Ohio stepping it up, and other action

I'll readily admit that I am a true blue Democrat, but the big D is not the only thing I care about when I'm looking to support a candidate. As we saw throughout the 90's and early 2000's, populist, pro-worker messages can be misleading; look no further than the DLC-backed Clinton era.

Slick Willy could talk up a storm about "workers getting the shaft" (actual line from his '92 convention acceptance speech), and while he a few things for working families (and his record is magnified by the pure hatred of workers of this administration), the whole Robert Rubin-Hamilton Project nexus did a lot of things that ended up giving workers the same shaft they decried, in the name of fiscal responsibility and whatever other centrist buzzwords they used. And a whole generation of Democratic Senators did the same.

Of course, unions turned out big for these candidates, because they were promised big things, and anyways they were better than Republican alternatives. But for all the work labor did in fundraising and GOTV, from NAFTA to welfare reform, the return on investment wasn't very high. And soon enough, triangulation and corporate trade policies and giveaways to insurance companies led to voters tuning out the faux-populism of Democrats, not believing a word they said, and voting angry (and Republican). Words without deeds do not make for a lasting majority.

Enter 2006 and a new wave of populism sweeping the nation after six dismal years of a Bush administration whose Secretary of Labor sees workers as lazy and dirty -- literally. This time around, it was more important than ever to have right candidates; candidates that would really stand with labor, so to speak. For a perfect microcosm of this, check out Ohio 2006.

The two major candidates for office in Ohio, Reps. Ted Strickland for Governor and Sherrod Brown for Senator, both entered Congress in 1993. Every year since taking office, both put together 100% voting records on the AFL-CIO yearly report card, while voting against the most recent free trade giveaways, giving them veritable fair-trade records (though that's treated as a bad thing by CATO, the one doing the scoring on this particular issue). They both had 100% from the American Public Health Association, advocating for better Medicare benefits and, in Brown's case, stumping for healthcare as a right way back in the 90's. In short, these were real pro-worker Democrats.

The populist Democrat is that once rare species in the midwest and American heartland, for a long time replaced, at least in Senate and Governor campaigns, with the cautious, triangulating Democrat the DLC thought had the best chance of winning, if they could only blur the lines and smear the colors a bit between red and blue. Like I said, given the horrible state of the economy under King George II, as well as a particularly toxic environment for Republicans in a state that had given re-election to Bush just two years before, there was a huge opening for Democrats to reassert themselves, if only they could show some backbone. Strickland got 60% of the vote against veritable nutbag J. Kenneth Blackwell (he of voter discrimination and chairing the Bush campaign in Ohio while serving as Secretary of State, in charge of Ohio elections), while Brown took down incumbent Mike DeWine 56-44.

Labor has been longtime supporters of Brown and Strickland, and that certainly didn't change this past fall. And finally, a mixture of that toxic environment and some actually ballsy, populist candidates produced a long-awaited pro-worker generation of state-wide officials. And it's already producing dividends. First, from Senator Brown:

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio introduced a bill last night to reform a 19-year-old federal law designed to give notice to workers losing their jobs.

Mr. Brown took action a day after a Blade investigation found the law is so full of loopholes and flaws that employers repeatedly skirt it with little or no penalty.

The Worker Adjustment Retraining and Notification Act, or WARN, requires many employers to notify workers 60 days before they close a plant or lay off dozens of employees.

•Increase the notice period under the WARN Act from 60 days to 90 days.
•Require companies to abide by the WARN Act if 25 or more workers lose their jobs in a plant closing. The current trigger is at least 50 workers.
•Require employers to provide notice if 50 to 99 workers are laid off, and those who lose their jobs represent one-third of the full-time work force.
•Mandate notice if 100 or more workers are laid off. Currently, companies that lay off 500 or more workers must provide notice.

•Give the U.S. Department of Labor and state attorneys general authority to enforce the WARN Act.

•Increase the penalty for violating the law. Workers who did not receive a 90-day notice would receive benefits and double the amount of back pay for the 90 days. The current penalty is up to 60 days.

•Require employers to provide written notification to the Labor secretary of major layoffs and plant closings.

This is something many worker advocates have been agitating for for years, and is a simple act that returns fairness to a law that has sliced and diced by unfriendly courts and rich companies that decide to pack up and ship jobs overseas every single day. And now Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, opportunist as ever, are signing onto the bill; having a guy like Sherrod Brown in the Senate is proving crucial in moving the debate back towards what's good for the vast majority of working Americans.

And as for Strickland, among other things:

With a wave of his pen this week, Gov. Ted Strickland handed the increasingly powerful Service Employees International Union a golden opportunity -- the chance to increase its Ohio membership by about 25 percent.

The SEIU, which doled out $134,800 to the Democratic governor during his successful campaign in 2006, will now have the chance to organize about 7,000 home health care workers working as independent contractors for state government.

That's thanks to a Strickland executive order handed down Tuesday, giving those workers the ability to unionize should they choose to do so. Previously, those workers had no right to collectively bargain under Ohio law.

During remarks at an impromptu Statehouse news conference yesterday, Strickland shrugged off those questioning his motives.

"I'm just doing what I think makes sense, [what] is the right thing to do for my value system and my point of view and I can't control what others may say my motives are," Strickland said.

The governor framed the issue as a matter of fairness.

"The people who provide these in-home services deserve the same opportunity to have representation that the workers who work in the nursing home facilities have," Strickland said. "I think this can actually contribute to increased quality, training standards and the like and will lead to good outcomes.

And, as a WaPo E.J Dionne Jr. column out today shows, this kind of down-home populist Democratic politics wins:

At a moment of festering polarization in national politics, Strickland is Mr. Consensus. He doesn't hide his progressive views -- he calls himself "pro-choice, pro-labor and pro-universal health care" -- and yet just about everyone thinks of this ordained Methodist minister as a moderate because he spends a lot of time in places where Democrats don't dare venture, offering soothing sentiments you're unlikely to run into on talk radio or the Internet.

...snip....

What might Democratic presidential candidates learn from Ohio? As a matter of style, Strickland suggests they must understand that "people are desperately wanting to believe that political leaders understand them and that they are trying to deal with their day-to-day lives." Memo to overly cautious candidates: Strickland also thinks that "the display of genuine emotion is important."

Substantively, Strickland says the economy matters most, although he has been a strong opponent of the Iraq war from the beginning. "The foreclosure problem is huge," Strickland says. "The people are desperate for jobs." He sees health care and education as central -- they were the key issues in his recent budget. These questions "ought to give Democrats a leg up," but only if they can "talk about these things in a way that gets people to believe you will do something about them."

As David Sirota often hints at and I've been screaming, real populism wins elections, especially in places like Ohio, where corporate trade policies as well as 1% of the population tax breaks have ravaged the economy. If we can find and support candidates that stand up for workers and those struggling to make a living in this new economy, there is absolutely no reason at all for anyone in states like Ohio and Kentucky to vote for a Republican. If we triangulate and allow the impression that we're floundering, weak and stand for nothing, people might just say screw it and start to vote their "values", which get defined by candidates taking advantage of Democratic impotency.

Let's hope the Strickland/Brown election provides a guide for the party nationwide.