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August 08, 2003
Why Won't Progressives Give Credit to Unions?
A range of unions, environmental, women's organizations and rich guys have created a broad umbrella organization to turn out the vote next year, with the goal of spending $75 million.
George Soros is throwing $10 million into the effort, which is all to the good, but KOS therefore credits him with having "pulled together" the coalition, when these coalition funding vehicles have been in formation for over a year.
This is on top of the multi-union progressive vehicles that were approved at the recent AFL-CIO meeting. Unions will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars in next year's election, yet they rarely get credit for bankrolling and turning out volunteers to make progressive electoral victories possible.
Give Soros his kudos-- but hell, he can spare the money. How about a few more hurrahs for the working janitors at SEIU contributing to knock Bush out of office?
I don't mean to slam Kos specifically, since he does detail union activity reasonably often, but there is a general taking for granted that most progressive election funds come from union members. It's nice when previously depolitical professionals throw some bucks to a Dean candidacy or a Soros dumps some cash in, but the expanded union investments in this election are going to end up being far more important to ousting Bush next year.
Posted by Nathan at August 8, 2003 11:54 AM