Well, it’s no surprise to those of us who’ve seen him in person that when it comes to rhetorical delivery, John Sweeney is no John Wilhelm. He hit the right notes though, even if not in any particularly innovative ways. Glad to see that, as when he addresses the AFL-CIO, he was flanked by workers and his argument was supported by their narratives. Would’ve helped to hear from them directly. But Sweeney did his job in setting out the course that a Kerry administration, banking on the support of union- and union-backed organizing to get into office, should follow once there.
Author Archives: Josh Eidelson
Barney Frank has just “come clean” on behalf of GLBT Americans: “We do have an agenda” – the right to serve their country in the army, the right to be considered for jobs based on performance, the right to have their love and commitment codified in law as marriage. Shame he had to end a strong speech by condemning Nader in stronger terms than Bush.
AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka just laid out the case against Bush’s “suicidal” trade policy and argued effectively (if uncreatively) that “American workers deserve better, you deserve better, and America deserves better.” Trade policy – given the contrasts and contradictions between his record, his rhetoric, his advisors’ rhetoric and records, public opinion, elite opinion, and such – may be the biggest question mark hanging over a Kerry administration; as Ramesh Ponnuru (just flip the words “optimistic” and “pessimistic”) observes:
We keep getting mixed signals about how seriously to take the Democrats’ protectionist rhetoric. The most optimistic spin is that the corporate-tax plan, whether or not it’s a good idea, is a fairly modest way to pander to protectionist sentiment. I doubt Kerry is really going to do much with that promised review of existing trade agreements. On the pessimistic side: Even Bill Clinton plumped for more trade “enforcement actions” on Monday night (as Kerry also has); the Democrats want no new trade agreements without conditions that make it very hard to envision the agreements being reached; and Kerry’s objection to Bush’s steel tariffs is not that he imposed them but that he later rescinded them.
Matthew Yglesias shares one of many anecdotes which should make Ponnuru (and Yglesias, for that matter) optimistic and the rest of us more pessimistic:
On hand was Rand Beers, Kerry’s top national security adviser (and his likely National Security Adviser), Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (Kerry’s likely Secretary of State), former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Senator Gary Hart, and — most interestingly — Laura Tyson, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and currently one of three economists “consulted on nearly every [economic] policy decision” the Kerry campaign makes…Tyson acknowledged that her remarks were somewhat at odds with much of what Kerry’s said on the campaign trail. “When people say, ‘well, listen to what the Kerry campaign has said about trade in some of the primaries, we are concerned that Senator Kerry will move the US away from trade integration,'” she said, she tells them to “think about the issue of national campaigns in the US” and to “recognize that what might be said in one primary … is not an indicator of the future.”
Tyson further argued that Kerry would be able to liberalize trade more than Bush has, because Kerry would support policies that help compensate the inevitable losers in globalization — a step that will allegedly drain the swamp of anti-trade sentiment. Lest it be thought that Tyson’s commitment to the multilateral process and to continued trade integration leaves plenty of wriggle room to keep the process but add, say, environmental standards into the mix, she explicitly disavowed this option during a later exchange. Adding environmental issues to the WTO’s brief might bog it down and impede progress on further integration. “I want to assure you that a Kerry-Edwards administration will continue in the great American tradition of leading the way on global economic integration,” she concluded.
A rightward tack during the general election following on the heels of a shift to the left during the primaries isn’t necessarily anything to write home about — that’s how all Democratic presidential campaigns work. The dynamics of the trade issue, however, are somewhat different, because the left view on trade is actually more popular than the centrist alternative in many of this year’s key swing states. Accordingly, the higher-profile public speeches in the Fleet Center have continued to sound skeptical themes, while the free-trade message has been delivered to elite audiences at low-profile events. There are no sure things in politics, and Kerry might change course yet again while in office; as a senator, though, he was (as John Edward tried to point out against him during the primary campaign) a consistent supporter of new trade agreements, so there’s every reason to believe that the Democrats’ centrist wing has already won the first major policy fight of the Kerry era.
Another area where labor had better be prepared to play hardball with the Democrats.
Glad to see SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger and one of the many members of SEIU’s Heroes Campaign up on the podium:
With your help, we will ensure that the first thing a Doctor asks is “Where does it hurt?” instead of “Where is your insurance card?”
We should be seeing more of them this week. I hope John Kerry knows that when SEIU talks about working to forge a healthcare policy together, SEIU means together. And that if he doesn’t, SEIU is ready to show him.
John Lewis:
In the final analysis, we are one people, one community, one house.
His voice thunders – as does his moral authority.
Some admirable candor from John Derbyshire:
…when all is said and done, he served. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney didn’t, and they should have done. I say this as a Bush-Cheney voter. I like the ticket, and I’ll be voting for it. I wouldn’t vote Kerry-Edwards at the point of a gun. Yet if you ask me: “Doesn’t it take some of the luster off the GOP ticket to know that when it came time for your guys to put themselves in harm’s way at the nation’s call, they ducked it?” my honest answer would be: “Yes, it does.” And yes, of course I suspect Kerry’s motives in going to VN just as much as you do. It is still the case that he went. It is still the case that if some NVA round had passed six inches further to the left, he would have been maimed or killed. The honor that we accord to our serving men and women is, in my personal opinion, indivisible. John Kerry is just as entitled to it as anyone else who served. That’s how I see it, anyway.
Well, Congresswoman Corrine Brown just exceeded the tacky pun quota by several. But that’s forgivable, given her willingness to talk explicitly and compellingly about the purge, as she says, of 27,000 of her constituents’ 98% democratic votes – both in Boston and back in DC.
Speaking of people who didn’t get Al Sharpton’s message:
Americans do not have a fundamental right to sexual privacy, a 2-1 decision of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said on Wednesday. The split panel upheld an Alabama law — nearly identical to one in Georgia — that made the sale of sex toys a crime punishable by up to a year in prison. The decision extends an emerging division in the court over sexual rights, with Judges Stanley F. Birch Jr. and Rosemary Barkett leading opposing factions. Birch maintains that although the U.S. Supreme Court last year struck down a Texas law criminalizing homosexual sodomy, the justices have not decided fully that sexual privacy is a fundamental right protected by the Constitution.
More news on Florida’s creeping purge:
Voting rights lawyers are in Tallahassee, one of the epicenters of the 2000 presidential election convulsions, arguing about recounts. Florida civil rights advocates are seething about restoring the voting rights of felons. And, in Miami, elections officials now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to explain why they’ve lost much of their audit records from the last big statewide election. “We are no safer than we were in 2000,” said Lida Rodriguez-Tasseff, chairman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition, a voting-rights group. “We may have even bigger problems that we don’t even know about.”
Rodriguez-Tasseff’s organization unearthed the latest in an increasingly lengthy string of embarrassments for the Florida elections system when it filed a public-records request this month with the Miami-Dade County elections office asking for the audits of votes in the 2002 governor’s election. The records were supposed to have been collected by the county’s new $25 million electronic voting network. The answer the group received has made voter advocates queasy about how the system will perform in the November presidential election: The records were gone.
For those who thought Al Sharpton was just being ornery.
A legal victory for the rights of religious minorities in the post-9/11 US:
Two Sikhs who were told they could not wear turbans on the job as traffic enforcement agents will be reinstated and allowed to wear their turbans, their advisers said yesterday. The two unrelated cases followed different routes through the legal system but essentially involved similar allegations: both men said they were denied exemptions from police uniform rules for their turbans, a central element of daily religious practice for Sikh men. One, Amric Singh Rathour, was dismissed. The other, Jasjit Singh Jaggi, left his job.
Mr. Jaggi, 36, was the valedictorian of his class at the Police Academy. He filed a complaint with the city’s Commission on Human Rights. Mr. Rathour, 28, sued the city in federal court on grounds of religious discrimination. “It’s a tremendous moment for the Sikh community, one of our first big civil rights victories in this country,” said Prabhjot Singh, a director of the Sikh Coalition, a civil and human rights organization.
Looks like some Republicans have given up on honestly convincing immigrants to vote for them:
Just before the new citizens left the June 29 event, an immigration official directing the swearing-in urged the them to stop by a voter registration table — a not uncommon sight at naturalization ceremonies. But this table was unusual: Those handing out forms were Republican volunteers — and the party affiliation box had been checked off ahead of time to make all of the new voters members of the GOP.
All of it was suspicious to Linda Cross, who was there to watch her husband, Dario Cruz, take his citizenship oath. Cross asked one of the women sitting at the table in the foyer of the University of North Florida auditorium whether there were any forms that left the party affiliation blank. She was told no. ‘They said they didn’t have any forms that weren’t checked,” Cross recalled. ‘She said, `We’re a Republican organization.’ Now, after complaints from Democrats, immigration officials say the table was unauthorized and that the incident will mean delays in swearing in naturalized citizens in Jacksonville. Top Republican party officials insist they did not authorize the voter registration effort, but Democrats remain skeptical as to how a Republican group would know when and where to show up.
This is about living up to the promise of America. The promise of America says we will guarantee quality education for all children and not spend more money on metal detectors than computers in our schools. The promise of America guarantees health care for all of its citizens and doesn’t force seniors to travel to Canada to buy prescription drugs they can’t afford here at home.
…We were told that we were going to Iraq because there were weapons of mass destruction. We’ve lost hundreds of soldiers. We’ve spent $200 billion dollars at a time when we had record state deficits. And when it became clear that there were no weapons, they changed the premise for the war and said: No, we went because of other reasons.If I told you tonight, Let’s leave the Fleet Center, we’re in danger, and when you get outside, you ask me, Reverend Al, What is the danger? and I say, It don’t matter. We just needed some fresh air, I have misled you and we were misled.
…The promise of America provides that those who work in our health care system can afford to be hospitalized in the very beds they clean up every day. The promise of America is that government does not seek to regulate your behavior in the bedroom, but to guarantee your right to provide food in the kitchen. The issue of government is not to determine who may sleep together in the bedroom, it’s to help those that might not be eating in the kitchen….It, to me, is a glaring contradiction that we would fight, and rightfully so, to get the right to vote for the people in the capital of Iraq in Baghdad, but still don’t give the federal right to vote for the people in the capital of the United States, in Washington, D.C…Mr. President, the reason we are fighting so hard, the reason we took Florida so seriously, is our right to vote wasn’t gained because of our age. Our vote was soaked in the blood of martyrs, soaked in the blood of good men (inaudible) soaked in the blood of four little girls in Birmingham. This vote is sacred to us.
Josh Eidelson 