NEW YORK -- On Eighth Avenue Wednesday afternoon, New York union members have gathered to tell the president what they think of him and his economy and his war (and that just begins the list). But the most indignant reaction I encounter from the assembled workers comes from Harold Aken, a firefighter from Rye, New York, and his ire is not directed at the president. When I tell Aken that the New York City local of the Firefighters, the first union to back Kerry way back before the primaries began, has just broken ranks and is endorsing Bush -- and, worse yet, had decided to welcome Bush to the Big Apple -- he is apoplectic.
“You can't print what I want to say,” Aken says. “We were just at the [Firefighters'] convention with that local. And the Republican administration hasn't done anything for these guys in the past four years. They didn't get a raise out of [Rudolph] Giuliani or [Michael] Bloomberg.”
Maybe George W. Bush will bring some special funding with him that Mayor Bloomberg can use to give the firefighters and the police their long-sought raises. But it's certainly clear what Bush gets out of the deal: a widely watched image of his being welcomed to New York by some of America's most celebrated blue-collar workers.
One of the central strategic goals of this convention, it's now very clear, is to create a bond between Bush and blue-collar white males. That's what lay behind Giuliani's dwelling on the macho love-fest between Bush and New York construction workers during the president's first visit to Ground Zero three days after the September 11 attacks. That's why, earlier that evening, the convention saw a video feed from another dissident firefighter local, this one in Wisconsin, whose president declared that his members would follow Bush into a burning building.
This convention has been stocked with specific appeals to many different groups of voters, from Orthodox Jews to moderate suburban moms. But the key demographic in Karl Rove's calculation is the white, male, downscale worker of the industrial Midwest. And his goal is to establish a macho bond between Bush and these guys so tight that they will dismiss the fact that the Bush presidency has destroyed much of their world
The logic of the Bush strategists is quite clear: Unable to run on the president's record, they will wage a campaign of character, contrasting Bush's resolve with John Kerry's untrustworthiness. Of course, to establish Kerry's untrustworthiness required the creation of a Big Lie campaign known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Thus, August was devoted to spreading calumnies about Kerry's qualifications as a leader -- never mind that nearly all of the men he actually led in Vietnam, his crews, swear by his leadership -- and now the convention is devoted to singing praises of Bush's resolve.
Provisionally, the strategy seems a success. Kerry's slight lead over Bush coming out of the Democratic National Convention in Boston has become a slight deficit as the Republicans convene in New York. His margin among veterans has vanished, his bona fides as commander-in-chief have declined, and his small leads in such key Midwestern industrial states as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin have, depending on the poll, either shrunk or disappeared altogether.
The Republicans are stalking the Deer Hunters. In the South, downscale white males have been voting their cultural allegiances rather than their own, and the nation's, economic better interest since what seems like the beginning of time. But such has not always been the case in the Midwest, which on some cultural issues may be nearly as conservative as the South but where the presence of industrial unions has been a force propelling those voters into the Democratic column since the 1930s. (Pennsylvania was just about the most Republican state in the land until 1936, when, at the prodding of the newly founded Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its thousands of steel, mine, and auto organizers in the western part of the state, it went for Franklin Roosevelt.)
But the old CIO unions are just a shadow of their former selves today. Indeed, the challenge for America Coming Together, the Democratic 527 waging a huge campaign in the industrial Midwest, is largely to fill the void created by those unions' near-demise. The door is open for Republicans to win the allegiance of the Deer Hunters.
There is nervousness in Democratic ranks just now. The polling is disquieting, and the frustration with the Kerry campaign -- which should have seen an attack like that of the Swift Boat Liars coming, and shouldn't have taken two weeks to wage a counter-offensive -- has never been higher. Yesterday, rumors were rife that heads were going to roll. Today, the rumor mill has quieted down; the campaign has created a new rapid-response team and brought on Joe Lockhart, President Bill Clinton's last press secretary, to travel with Kerry.
The Democrats' concern is valid, but there are no grounds at all to panic. Republicans have had some successes over the past month in changing the subject of the election away from the condition of the country, but voters still believe the country's condition is anything but peachy. A clear majority still believes the country is headed in the wrong direction, that the war in Iraq was not worth waging, and that Bush's handling of the economy and the war in post-Saddam Iraq has been wanting. John Kerry's challenge is to return the discussion to the fundamentals. Abetted by the media, Bush has been able to steer the national discussion away from Iraq and the economy over the past three weeks. But the economy's anemia and the war's intractability remain, and will surely figure in both the news and John Kerry's debate presentations in the campaign's final two months. A little more populism from Kerry is in order now, some indignation both at the attacks on his honesty and leadership and at the administration's indifference to the plight of downscale America, the plight of the one-time factory and mill towns of the Midwest, whose aging residents are likely to determine the identity of our next president.
Harold Meyerson is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
