This is not good. Labor leaders met with Obama yesterday to discuss the health care bill. As we reported last week, Obama is siding with the Senate's plan to tax benefits that are on the more expensive side. That is not sitting well with labor because the tax would directly impact many union members who often forsake higher wages for better benefits. And, this issue could impact the 2010 elections:
The president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, warned that Democrats risk catastrophic election defeats similar to 1994 if they fail to come up with a health bill labor likes.NPR had a story this morning on the same subject. (The transcript hasn't been posted, but the audio is here.) In that piece, both Trumka and Steve Rosenthal, a savvy DC political pundit, invoked the disastrous elections of 1994.
"A bad bill could have that kind of effect — a place where people sit at home" — as happened in 1994, when Democrats lost 54 House seats and eight in the Senate, costing them control of Congress, Trumka told reporters.
Now, as I understand how the White House operates, one of Rahm Emanuel's primary missions was supposed to make sure this presidency didn't suffer the same fate as Bill Clinton's did in those first two years. Rahm was there in 93-94, so he knew what went wrong back then -- and was going to prevent it. That's one reason why there hasn't been any progress on the LGBT agenda.
Yet, almost every day, we hear more and more people predicting that the 2010 elections will be similar to 1994. In Rahm's quest to prevent 1994, he's potentially recreating it. The White House, with the help of the Senate, is aggravating key Democratic constituencies who need to not only turn out, but help get out the vote.
There's time to fix it, but that would require the President to lead -- and to keep his campaign promises.
