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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Richard S who wrote (491317)	11/12/2003 8:10:19 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 769670

washingtonpost.com 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." 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.