Howard Dean's Unlikely Road To a Major Boost From
Labor:AFSCME and SEIU Set to Announce Joint Endorsement
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 12, 2003; Page A08
When Andrew L. Stern, president of the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU), arrived at the Washington
condominium of Gerald W. McEntee, president of the
American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME), on the morning of Nov. 3, he had no
idea they were about to transform the battle for the
Democratic nomination.
McEntee, hobbled
by a chipped
ankle, had put
out a spread of lox
and bagels for
Stern and the
SEIU's
international
secretary-treasurer,
Anna Burger.
McEntee knew
the SEIU was
preparing to
endorse former
Vermont governor
Howard Dean for president. What startled Stern was
McEntee's revelation that his union was also ready to go for
Dean and that he wanted the two unions to do it together.
It was a radical idea, one that would put the AFL-CIO's two
largest -- and among the most politically potent -- unions
behind Dean's candidacy, a move Stern later described as
McEntee's "big-bang theory" of how the SEIU and AFSCME
together could vault Dean above the rest of the Democratic
pack in a way that each acting alone might not.
This afternoon at a Washington hotel, McEntee, Stern and
Dean are set to formally consummate the deal that was
brokered over that Monday morning. For Dean, the
endorsements show that, even as he is building support at the
grass roots, he is also playing a skillful inside game with some
of the Democratic Party's most important power brokers.
From the beginning, Dean believed that the SEIU and
AFSCME, with their own grass-roots strength and highly
diverse memberships, would provide the two most important
endorsements he could get, and he worked methodically, from
outside and inside, to win their support.
"It sends a very strong signal to the establishment in
Washington," Dean said yesterday. "This says that two people
who know me well and who know inside Washington well
think we're the most likely person to beat George Bush."
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