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The move stunned labor and political insiders and left some of
Dean's rivals furious. Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who
has the support of 20 unions, believed he would get the
AFSCME endorsement and was particularly upset. According
to one person, he fumed that McEntee had just "turned over
the country to the Republicans for four more years."
The SEIU and AFSCME ended up in the same place, but they
followed far different paths, each reflecting the union's
president. Stern, cerebral and democratic, oversaw a
bottom-up process that gave strong voice to union rank and
file. McEntee, the first union leader to endorse Bill Clinton in
1992, is a visceral politician who dominates his union. His
process was top-down, and over the past nine months his
allegiance shifted from Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to retired
Gen. Wesley K. Clark -- whose campaign's mistakes may have
cost him AFSCME's support -- and finally to Dean.
The only similarity was that at the beginning of their
discussions, Dean was not on either union's list of likely
endorsees. Last December, at one of their first meetings,
Stern asked Dean if there was any way he could help him,
thinking he could open some union doors to the little-known
candidate. "He said, 'Well you can endorse me,' which I
thought was a pretty bold, first opening comment," Stern said.
"And I said, 'Well, we're a little far away from that,' and he
said, 'Well, if you endorse me, I'm going to be president.' "
The SEIU offered all the candidates the same resources: a list
of their local leadership and a warning that the route to the
endorsement began not in Stern's fifth-floor office on L Street
NW but through the rank and file. "Everybody got the same
advice," an SEIU official said. "Howard Dean took it to heart."
No other candidate came close to Dean's outreach.
"Shockingly" not close, Stern said.
SEIU officials also told the candidates that the first
prerequisite to winning an endorsement was a plan to give all
workers access to health insurance and the means to pay for
it. Gephardt built his entire campaign around a bold and
costly plan to do that, but Dean, a physician, prided himself
on being the health care candidate with a record in Vermont.
At the beginning of the year, SEIU officials assumed that
Kerry and Gephardt had the best chance of winning their
endorsement. But as they looked at polls of their members
from spring to early autumn, only Dean was moving up. By
the time the union held its September convention to evaluate
the candidates, Dean was the clear front-runner for the
endorsement.
Dean had enthusiastic support among the union's local
leaders in Oakland, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. None
was more important than Dennis Rivera, the powerful leader
of Local 1199 in New York. When a friend suggested last year
that he meet with Dean, Rivera said he did not even know who
the former governor was. Since then, they have held several
meetings and spoken by phone at least 10 times.
Gephardt had hoped to win over Rivera, but in the end he lost
out to Dean. "We have come to the conclusion that, in order to
win the presidency, we need to change the political
configuration," Rivera said. "We need to bring more people to
the political process. I don't think that's happening with the
candidacy of our good friend Dick Gephardt."
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