Democratic Agenda Smells Republican

The Republicans are shamefully hypocritical in their furious attacks on unions for spending “lavishly” to stop the Republican “revolution” in its tracks and reelect President Clinton.

When unions didn’t reach their goal of getting a Democratic majority in the House, the GOP declared an unequivocal victory. It was anything but that.

Labor was primarily responsible for the defeat of at least 11 of House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s extremist allies, blocking most of his reactionary “contract with America,” and was an essential element in Clinton’s victory.

“The truth is, without the union bosses we’d be gaining at least 30 [House] seats,” Gingrich said.

Not surprisingly, then, the business-oriented Republican leadership denounced union leaders more vehemently than they have for decades--a clear sign of labor’s political revitalization under its new AFL-CIO president, John Sweeney.

Haley Barbour, Republican national chairman during the campaign, laid down the law: “We must stop the practice of the union bosses in Washington taking the union dues of their members involuntarily” and spending that money on political campaigns, he said.

Not one word from Barbour, of course, about the far greater political contributions of corporations--almost all of which went to Republicans--on orders from corporate executives. What about the rights of shareholders whose money was involuntarily taken for candidates they might have opposed?

And certainly no word from the GOP about corporate executives not asking workers whether they wanted their company’s money to go to politicians who vote against workers’ best interests.

Union officers are elected by their members or by delegates to conventions, unlike nonelected corporate executives, who spent at least seven times more money on political races this year than unions did.

But unions and their liberal allies face a challenge beyond the one from conservative Republicans. It comes from the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, which Bill Clinton helped create.

The DLC sets the Democratic Party agenda these days, and much of that agenda is opposed by unions--which hardly rate a DLC mention. Instead, Clinton and the DLC, like the Republicans, have been pressing hard to diminish the size of government, to end the federal deficit and balance the federal budget.

None of these makes labor’s list of priorities.

There is no need to eliminate the federal deficit, which is not out of sync with the nation’s wealth and gross national product. America’s assets far outweigh its deficit. A deficit is not intrinsically an evil to be wiped out, but certainly must be watched carefully to keep it in balance with the economy.

Labor fought strenuously against the DLC, the GOP and Clinton’s high-priority issue, the North American Free Trade Agreement, along with similar trade pacts that often are wage-depressers and job-busters for U.S. workers.

The direction of the Democratic Party must change and may indeed if labor works with other progressive forces in the civil rights movement, women’s groups and organizations like Americans for Democratic Action.

The ADA is headed by Jack Sheinkman, a former AFL-CIO vice president, who tabbed Clinton accurately when he said the president was, “at best, a moderate Republican.”

The Democratic Party needs to return to its root motivations of compassion for the poor and concern about economic justice.

To help achieve that goal, the AFL-CIO recently joined with other liberal groups to create the Campaign for America’s Future. Among its activists is Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute. In his new book, “The Party’s Not Over,” Faux says that the task of the Democratic Party is not to echo a Republican view of the world.

“The task for Democrats is to offer a different view, an economic story that puts their traditional and majority constituency of working people in the center. Then let the people choose.” Unions must continue to fight the hypocrisy of Republicans who want to eliminate them from the political arena.

Labor and its allies must intensify the effort to elect political leaders who will battle what the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops have called the “concentration of privilege,” and work to end the social and moral scandal of poverty in the midst of plenty.