.

(Corrected the first paragraph to say “filibuster-proof majority” instead of “veto-proof”.)

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 22, 2024
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