Seeker Blog

Michael Barone on the elections:

(…) But you missed seeing the guy who may have been the biggest loser of all—a man who according to recently released White House logs has been a guest in the White House 22 times since Barack Obama became president, more than any other single individual.

That man is Andy Stern, who has boasted that the Service Employees International Union, which he heads, ponied up something like $60 million for Barack Obama and other Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Altogether, Mr. Stern and other labor union leaders reportedly gave Democrats some $400 million last year.

This was, to borrow a word from Mr. Obama, an audacious gamble. Unions these days represent only 8% of private-sector employees (and that’s counting General Motors and Chrysler as private sector) and some unions went into debt to make these contributions. Public employee unions of course are financed by taxpayers, who pay the salaries from which dues are extracted, but even so their resources are ultimately limited.

What have the unions gotten in return? Some not insignificant things. The Obama administration bludgeoned General Motors and Chrysler bondholders, in what I called an episode of “gangster government,” and effectively turned over the two auto companies to the United Auto Workers. The building trades got project labor agreements—i.e., plenty of dues money flowing to their coffers—in the $787 billion stimulus package.

A lot of that stimulus money went as well to state and local governments. The goal was to spare public employee union members from the vicissitudes of the recession to which the rest of us are subject—and to keep that dues money flowing in.

(…) The big-government programs of Obama Democrats evidently have less appeal than those trendy posters and inspiring rallies and cries of “We are the change we are seeking.” I have yet to see survey research showing that young Americans want to work under union contracts, with their 5,000 pages of work rules and rigid seniority systems. That doesn’t sound like a tune that appeals to the iPod generation.

Economically, the Obama majority was a top-and-bottom coalition. The Democratic ticket carried voters with incomes under $50,000 and over $200,000, and lost those in between. As the shrewd liberal analyst Thomas Edsall has noted, there’s a tension between what these groups want. High earners in non-Southern suburbs have been voting Democratic since the mid-1990s largely because of their liberal views on cultural issues; low earners vote Democratic because they want more government money shoveled their way.

Tuesday’s elections suggest those whose money gets shoveled are having second thoughts about this odd-couple coalition.(…) The unions’ unprecedented political push in 2008 has not been unnoticed by the voters. (…) The Gallup organization reports that Americans are less pro-union than they have been at any time since it first started asking the question in 1936.