Two short bits from "TNR". I thought the same on the first one when I read about the new "Think Tank." The second one is a real "Death Knell" for Gephardt, who I think is a "Dead Man Walking" anyway.
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GETTING THE RIGHT IDEA: David Von Drehle doesn't break a whole lot of new ground in his Center for American Progress story in today's Washington Post. But he does rather succinctly--if inadvertently--get at a problem Matt Bai dwelled on in his more-than-adequate New York Times Magazine version of the piece two weeks ago. As Von Drehle writes in the fourth to last paragraph of the piece: "When the center finds its ideas, [Center for American Progress president and former Clinton chief of staff John] Podesta said, they are likely to reflect certain values..."
When the center finds its ideas? Reading this line gives you the impression there are loads of compelling left-of-center policy innovations out there ready to be connected to a compelling new left-of-center worldview, which the center's staff will quickly assemble into a series of easy-to-read briefing booklets and commence touting on CNN. But, of course, the whole problem is that the left doesn't have a broadly compelling, coherent worldview, and creating an institution to market one before it does seems to get the process backwards. (As Bai pointed out in his piece, the Heritage Foundation, the organization the Center for American Progress has been conceived to both balance and emulate, was a very direct outgrowth of the worldview of its founders, Ed Feulner and Paul Weyrich.)
Which is not to pick on Von Drehle. The when-we-find-our-ideas mindset seems very much at the heart of the center's confusion over what it wants to be. It'd be surprising if a reporter writing about the group didn't stumble across it.
posted 5:30 p.m.
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INSERT LABOR PUN HERE: Separate reports from the New York Daily News (relayed via ABC's The Note) and the well-connected blog Daily Kos suggest that Howard Dean may bag the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) when the organization holds its next big meeting in November. Just this week, a consultant with close labor ties told TNR the very same thing: "I hear it's going to be Dean. The assumption is that the board will vote to back him at that [November] meeting."
If true--and, like everything else politics, it's hardly certain until it happens--it would be a huge boost to Dean's candidacy. Leave aside the fact that SEIU is among the largest, most politically active unions in the labor movement. (It's already planning to run an independent $35 million campaign, financed by member donations, to oust Bush in the general election.) An SEIU endorsement would deal a devastating blow to one of Dean's rivals, Dick Gephardt, by erasing any remaining chance that Gephardt could win an early endorsement from the AFL-CIO. Such an endorsement would be vital to Gephardt's campaign, since it would offer him enough organizational support to help offset the fundraising disadvantage he'll face no matter how well he performs in the Iowa caucuses. But it takes a vote by unions representing two-thirds of the AFL-CIO's membership to get the endorsement, and without SEIU that's nearly impossible.
The second, less understood reason SEIU is so important for Dean is that it broadens his support. Astute political observers like the Los Angeles Times' Ron Brownstein have taken note of Dean's relatively upscale base of college-educated professionals and wondered whether he can expand his coalition beyond the "Starbucks ghetto." Still others have commented upon the racial diversity of Dean's supporters, or, more accurately, the lack thereof: By most accounts, Dean's crowds are the most overwhelmingly white of any leading candidate.
But within the labor movement, probably no union is more downscale--or more diverse--than SEIU. This is a union of minorities, many of them foreign-born, many of them toiling away at minimum-wage jobs with few benefits. (That's why it's also the union most keenly interested in the cause of national health insurance.) What's more, for the last few years, it's also been among the fastest growing unions. If the face of the old labor movement is a pasty-white UAW member wielding a welding torch inside a Michigan factory, the face of the new labor movement is a darker-skinned SEIU member wielding a dust rag inside a California hotel.
Dean has always had the potential to connect with this audience--not only because he's a longtime health care reform advocate, but because he happens to speak fluent Spanish. If he gets the SEIU nod, he'll have taken a substantial step toward fulfilling that potential. And while geography means these voters are still less important in a general election than Midwestern industrial workers, scoring big with SEIU members could at least boost Dean in contested states with heavy immigrant populations and largely service-based economies--i.e., Arizona, New Mexico, and Florida.
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