Reclaiming Reagan Democrats Key to Winning White House, Union Leader Says

Pluribus Media OhioNews Bureau

COLUMBUS, OHIO: Ohio AFL-CIO President Joe Rugola said his union members and their families would confront Arizona Sen. John McCain on Thursday in Columbus and expose his record on critical issues related to jobs and the economy in the first skirmish in a longer campaign to win the White House in November by preventing Republicans from winning blue-collar worker voters by a wide margin.

Rugola, speaking to reporters in a conference call Tuesday afternoon that included ePluribus Media OhioNews Bureau, said the policies of Sen. McCain, the presumptive nominee of Republicans for president, on trade and globalization, health care and social security are not in the best interest of union members and their families, and that through a door to door campaign the Ohio AFL-CIO will launch this Saturday, Ohioans will be educated about why they must elect a Democrat to the White House on Election Day.

Even though overall union membership has declined steadily since its apogee in the 1950s, Rugola believes the influence labor can play in the 2008 run for the White House is more important than ever before. Rugola pegged national union membership at about 12 percent, but said its as high as about 18 percent in Ohio.

Saying McCain will continue the policies of President George W. Bush that have produced the loss of hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs in Ohio and other states hard hit by trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement and current proposals like a proposed trade pack with Columbia that have deteriorated America’s middle class, Rugola said a thousand union members and their working-family volunteers will start going door to door in 22 locations to “make sure everyone has the truth (about McCain) so they can make what’s in the best interests of their families when they vote in the November.”

Ohio continues to lose jobs, as was shown again this month in a report from the state’s office of budget and management that revealed Ohio employment decreased by 2,600 jobs in March, which reflected the loss of 8,200 manufacturing jobs, and compared with a year earlier, Ohio employment was down 9,600 jobs that reflected a loss of 20,600 jobs in manufacturing and 2,700 each in construction and leisure and hospitality.

“We plan to clarify for our members an inform them and their families about McCain’s position on issues of trade and globalization. We’ll also be focusing attention in coming days on the senator’s position on health care and social security.” [Joe Rugola, President, Ohio AFL-CIO]

Rugola laughed at what he said was McCain’s best effort on health care, which was to walk 30 minutes a day, in the hopes that such exercise would keep people healthy.

On the subject of social security, Rugola said McCain’s drive to privatize the program as Bush has done is wrong on all accounts. “Social security program is a government program that has worked for generations to provide a safety net for many workers who work all their life and deserve a program that works,” he said.

Figures from a study performed by Harold Meyerson and published in The Washington Post, in 2004, showed that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry won 57 percent of the vote of white male union members who didnot go to college and won only 34 percent of white male nonunion members who also did not attend college, for a difference of 23 percent. This statistic is particularly important in 2008 because of the undeniablereluctance of some white voters to support Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, an African-American. According to exit poll data in the most recent round of primaries, Obama captured only 37 percent of the white vote in North Carolina, a state he won handily, and 40 percent of the white vote in Indiana, a state helost narrowly. His white noncollege vote was only 26 percent in North Carolina and 35 percent in Indiana, which was a Democratic primaries.

The challenge in the general election vote this November will be even tougher, according to some like Rugola who say winning the votes of blue-collar, non-college-educated white Democrats who supported Hillary Rodham Clinton in these primaries. Many, but not all, of these were union members.

Rugola took a different tact from the convention wisdom of mainstream media pundits who say the contest has been to blood and divisive and will lead to a fractured and disjointed effort in the fall that McCain will benefit from. “The current contest is not bad for the Democratic party or for Ohio,” Rugola said. “It forces Clinton and Obama to sharpen their skills on campaign trail about their ideas about how to address some of the issues that are of central importance to industrial states of this country like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and West Virginia.”

Rugola scoffed at the notion that just because Democrats don’t have a standard bearer they don’t have a message. What he is concerned about, he said, is that there is a natural predilection by working families to at least sympathize with many things about McCain’s background, “how could you not,” he said, adding, “but our goal in the near term is to show working families how devastating his policies would be both in this state and nationally.”

Responding to a question by this correspondent about the contrast between high productivity rates and the continuing loss of manufacturing jobs, Rugola said productivity is complicated, for sure, but that American workers are “working like fools.”

“We are producing an unbelievable amount of goods and services, considering all the problems our economy is faced with,” a feat he gives great credit to American workers for doing. But the reality of that trade off is that “we’re making more sacrifices on a personal and on an economy-wide basis in order to do that.”

He said it’s a tragedy to watch the dollar devalued on the misguided budget and trade policies of the Bush Administration, which he faults for the great decline in the value of the dollar. Ohio governors, past and present, say a weak dollar is result in robust exporting. Rugola that’s one way to take a bad situation and use it to your advantage, but he said “I don’t want to see Ohio jobs created only if its because of a terribly weak dollar. That’s not the kind of permanent capital invest or job creation that will benefit us over the long run.”

Asked to comment on Strickland’s stimulus proposal that will have hearings in the General Assembly next week, Rugola said “We’re for it…the bottom line is that without public investment in the creation of jobs and opportunity, we don’t see a realistic possibility that we’ll create any programs in that area…We expect that based on the international situation we’ll continue use jobs in Ohio.” He applauded Strickland for his “proactive, creative ways to create good paying jobs in this state” and said he’ll “continue to support his instincts on this question.”

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