ON OCCASIONAL SOLIDARITY. I think this is an important post by Matt, and it's worth adding that the substantive priorities of the labor-Democratic alliance are oddly rearguard. So retaining civil service protections in government agencies is of transcendent importance, but effecting actual change in the country's organizing laws is not. Card check was, to be sure, just voted on. But everyone knows it won't pass. What you aren't seeing, and what you didn't see during the Clinton era (even when Democrats had all three branches of government), was a full throttle effort to in any way ease the job of organizers are accelerate the creation of more unions (and, thus, more Democrats). It's peculiarly short-sighted on the part of the Democrats, of course, and also on the part of the unions. Democrats could have made easing the organizing laws a decades long battle, as repealing the estate tax has been for the GOP, but they've instead pursued it half-heartedly and mostly symbolically, and haven't fought for compromises or incremental progress or much else. And that's not even to get into their total abandonment of the unions on trade issues like NAFTA. --Ezra Klein
