Gerard to McCain: The Steelworkers Are On To Your Pandering

Berry Craig, AFT-Kentucky/KEA-NEA

MAYFIELD, Ky. -- We Presbyterians – the “Frozen Chosen” – don’t do “amens” like our Baptist brothers and sisters.

But I’d like to “amen” some recent remarks by Leo W. Gerard, international president of the United Steelworkers of America.

Gerard said his union’s leadership is concerned “about the media’s ongoing attempts to sensationalize and mischaracterize the contest between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.”

He added, “Most disturbing have been attempts to define working people’s voting decisions in this contest as somehow racially based, while completely ignoring the fact that for years Senator McCain and many of his Republican colleagues have treated all working people with complete disdain, whether those workers are white, Black, Hispanic or otherwise.

“Shouldn’t that be the issue for 2008, and not this absurd and unfair focus on race and sometimes on religion?”

Amen.

Gerard also stressed “that both [italics mine] Democratic candidates would be far superior advocates for the rights of working people and their families than Senator McCain.”

Amen.

In addition, Gerard warned that McCain’s backers “are already engaged in the politics of divide and conquer,” especially against Obama, the almost certain Democratic nominee. Gerard called the Republican tactics “destructive…deeply troubling and completely unfair.”

Gerard pointed out that Obama’s grandparents, who helped rear him, “fought in World War II and worked honorably in manufacturing jobs to support their family. Obama, Gerard added, “has pledged his own undying allegiance to our country and to working-class Americans.”

Amen.

Gerard said that “dividing working people along racial and ethnic lines is the oldest and meanest game in the book, and it is the one the Republicans are already using to distract attention from the fact that Senator McCain has made it abundantly clear that he offers nothing more than a continuation of the Bush administration’s sorry record of relentlessly assaulting the well-being and interests of working people and of our nation’s unions.”

Amen.

The record could hardly be clearer.

McCain votes the Bush party line almost 90 percent of the time, according to the AFL-CIO. The senator has voted “right” on labor bills only 16 percent of the time, says the AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education.

By comparison, Obama’s COPE rating is 96 percent. Clinton’s is 94.

McCain is against the Employee Free Choice Act and the Davis-Bacon Act. Obama and Clinton support them.

McCain is for a national right-to-work law. Obama and Clinton are not.

While the Steelworkers have endorsed Obama, other unions, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, are sticking with Clinton.

But unions agree on the most important part of this year’s presidential campaign, says Joe Delio of AFSCME. “We’ve got to beat John McCain,” he told the Paducah-based Western Kentucky Area Council before the Kentucky primary.

The delegates added an amen with loud applause.

With the economy and Iraq, all McCain has got is “the politics of divide and conquer.” Also look for him to trot out the old Republican red herrings -- “the Three Gs,” meaning God, guns and gays.

Anyway, you’d think convincing a union member to vote for an anti-union candidate like McCain would be mission impossible. Labor leaders like Leo W. Gerard are working hard to make sure it won’t be mission accomplished for McCain.