The Witness Chronicles, August 31, 2024

The resurgence of organized labor in politics

Photo by Done By Alex on Unsplash

It’s Labor Day Weekend and Labor Has Once Again Risen as a Major Campaign Issue

Joe Biden left Kamala Harris a gift

Joe Biden was the first sitting President to join a union picket line and the timing was impeccable. It helped bring labor unions back into the spotlight of American Presidential politics. And now union and worker issues, once a mainstay of Democrat politics, are back.

It was helped by Biden’s evident pride in growing up in blue collar Pennsylvania in a very pro-union region. It gave him street cred with labor, and Harris has been wise enough to maintain that pro-labor stance, while her opponent never had any real interest in the regular people who actually do the work.

It’s ironic that a guy whose TV slogan on the Apprentice was ‘you’re fired!’, (not exactly words that endear him to workers), is now hearing ‘you’re not hired!’.

A lot of factors are at work here and many of them lead back directly to Biden’s successful policies. That legacy may be one of the best campaign talking points he has left the Harris/Walz campaign.

Yesterday I explored a recent pattern in what I’m seeing, the contrast between the Trump campaign's relentless negativity and Harris’s pragmatic and humorous ability to talk basic policy while ignoring Trump’s constant baiting.

The other pattern I’m seeing is Trump constantly insulting voter groups he desperately needs and Harris expanding her base by gathering in a representative slice of the American voting public, with all its diversity. This is in stark contrast with the right’s relentless racism, intolerance, and fear mongering.

Labor is a case in point. Biden’s infrastructure and manufacturing support has created an estimated 800,000 jobs, bolstering labor as a political force to be reckoned with, after being shoved in the background by corporate-friendly and anti-labor Republican policies. Labor is back, as evidenced by their presence at both nominating conventions.

Yes, the Teamsters Union leader spoke at the RNC, and was roundly criticized for it. And they withheld their endorsement from both parties. They were not invited to speak at the DNC, where the AFL-CIO Union chief spoke with a fiery assault on Trump, wearing a t-shirt calling him a scab, the worst insult from a union member.

Before the DNC, in Trump’s notorious X interview with Elon Musk, the two billionaires congratulated each other on their abusive labor practices, which predictably backfired with workers. Trump’s running mate JD Vance, followed his VP opponent Tim Walz in speaking at a first responder firefighter convention in Boston, a room full of union members.

Walz received a friendly reception, while Vance was roundly booed over and over again, in part because of Trump’s words with Musk. Another example of the Trump campaign wooing a constituency only to undermine those efforts by saying what they really believe.

The Trump/Vance effort to rescue labor voters has them consistently lying (no big surprise there) about his accomplishments creating jobs. For example, Vance recently claimed Trump had created 80,000 new manufacturing companies, which is completely false and entirely made up.

I’d like to know the process for developing these whoppers within the campaign. Do they cook them up around a conference table and then present them to Vance as facts? Obviously he is unconcerned about whether they are true or not. With Trump, they likely don’t have to supply him with lies, he is an expert at conjuring them up out of thin air.

But consistency is non-existent and that is resulting in debacles like Trump’s half assed outreach to labor unions. It’s baffling.

On a related note, I’m not the only one identifying these patterns and seeing in them a Trump who is unraveling, fast. That’s because the examples are not here and there, they are constant. His legal delaying tactics for the multiple trials he faces are starting to fall to pieces and he is starting to realize he is losing.

For a world class narcissist, this double whammy is enough to push him over the edge and I think we are seeing it. His running mate, obviously chosen by Trump when attack mode was working against Biden, has turned out to be a real nut job and not much of a campaigner. And the insults are bouncing off their targets like nerf balls.

Harris, for her part, needs to tread carefully and so far she is. She refuses to engage in the spitting war and is instead extending her bus tour directly into Trump territory in Florida, where Democrats smell blood. Ron DeSantis’ culture wars and refusal to acknowledge his state is in the epicenter of climate change, is now a major liability for Republicans.

But Trump is still polling strong, though I firmly believe the polls are meaningless. Because I write about this stuff daily, I see things compressing as we approach the election. It’s a pressure cooker and so far it is Trump who is getting the pressure.

Think about this. Trump was literally born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His wealthy father smoothed the way for him, keeping him out of the military, getting him into a prestigious college where his academic records mysteriously disappeared, and leaving him $400 million dollars, tax free, because of an elaborate tax dodge scheme.

The result is a man who has never had to deal with reality. But reality has caught up. He has never had to exercise restraint or judgment, as evidenced by his willingness to take on ridiculous money making scams like selling pictures of himself as a superhero or hawking bibles. For chump change.

He has been a master of one thing. Pulling the wool over the eyes of rubes. But those rubes are no longer the majority in America, if they ever were. And now he desperately is pursuing the rest of us in order to avoid reality. But we are wise to him, I hope.

His last bet is that we are not. But he showed his hand on January Sixth 2021 and failed while we all watched. He will try again, but this time the deck is not stacked in his favor. The guy’s luck has run out, and he knows it.

We may be watching a public man’s fall in a very public way. It’s going to be ugly, actually it already is. Desecrating hallowed ground to promote himself, as he did this past week, should have outraged all Americans, including his MAGA hordes. Shame on them, and us, if he prevails.

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