Last Friday and Saturday, the eight Democrats who have in varying degrees announced their intention to run for president came before the executive board of the most powerful and strategic organization in American liberalism -- the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). No sooner had this first of countless candidate cattle calls been completed than the SEIU's president, Andy Stern, flew off to Iowa for several days, followed by a couple of more days in New Hampshire.
Last Friday and Saturday, the eight Democrats who have in varying degrees announced their intention to run for president came before the executive board of the most powerful and strategic organization in American liberalism -- the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). No sooner had this first of countless candidate cattle calls been completed than the SEIU's president, Andy Stern, flew off to Iowa for several days, followed by a couple of more days in New Hampshire.
No, Stern insists, he's not running for president. Rather, he's setting in motion an SEIU program called "Walk a Day in My Shoes," in which the union will encourage (or hector) the candidates to spend a day with a working-class family in one of the first four states (Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Carolina) to hold primary and caucus elections in 2008.
Besides, Stern is already doing as much as if not more than the presidential hopefuls to shape the Democrats' agenda. This week, as Stern publicizes "Walk a Day" by building cabinets in Iowa and driving a snowplow in New Hampshire (at some danger, he notes, to his co-workers and himself), a new group called Americans Against Escalation is commencing an ambitious lobbying campaign to persuade members of Congress who have voiced their dismay at President Bush's Iraq surge to actually vote against it. The organizations consists of MoveOn.org, the Campaign for America's Future, and other progressive groups, among which the SEIU is providing the lion's share of the funding.
Two weeks ago, another new liberal group was officially unveiled. For years Stern has been talking about putting together an organization that would monitor the votes of Democratic members of Congress on economic issues and mount primary challenges against conservative Democrats who represent liberal districts. He suggested calling the group They Work for Us, and this month, a new group with that name -- and whose board members include representatives not just of the SEIU but also the Steelworkers, MoveOn.org, the American Association for Justice (trial lawyers), and the much-read progressive blog DailyKos -- announced its formation, with heavy backing, again, from the SEIU. Stern's longtime friend Steve Rosenthal, the onetime political director of the AFL-CIO and an acknowledged master of voter mobilization campaigns, is the group's executive director. And just to pique Democrats' interest, They Work for Us listed three Democratic members of Congress (California's Ellen Tauscher, Maryland's Al Wynn, and Texas's Henry Cuellar) as examples of Democrats whom the group would be monitoring.
"I'm sure it's not what the Democratic Party is hoping for," Stern says, "but we need to give our members options when the people they elected don't live up to what they said they were going to do." Over the past two weeks, Stern has also announced the formation of the group Divided We Fail, which joins the SEIU with the Business Roundtable and AARP in support of a universal health care program that decouples health insurance from employment. The SEIU is also deeply involved in the discussions over immigration reform and is active in retooling Rock the Vote, the preeminent young voter mobilization program.
There's a clear model for the part that the SEIU and Stern are playing in American liberal politics. Just as the SEIU is the largest and most dynamic union in today's service-dominated economy, so the United Auto Workers was the largest and most dynamic union in the industrial economy of the mid-20th century. Under the leadership of its legendary president, Walter Reuther, the UAW funded the 1963 civil rights march on Washington and provided crucial assistance to Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers, the student movement of the early '60s, and the fledgling efforts of the National Organization for Women and the first Earth Day. The UAW was the anchor tenant in the house of postwar American liberalism, and the SEIU is embracing an analogous role today.
Even Stern's failures have a Reutherian air to them. In 1968, upset with what he saw as the rightward drift of the AFL-CIO under the leadership of George Meany, Reuther pulled the UAW out of the federation to form its own mini-federation, the Alliance for Labor Action, with the Teamsters. But the Alliance for Labor Action, alas, never really did anything. In 2005, upset with what he saw as the generalized drift of the AFL-CIO under the leadership of John Sweeney, Stern pulled the SEIU out of the federation and established the Change to Win Federation with several other large unions. A year and a half since the formation of Change to Win, however, it can't really be said to have done anything, either. Still, Stern's larger lesson from Reuther is a sound one: A powerful progressive union can ultimately thrive only in a progressive nation. And nobody's in a better position to build one.
Harold Meyerson is acting executive editor of The American Prospect. A version of this column originally appeared in The Washington Post.
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