Politico: Labor confronts race issue in blunt terms

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.mlive.com/us-politics/index.ssf/2008/11/labor_confronts_race_issue_in.html

by Politico.com
Sunday November 02, 2008, 6:15 AM

Since Barack Obama gave a dramatic speech on the subject of race this spring, the issue has lingered over the election, a quiet, awkward factor that the candidates, their campaigns, and their surrogates have brushed aside or would rather not talk about at all.

But there's one place the "national conversation" Obama suggested in March is taking place: among white, Rust Belt union workers – who generally voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primary – whose leaders have led a large-scale, direct, and under-the-radar conversation about some members' discomfort with a black Democratic nominee.

"I think a lot of people expected when he made that speech about a national conversation about race that it would be formalized," said Gerald McEntee, the president of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, in a telephone interview from Ohio. "In the labor movements and unions and the way they are composed, it just became a reality.

“Some of our own people had never experienced anything like this before, so the dialogue did take place, the conversation did take place,” he said.

The older, largely industrial unions, members of the AFL-CIO, have emerged as key ambassadors for Obama to the parts of the country where he is weakest. Those unions have, in the recent past, been dismissed by Democrats as fading powers – good for turning up some burly, white ethnic workers at campaign rallies, but shrinking and demoralized, and without the energy or organization of growing unions like the Service Employees International Union.

But for the first black nominee, white labor has proved a crucial bulwark of support. The AFL unions have pressed a concerted – and targeted — effort that began in earnest in July, when AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka – a former Pennsylvania coal miner with a bushy mustache – delivered a speech to the United Steelworkers' national convention in Las Vegas that many considered a key moment in the campaign to build cultural comfort with the Democratic nominee.


FULL story at link.