(The following article by Dan Balz and Thomas B. Edsall appeared in the Washington Post on August 4.)
WASHINGTON — As the leaders of the AFL-CIO gather in Chicago this week for critical meetings about the 2004 election, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) has mounted an all-out offensive to keep alive his hopes of winning an endorsement from the powerful union body, whose financial resources and grass-roots mobilizing strength could determine who becomes the Democratic presidential nominee.
Gephardt’s lackluster fundraising and questions about his electability have made some unions wary about supporting the former House Democratic leader, despite his extraordinary support for labor during his career. Gephardt’s rivals are urging labor leaders to remain neutral in the Democratic contest.
With a helping hand from longtime friend James P. Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Gephardt wants to emerge from the meetings of the AFL-CIO Executive Council with renewed hope for the endorsement and perhaps with an extra push that might help him to achieve what his rivals have been working assiduously to prevent.
Labor and Democratic sources said Hoffa is pushing a resolution that would call for an October meeting of the AFL-CIO with a recommendation to endorse Gephardt at that time. Failing that, Gephardt supporters hope for a resolution calling for an October meeting, even without a recommendation for endorsement. If there is an October meeting, Gephardt would need two-thirds support from the AFL-CIO’s 13 million members to win labor’s backing.
“Right now I don’t think any candidate has two-thirds of our membership,” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who will preside over the meetings this week, said in an interview.
The AFL-CIO has endorsed only two Democratic candidates before the primaries in the past five presidential elections, and both of them — Walter F. Mondale in 1984 and Al Gore in 2000 — went on to win the party’s nominations. Neither won the presidency, however.
Gephardt, who has been one of labor’s strongest champions during his 25 years in Congress, is the only Democrat who might be able to win that endorsement, according to labor officials and rival campaigns. Given his record on labor issues and the energy he has committed to winning labor’s support, failure to receive the AFL-CIO endorsement would be a damaging blow to his candidacy.
If there is no overall endorsement, individual unions are still free to make endorsements on their own.
Gephardt has won the endorsement of 10 unions, and aides say he will win more before the Chicago meetings, which will also include a forum for all nine Democratic candidates on Tuesday night. The Teamsters decided last week to endorse the Missouri Democrat and will make a formal announcement at events next Saturday.
The big prize would be an endorsement by the AFL-CIO, but Gephardt’s rivals would prefer to see the union leaders declare that no one is likely to win such an endorsement and end the process.
The only Democrat who appears to have significant support to win the backing of individual unions is Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), and he has been making the case to union presidents that he is the most electable Democratic candidate.
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean has been courting union presidents since his emergence in the race and has argued in his private meetings that he has energized rank-and-file union workers and can point to a new poll in yesterday’s Des Moines Register that shows him the favorite of 29 percent of Iowa caucus participants from union households, compared with 24 percent for Gephardt.
“The only thing that unifies John Kerry and Howard Dean is their effort to stop a Gephardt endorsement,” one union official said. “They finally found something to agree on.”
Gephardt’s bid for the AFL-CIO endorsement is hampered because several big unions — among them the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the American Federation of Teachers — remain on the fence.
SEIU President Andrew Stern said he might be amenable to supporting the kind of proposal Hoffa has in mind, even though he and his union will not make an endorsement decision until September at the earliest.
“The only person who has a chance [of winning the AFL-CIO endorsement] at this moment is Dick Gephardt,” Stern said. “Even people like me who haven’t decided aren’t against him, and Gephardt has a lot of passionate people for him. I’m not against the passionate people leading the way.”
AFSCME President Gerald McEntee agreed that “there isn’t anybody who comes near” to Gephardt in terms of labor support, but said that the two-thirds vote threshold “is a tough hill to climb.” Asked why there was hesitation about backing someone so loyal to labor, he said, “Our union is extremely concerned about Bush not getting another term and — it’s not just Gephardt — it’s who is the best person to get the nomination to take on George Bush. Electability becomes extremely important.”
In 1992, McEntee broke with other labor leaders and his union gave Bill Clinton an early and critical endorsement. McEntee is seen by others in the labor movement as leaning toward Kerry. “Right now we’re not pro-anybody,” he said. “We’re pro-a-Democrat-in-the-White-House.”
Because Gephardt has been an outspoken opponent of unrestricted free trade agreements, his strongest base of support in labor is among manufacturing and industrial unions that have suffered the most severe membership losses as production has gone to plants in Mexico and Latin America or elsewhere.
But to win the necessary two-thirds support for the endorsement, Gephardt would have to pick up support from the public sector and service industry unions that increasingly have come to dominate the labor movement. The SEIU and AFSCME are the nation’s largest and second-largest unions.
For the past month, Gephardt has lobbied union leaders to make the case that he deserves their support. His sales pitch, an aide said, includes the following points:
Despite disappointing fundraising in the first two quarters of the year, he will be able to raise $20 million by the end of this year. No candidate will advocate labor, trade and economic issues more passionately than he will. The key to beating President Bush is not winning in the South but winning the industrial states in the Midwest, and as a Midwesterner, he has a better chance at that than his rivals. Finally, Gephardt has told union presidents, labor would send a devastating message to its supporters on Capitol Hill if it turns its back on someone who has been as loyal as Gephardt over the years.
For Gephardt, two of the crucial unions are the United Auto Workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers, both of which are strong in Iowa, the first state to hold a caucus. Gephardt won Iowa in 1988, when he had the backing of the UAW state affiliate, and a defeat there in 2004 would be a major setback.
Sweeney, who pushed hard for Gore’s endorsement four years ago, has taken a wait-and-see posture with regard to whether his organization should even endorse a candidate this year. Some union leaders prefer neutrality, to conserve resources for the general election.
“I would like to see whatever two-thirds of our membership would like to see,” he said in an interview.
Sweeney said that Gephardt had strong support among many of the industrial unions within the AFL-CIO family but that union leaders and their rank-and-file members are trying to weigh both the candidates’ positions on labor issues and their prospects for beating Bush in November 2004.
“My position is we shouldn’t push this any sooner than the affiliates are ready to push it,” he said. “Whatever position we take we have to have as united a labor movement as we can possibly be.”
Asked who among the Democratic candidates has a labor record as good as Gephardt’s, Sweeney replied, “Dennis Kucinich,” a House member from Ohio. Kerry, he said, has been at odds with labor on some trade issues. But he added, “It’s really unfair to make this any kind of a single issue — there are unions, as you said before, who want John Kerry.”
He also said Dean “has to be seriously considered,” but he hedged on whether Dean’s opposition to the war in Iraq makes him unelectable in a general election.
Sweeney said no matter what happens on the question of endorsing a candidate in the Democratic primaries, labor will be united next year against Bush. “I don’t believe there will be any major splintering of unions,” he said. “I think we’re going to do our damnedest to have a solid labor movement and a solid political program all across the country.”